Post-Subjectivity [1 ed.] 1443856746, 9781443856744

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
POST-SUBJECTIVITY AND HISTORICALCONSCIOUSNESS
SELF AND TIME
DOES TRUTH REQUIRE A SUBJECT?
IS A WORLD-ETHIC POSSIBLE?POSING THE QUESTIONPHENOMENOLOGICALLY
TIME TRAVEL
AGAPEIC SELVINGAND THE PASSION OF BEING
“TILL THE END OF LOVE”
BEING THE LOVER
NEOSEXUALITIES AND SELF-SEX
FREEDOM AND SUBJECTIVITY
THINKING SUBJECTIVITY AFTER HEIDEGGER
FREEDOM, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE STATEIN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
ON THE SUBJECT OF THE DIVINE
CONTRIBUTORS

Citation preview

Post-Subjectivity

Post-Subjectivity

Edited by

Christoph Schmidt with Merav Mack and Andy R. German

Post-Subjectivity Edited by Christoph Schmidt with Merav Mack and Andy R. German Copyeditor: Deborah R. Schwartz This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Christoph Schmidt, Merav Mack, Andy R. German, and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5674-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5674-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Subjectivities after the Death of the Subject .......................... 1 Christoph Schmidt Post-Subjectivity and Historical Consciousness .......................................... 9 Gabriel Motzkin Self and Time ............................................................................................ 17 John Panteleimon Manoussakis Does Truth Require a Subject? .................................................................. 31 Michael Roubach Is a World-Ethic Possible? Posing the Question Phenomenologically ...... 39 Klaus Held Time Travel: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis ............................ 53 Joel Pearl Agapeic Selving and the Passion of Being: Subjectivity in the Light of Solidarity ............................................................................................... 77 William Desmond “Till the End of Love”: Eros and Time in the Constitution of Modern Subjectivity .............................................................................................. 103 Christoph Schmidt Being the Lover: The Moral Philosophy of Max Scheler ........................ 121 Shem Shemy Neosexualities and Self-Sex: On Cultural Transformations of Sexuality and Gender in Western Societies......................................... 137 Volkmar Sigusch Freedom and Subjectivity: Platonic Reflections on a Hegelian Theme ..... 163 Andy R. German

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Table of Contents

Thinking Subjectivity after Heidegger: A Phenomenology of Plato’s Concept of the Soul ................................................................................. 183 Eli Schonfeld Freedom, Subjectivity, and the State in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ..... 201 Emily Hartz and Carsten Fogh Nielsen On the Subject of the Divine ................................................................... 221 Hillel Ben-Sasson Contributors ............................................................................................. 243

INTRODUCTION: SUBJECTIVITIES AFTER THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT

Against the more apocalyptic visions of an emerging world order with clashes of civilizations and violent renaissances of religion, the 2004 Munich debate between Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas offered a quite different vision, which Habermas vaguely defined as the “postsecular.” This postsecular mode was meant not only as a definition of a new relation between secular enlightenment and religion, beyond their classical mutual delegitimizations, but also as an indication of the emergence of a new paradigm for global culture. The concept of a postsecular culture on the global level seemed to presuppose new versions of subjectivity that would be able to inherit the tradition of modern subjectivity and carry its burdens, on the one hand, while redefining its ways of “being in the world,” on the other. A new world ethos, with some serious political, social, and existential implications and corresponding effects on the classical understanding of “subjectivity,” is emerging out of the demise of classical, secular enlightenment. Postsecularity does not only presuppose the overcoming of exclusive secularism, aiming at the elimination of all religion and of antimodernist orthodoxies resisting modernity, democracy, and secularity. It presupposes the end of all utopian versions of a radically new subjectivity, the new man, and the new humanity, which have overloaded the legitimate political aims of the socialist, sexual, and feminist revolutions with protoreligious messianic expectations. Only through the liberation from the compulsion to liberation have these legitimate aims had a chance to become realized. The end of messianic eschatologies not only opens the space for a postsecular relation between religion, politics, and society, it also seems to be another aspect of the emergence of multiple forms and versions of subjectivity, which found a first voice in these ideologies. With their return to history and the reality principle, they managed to survive utopia and the disappointment over its

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impossibilities. Instead, in the realm of a messianic time, they arrange themselves in the new open space of the global world. When the early postmodernists translated Martin Heidegger’s Delphic oracle “Der Mensch ist ein Versprechen der Sprache” as “man is a slip of the tongue” in order to adopt it as their slogan and the point of departure for their deconstructions of the concepts of subject and subjectivity, they had in fact overheard the semantic ambiguity of the German verb “versprechen,” which means both “slip of the tongue” and “promise.” Man was, according to Heidegger, always already both a failure and a promise. The project of overcoming humanism in language, discourse, and the cultural sciences was not only a misunderstanding. Very early on it led to new strategies of “saving the subject” in various forms of a posthumanism, a humanism of the other, that would cure the congenital defects of the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian transcendental ego, or the Nietzschean will to power that were held captive in the metaphysical framework of the classical concept of the substance as subiectum. Instead of eliminating the subject, it was to take up its responsibilities for its past, present, and future. “Otherness” and “Alterity” became fashionable signs for an awareness of all kinds of neglected and suppressed aspects of subjectivity, from the artist and genius to gender politics and the various forms of the outsider such as Jew, Black, Woman, or Homosexual. Postcolonialism was another aspect of this new consciousness of the different colors of subjectivity and the power relations defining it. After all, the concept of the subject meant both “vassal” and “sovereign”: it always already included the dialectics of master and slave. The prefix “post-” in “post-subjectivity” does not indicate much more than the fact that there is something to this classical concept of modernity that somehow is still “there,” and in spite of the declarations of the end of man, it has not lost its validity while, undoubtedly, undergoing serious changes and transformations. After the breakdown of all secular eschatologies and political theologies, after the declarations of a possible end of history and its unexpected continuation, after the exhaustion of all utopias and counterutopias, and after the renaissance of religion, subjectivity obviously is still around and does not seem to need any justification for its pluralization, individualization, and alterity. There are, of course, enough signs of the emergence of a functionalized “one-dimensional man” conquering the global realms of economy, technology, politics, and culture, but the enormous plurality of lifestyles and versions of subjectivities seem to counterbalance this uniformed persona, the anonymous mask of subjectivity of power. The philosophical discourse can be but one aspect of this new global scene, even if it tries to present an encompassing concept of this continuity or “resurrection” of man after the declarations of its end. It is part of the same

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process of pluralization, individualization, and privatization that characterizes the age of post-subjectivity and cannot escape its hidden logic or destiny. The new lifeworlds and lifestyles do not depend on philosophical, theological, cultural, or sociological definitions; they develop alongside the turbulences of these theoretical discourses as effects of global capitalism, media technology, and communication systems. But still they are interrelated and seem to nourish each other’s imagination. In this sense it is difficult, for instance, not to see the strange affinity between the self-representations of everybody on Facebook and in Leibnitz’s monadology. Organized by a divine mathematical order, God as a computer, which harmonizes the infinite forms of monadic self-representations, the individual monads are screens of self-consciousness representing the world without any need of windows! Phenomenology with or without the theological turn, critical theory, the renaissance of St. Paul in present political theologies, the philosophical discourse on love, and the “therapeutic turn” seem to be reactions to the new world order as they influence its languages and representations. While the phenomenology of Emanuel Levinas has rediscovered the philosophical fundament of ethics in the concept of the other who, while turning his face to us, breaks up the limits of our selfhood, Jean-Luc Marion has taken phenomenology to the new horizons of “the given” and the “gift” as saturated phenomena, thus opening it for genuine religious experience as well. The critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth has translated the project of enlightenment following Theodor Adorno’s neo-Hegelianism into a theory of communicative action and an ethics of recognition and memory that corresponds with an engagement for human rights on a global level. The trauma of Auschwitz initiating Critical Theory in postwar Germany in fact became part of a world ethos when the UN introduced a global remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust. The remarkable renaissance of the (political) theology of the apostle St. Paul in phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou), in critical theory (Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben), and in present existential and psychoanalytical discourse (Michel Serres, Slavoj Zizek) follows the steps of Karl Barth’s famous reading of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Barth’s reading seems to be the reflex of the correlation between the cosmopolitan horizon of a new form of “being in the world” and the radical individualization demanded of us with the breakdown of the traditional social frameworks of family, society, nation-state, and so on. In light of the demand for a new global law beyond the local forms of constitution and legal organization, it is no surprise that love has become a point of departure for the overcoming of localities and fixed identities. Paul’s famous words—that

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there is no Jew and Greek, no master and slave, no man and woman—echo the spirit of the global space in search of a new Nomos of the earth. It is no wonder, then, that philosophy has been engaged for some time in new thought regarding love. Since Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the concepts describing love as Eros, Agape, Sex, and Charity have become the objects of numerous investigations questioning the psychoanalytical reductions of love to sexuality as they rediscover the ethical and religious layers of the concept of love (Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Marion, William Desmond) trying to redefine the very fundament of thought and being in love. If one can speak today of a “therapeutic turn” in philosophy initiated by Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, it seems to be no accident that this turn, influenced by modern psychoanalysis, focuses on the various philosophical schools of antiquity—the Stoa, the school of Epicurus, the Cynics, and the Platonic academy—which have understood the interrelation between truth and therapy of the self. These schools developed in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the emerging Roman Empire as they tried to give answers to the meaning of life and existence while the individual was left to him/herself. The pluralization and individualization of these philosophical styles seem to correspond all too well with the global scene in at least one perspective— namely, the interrelation between the cosmopolitan horizon and the radical privatization of existential experience. While the global horizon widens, it seems that local cultures are flourishing and deteriorating rapidly at the same time, thus becoming a destination for tribal fundamentalism and tourism in search of the exotic. Subjectivity seems to find itself in a constant process of evacuation and displacement from its original locality, its homeland with its histories, arts, and moralities. Subjectivity moves, then, between the poles of a cosmopolitan openness and the insistence on rather local “patriotic” traditions and habits, between a flexible, mobile transformation of the self and a kind of fundamentalist resistance and insistence on the immediate lifeworld. The new existentialist with laptop is thrown into a “being in the world” that constantly expands or closes itself in the familiar lifeworld, or it moves between these modes while trying to create a practicable bridge between them. In fact the new global “being in the world” splits into multiple parallel cultural worlds with quite different temporalities and tempos demanding complicated synchronizations of these simultaneities and hopeless anachronisms. Subjectivity thus sometimes appears in its pure arbitrariness and contingency, without place and time, and hopelessly lonely. The hero of revolution—once a revolutionary like Che Guevara who was, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, the incarnation of the existentialist—has been replaced by more lonely forms of partisanship, if he has not become a fundamentalist

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fighter of al-Qaeda. Like Rambo in the Vietnamese jungle, this partisan is sent on a mission to nowhere land and is perfectly on his/her own, and unknown to all. Like the soldier in Southeast Asia after World War II, this lonely fighter might not have heard that the war is over. The present existentialist, if he is not just a tourist in search of paradise lost, appears often rather like the Don Quixote whom Georg Lukács has described as the metonymy of a new transcendental homelessness and loneliness. But can we think of the global sphere without its persistent political and natural catastrophes? Here the real refugees of the global scene are evacuated from their hometowns, looking for shelter and exile. These catastrophes suggest apocalyptic visions and the need for new communications systems and technologies. In light of the endless suffering of these victims, a new hero of subjectivity has emerged here as well—the anonymous NGO volunteers, the Doctors Without Borders, the human rights activists— sacrificing their lives on the fronts of these global catastrophes. The essays in the present volume are only a very first reflex and attempt at an articulation of some of the new meanings of subjectivity, or rather, a first attempt to give expression to some of those processes of evolving subjectivities in the wake of our transitory world. Are we in the process of a new Hegelian “formation of the spirit” working itself through new negations without finalities and teleologies? Are there new possible post-Foucauldian archaeologies and post-Nietzschean genealogies of modern subjectivity waiting to be written? Which Hermeneutics of the Subject is on its way? What role does religion actually play in these new forms and formations of subjectivity? What are the ends and beginnings of post-subjectivity, that is, the aims and means of its constitution? Which new modes of a legitimacy of the modern age are on their global way? The essays in the present volume begin by reconsidering the demands that phenomenology has made on our understanding of subjectivity. The problem engaged by both Gabriel Motzkin and John Panteleimon Manoussakis is that of the unity of consciousness or, perhaps better put, the unity of the various consciousnesses. It is assumed that for phenomenology consciousness does not need a unifying principle such as the transcendental I was for Kant and German Idealism, for it draws its unity by its intending “object.” The paradox here seems to be that what unifies consciousness is not “in” it, or “inside” it, but “outside” it—for it unifies itself by escaping itself through the bridges that intentionality continuously builds. Yet, the question remains, in what sense can the various consciousnesses be said to be mine? Can we still retain the possibility of unity and identity in the absence of the Ego and the Subject? The following two essays by Michael Roubach and Klaus Held intensify these opening questions by taking into consideration the always already

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present element of community, being-with, and intersubjectivity, as well as the role that the Other might play in the constitution of a self without subjectivity. By taking psychoanalysis as the leading paradigm of his discussion, Joel Pearl’s essay draws attention to time as the factor that unifies one’s experience of the world and of others without thus necessitating the appeal to a subject that would remain transcendent of time and its vicissitudes. The themes of time and intersubjectivity, already announced in the first five essays, are more closely examined in the following articles that explore the themes of Eros, Love, and Subjectivity. The authors’ insights focus on the erotic as the means to a transcendence that completes itself in selftranscendence. William Desmond’s essay looks at “selving” in the light of recent concerns about modern subjectivity. Selving is shown to be not merely a lack trying to complete itself but a process understood in terms of what might be called its agapeic promise: its giving of itself beyond its own beingfor-self. Drawing from a variety of classical sources, ranging from Barth’s epoch-making reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Love, Christoph Schmidt’s essay reconstructs a modern history of the secularization of love. He describes a dialectic between the religious and the secular meanings of love that culminates in the radical rejection of its religious and ethical dimensions. Schmidt’s historical analysis leads to the redefinition of subjectivity on the basis of Eros and temporality. Shem Shemy continues the engagement with Scheler by considering whether it might be possible to ascribe to love the role of a primordial intentional act of consciousness, which explains the essence of morality. Since no examination of the erotic would be complete without an appraisal of sex and sexuality in present culture and society, Volkmar Sigusch’s essay takes the reader through just such a reevaluation of the construction of sexualities in the closing decades of the past century. Turning a self-reflective as well as critical eye toward the philosophical tradition out of which the foregoing discussion has been operating, the following contributions trace the development of subjectivity throughout the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger while engaging the unreflective subject of philosophy itself. In Andy German’s essay we find a critique of Hegelian modernity grounded on a distinction, retrieved from Plato, between freedom and randomness. In the same spirit Eli Schonfeld argues that Heidegger’s critical identification of subjectivity with substantiality does not apply to Plato, who provides a different way of thinking about the soul that might escape some of the pitfalls of a philosophy of the subject. As opposed to the view that we have moved beyond such a “philosophy of the subject,” Emily Hartz and Carsten Fogh Nielsen argue that

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Hegel’s Philosophy of Right remains relevant in contemporary discussions about a possible post-subjectivity. Hegel reveals the inherent contradictions and inadequacies of traditional conceptions of freedom and subjectivity while also showing how modern, individualistic conceptions of freedom can only be realized through the gradual development of socially and historically embedded conditions of agency. The volume ends with a theological coda: Hillel Ben-Sasson reflects how, based on an ontological reading of Exodus, human subjectivity was historically grounded on the corresponding subjectivity of God as Esse Ipsum. The deconstruction of that reading, resulting in a God “without Being” (to invoke Marion’s title), finds its correspondence in a Man without Being, or a subject without subjectivity. We would like to take this opportunity to express our thanks to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and particularly to the director of the Institute, Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, for the ongoing support of the research group on Christian Subjectivity. Many of the papers in this volume were first presented at the conference on “The ‘Resurrection’ of the Subject: Subjectivity and PostSubjectivity in the Age of the Post-Secular,” held December 22–23, 2009, which received additional generous support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We are grateful to the editorial committee of Cambridge Scholars Publishing and to the publication committee at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, particularly to its chief editor, Dr. Tal Kohavi, and linguistic editor, Deborah R. Schwartz. Without their support and expertise, this volume would not have come about.

POST-SUBJECTIVITY AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS GABRIEL MOTZKIN

I believe we need to begin by defining the relation between subjectivity and resurrection. But which of these terms should be defined first? The older term is resurrection, but from a philosophical standpoint subjectivity seems to come prior to resurrection, since you cannot resurrect something that does not exist. The issue here is whether there is any weight to the historical development of concepts or whether what appears to be a priori should be the basis for what appears to be derived. But is there any weight to the historical development of a concept? Does its historical development shed light on its meaning? That question is a messy one. Does the illusion of a flat earth, which may have existed historically earlier than the perception of a round one, shed light on the significance for us that the earth is round? Well, it does. As human beings, we could not induce that the earth is round except in terms of our idea of flatness. The meaning of this roundness for us is strictly tied to the fact that we as human beings have to think that the earth is flat in order to move around. Thus in opposition to what might be an order of derivation for which our sense of flatness is derived from the roundness of the earth, historically our consciousness of the earth’s roundness is related to the flatness of our feet. It is counterintuitive to think that the earth is round. In the same way, while subjectivity may come logically prior to resurrection, for you need to be somebody in order to be resurrected, historically the concept of resurrection antedates the modern concept of subjectivity. I will argue that the modern concept of subjectivity makes no sense without the assumption of a prior conception of resurrection. Moreover, just because we no longer believe in resurrection does not mean that we do not need it, just as we need the illusory flatness of the earth in order to apprehend its roundness. Unlike certain kinds of knowledge acquisition, in which we throw away the way we have acquired that knowledge after we have acquired it, historical concepts are not erased by subsequent contradictions and falsifications. So, we need to understand that there could be no secular concept of subjectivity without the previous Christian conception of subjectivity—that

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is, the specifically Christian conception of the self. That previous Christian conception anchors the reborn subjectivity of the believer firmly in the resurrected Christ. It is a question whether the nonbeliever can be said to have a subjectivity. He has a soul, but that soul is a kind of pre-soul. The basic idea is that a true subjectivity is not one we have from birth, except potentially. It is one we acquire through an act, here the act of belief. This act of belief signifies that the noncorporeal spiritual salvation of the soul is made possible by the material resurrection of the body of Christ. What makes this reborn subject unique is the uniqueness of its act of belief; that is, the uniqueness of the subject is a consequence of Christ’s resurrection, which thus guarantees the possibility of salvation for the individual soul. In other words, subjectivity has to be recreated so that salvation becomes possible. Now we understand why this kind of reborn subjectivity requires a hiatus, a gap between the old person and the new one, in order to take effect. In a parallel fashion, Christ’s resurrection is possible after a hiatus or gap. The old order had to die in order for the new one to emerge. That death of the old order happened with Christ’s crucifixion, which effectively ended the old rule of law. For three days, the fate of the world was unclear, as it is for the believing soul before its reconstitution; then, with resurrection, the order of faith replaces the order of law. The world has been transformed, just as the believer apprehends the world in a totally new way. The consequence of this notion of re-creation is that greater emphasis is placed on resurrection than on Christ’s incarnation. The paradox is that there has always existed a tension with Christian culture between resurrection and incarnation. Christian art and philosophy, as Louis Marin has shown, often paid more attention to incarnation than to resurrection, until the beginnings of modernity.1 The reason is a consequence of the particular influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Christian sensibility. From Neoplatonism stemmed the idea that participation in divinity is what guarantees the soul’s potential salvation.2 If participation is the key metaphor for the relation between God and the world, then that participation precedes the possibility of the recreation of the subject. Indeed, participation is grounded in the procession of being from the One through the intelligible world into the material world, and it means that the participation in divinity has to take place before the soul can, through epistrophe (that is, return) reascend to whence it came. That Neoplatonic conception of a possible subjectivity is then grounded in creation and not in salvation. Indeed, the tension between pagan Neoplatonism and Christianity is that pagan Neoplatonism envisages the ultimate annihilation of the individuality of the subject. What happens when the transition to whatever we term as “modern thought” occurs? The nominalist moderns abandon the Greek-influenced idea

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of incarnation, just as they abandon the logic of participation. The question then arises as to whether the alternative is the Christian idea of the resurrected subject: in a way, yes, and in a way, no. The moderns believe in neither the incarnation nor the re-creation of the subject. However, they do believe in a duplication of the subject—that is, in the subject’s adopting a point of view that is not its natural point of view. One debate within modernity revolves around the question of the natural attitude: is the subjective perspective the same as the natural attitude, or does the subject adopt a perspective that is, as it were, outside itself, or constructed? In any case, this debate requires a subject that can re-present, or represent, itself, for which it must be able as its basic cognitive activity to represent the world. Marin argues that modernity has replaced the basic metaphor of incarnation with a metaphor of representation. What motivated this penchant for the metaphor of representation was a cultural drive to visualize everything. It is plausible that modernity, from the Renaissance until the end of the nineteenth century, stimulated a drive to visualize all phenomena. Modernity’s philosophies stripped bodies of their essences and mixed up political representation and optical representation, power and vision. However, despite the ideal of self-representation, of the self-transparency of the self, one body remains invisible in this standard modern conception: the subject. The result is that modernity substitutes an ineffable subject for an ineffable God. If one were to apply the metaphor of participation, the question exists as to the degree to which the subject remains transcendent to the world or, conversely, the degree to which the subject has access to the external world. The metaphor of representation requires an observer, a subject who is outside the picture, so that everything else can be visualized and thus made graspable. There was great resistance throughout this modern period to such a conception, in part because applying a metaphor of representation appeared to strip bodies of their unique meanings: representations are commensurable. The issue was how to make it possible for such a subject to seize the essence of things through the mechanism of representation: Can the essence of things be grasped through visual metaphors? Space can be perceived, but can light be seen? However, when in German Idealism the attempt was made to integrate the metaphors of incarnation and representation, this was rendered possible by the idea of a subject who ultimately makes himself effable through “subjecting” his representations—that is, through conquering his representations; it is the subject who infuses the objects and bodies of the world with the essences he attributes to them. Through representing the world, he is able to participate in it. In this way, that subject substitutes an essential representation instead of the originally nominalist idea that representations, in order to be representations, must be detached from their

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essences; after this detachment, while essences are still possible, they become ineffable. The paradox thus achieved is that the attempt to visualize the object through representing it makes the object ineffable. The application of the metaphor of representation was then based on assuming both a transcendental subject and a transcendental object. However, the dual ineffability of subject and object did not provide sufficient support for such a conception of representation without essence, which proved historically unstable. Ineffability appears to assume that what is ineffable is also uncreated, perhaps because of the Christian linkage of Logos to creation. Perhaps there is no good logical reason for such an assumption, but the possible uncreatedness of the world permeates Kant’s philosophy. There the uncreatedness is not only true for the unseen dimensions of transcendental subjectivity and transcendental objectivity. It seems as if the very possibility of legitimating knowledge through the implementation of synthetic a priori procedures requires the assumption of uncreatedness. An a priori truth must be true both for a created world and for a creator. If it is true for the creator, then his ineffability is not absolute, for his very nature then becomes knowable to some degree. Eventually this problem was resolved by taking logic to be a virtual procedure rather than one that characterizes or defines a physical reality. But then the issue emerged of how a physical entity can engage in nonphysical procedures that have no connection whatever with any physical reality, except insofar as they are instantiated in it. That problem is well known and banal, and I will not provide an answer, but it emerges that this issue is more difficult for a created entity than for an uncreated one, one that does not emerge from something else in space and time. The problem of the existence of the soul is not a biological problem. It is really a problem of the nature of being in time, but this problem cannot be resolved in such a way that our understanding of the nature of being in time is made to adjust to our understanding of the soul. A basic issue then is whether the subject is created or uncreated. Theories of knowledge seem to require an uncreated subject, both because they require a knowledge that is immanently certain and because they also require a point of view that is transcendent or external to the cognitive field. However, an uncreated subject is, as stated, problematic on two counts: first, the uncreated subject must possess attributes of divinity, while at the same time, second, an uncreated subject is the minimum subject required for certitude in cognition. If the secularized human subject is the uncreated subject in another guise, questions arise as to whether that subject can also be cognitively divine and whether such a cognitively divine subject is plausible as a minimum subject—that is, a subject that fulfills only the minimum conditions for the possibility of knowledge.

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The critique of such a conception of an unlimited but human subject also divides along these lines: for all sorts of reasons, the idea that human cognition is potentially unlimited seems implausible (although this would have to be examined in terms of all conceptions of unlimitedness in knowledge). On the other hand, it makes no sense to assume a minimum subject. The reason is that the appropriate conception of knowledge also has to be stripped down and simplified: if a cognitive subject is a minimum subject, then that subject can have, at least at first, only the appropriate minimum knowledge—for example, simple logical or combinatorial rules and procedures. If cognition requires different kinds of additional tools, characterizing that cognition in terms of minimum boundary conditions neither explains how human beings acquire knowledge nor does it really explain the conditions of possibility for knowledge. Perhaps an abstract subject could acquire knowledge in terms of such minimum boundary conditions. But to acquire knowledge, a cognitive subject of the kind that we are uses all sorts of auxiliary tools that are not derived from original assumptions, despite the possibility that these auxiliary tools may be conceptually unnecessary once that knowledge has been acquired. For example, even if all knowledge could be acquired through mere acts of intellection, we would nonetheless also use perception to acquire knowledge. Therefore the major attack on subjectivity has been an attack that criticizes the conception of a minimum or simple subjectivity. If we assume that subjectivity is multilayered or complex, we need to assess how that complexity affects our assumptions about the createdness or uncreatedness of human subjects. One could then infer that complexity is a possible characteristic of an uncreated world or that complexity is part of creation or that complexity somehow developed on the basis of an original simplicity. It should be noted that for Kant both God and man are simple: God does not require knowledge (because He can intuit everything immediately), and man requires minimum conditions for knowledge. Moreover, if complexity is a characteristic of an uncreated subject, then that means that the complexity in question is atemporal, since the subject is uncreated. While that may be imaginable, most thinkers have drawn the natural conclusion that uncreatedness implies simplicity, that an eternal being is a simple being with minimum conditions—in which case, if man is a complex being, he is not such an eternal being. There is another way of seeing this problem. What are the requirements for setting man as divine if man cannot be set as a minimum subject? In other words, can man be both divine and temporal; if so, what kind of temporality would characterize a divine human being? Hegel drew close to this point of view, but he could not emancipate himself from a linear conception of time,

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despite his preference for the whole over the infinite in his Logic. It should be evident that a divine human being would have to have some nonlinear type of temporality characterized by circularity, discontinuity, or some other model. Perhaps that is one reason why Heidegger posits a human subject who is both temporal and uncreated. An uncreated temporal subject is an infinity with a future limit, just as a created atemporal subject would be an infinity that has transcended its limit. We have arrived now at the question of whether we can solve the dilemma of knowledge by distinguishing between temporality and createdness and then positing a subject who is either temporally infinite, like Eriugena’s created God, or is uncreated (but not both).3 This line of argument assumes that we can in fact distinguish between temporality and createdness, which is wildly different from the normal Judeo-Christian assumptions about the relation between time and creation. In the late twentieth century, a common catchword was that of the dissolution of the subject: post-subjectivity. The subject was viewed as a cognitively unrewarding notion because it was correctly perceived as being too simple a notion, but it was never very clear which conception of complexity was supposed to replace the conception of the subject and in what way it was to be specified. Here we can begin to specify what post-subjectivity might mean. It used to mean either the limitation of being created and therefore being in time or the lack of limitation of being uncreated and therefore being out of time. When the human subject was posed as being infinite and uncreated, it implied that God is finite and created—that is, God is a creature of my mind. However, the dissolution of this link between time and creation means that we can begin to think of a created being who is outside time as opposed to an uncreated being who is in time. That uncreated being in time is the biological human being for a postmodern philosophy, for whom no resurrection is possible because his being in time means that he must die. Let us now turn for a moment to the created being in time. That being is in time because he has been created. However that creation is no longer a limitation on his future. We know of one such kind of being, which we can term virtual being, as we are creating it, but it is not coterminous with us. Our knowledge may well also have this character. We also have the idea of another such kind of being, which is the soul, which is both created and infinite. Indeed, our culture is preoccupied with the question of how we can ensoul artificial beings. But why do so? What is our interest in this infinity? Is it to become divine? Is it to live forever? I would suggest that a better way of understanding this drive would be the idea not of living in eternity but living

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with eternity, of being at peace with infinity. I take that to be the meaning of the metaphor of resurrection, that metaphor that now replaces both incarnation and representation, that resurrection that is the metonymy for creation and that is only possible for a postmodern subject that is created and infinite. Such a created subject may well be the central agent of a new historical era, one for which resurrection will be the basic metaphor and for which the ensoulment or spiritualization of the world will be the basic task.

Notes 1

Louis Marin, Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–25. 2 Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978). 3 Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena.

SELF AND TIME JOHN PANTELEIMON MANOUSSAKIS

Self I have anticipated this trip to Jerusalem ever since the kind invitation arrived.1 I have anticipated this talk, and one day I will remember it. I will remember these very words that I speak now, but then there will be no spoken words and no listening audience. How does one account for the perception, in memory or in anticipation, of a thing not yet present or not present anymore? When I recall this moment, this event will be absent, but its “effect” will be present “in me.” How can we account for the presence of an absence? It is rather embarrassing that both the simple man in the street and the educated man in the lab agree on this answer: my remembering of this talk will be facilitated and carried on by a process that involves my brain’s neurons. We should not concern ourselves with terminology at this point— synapses and all that—what matters is that either way (the way of science or the way of everyday naïveté) everything takes place “up here”: in the brain. This illusion of consciousness’s immanentism—the belief, in other words, that every act of cognition takes place within the confines of the brain—arises precisely from the difficulty we have just named—the presence of an absence. Immanentism fakes what it cannot account for: absence. Since one cannot explain how consciousness does not need its objects to be present-athand in order to be consciousness of them, the only other possible alternative, in the absence of absence, seems to be the presence of the world with its objects in consciousness. A whole philosophical difference is played out in these grammatical propositions: where the “of” seems inexplicable, the “in” must supplant it. The problem with the mind’s immanence is that it creates a dualism (with which philosophy is familiar since Descartes) between an outside—the things out there, and an inside—the world of thought in my head. Dualism not only leaves its own workings shrouded in mystery, it creates additional problems, three of which can be summarized as follows:

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1. If mind and body are two distinct realities, I am immediately presented with the problem of their correspondence: Is there any relation between my perception of the things and the thingsthemselves? The nightmare of a Matrix is only possible from within a dualistic point of view. 2. Given the at best ambiguous correspondence between mind and world, truth itself becomes dubious or relative. 3. Finally, the possibility of a meaningful intersubjectivity, the possibility of my relation with the Other, is irremediably wounded. It is indicative of the primitivism of our thought that we cannot think of consciousness but as a thing (a concretum)2 or the property of a thing and, therefore, once unable to locate it or produce it, we feel forced to deny it. To assume that memory remembers by means of images, so that every remembering becomes a form of re-presentation, will confront us with the very same problems St. Augustine was forced to face in Book 10 of the Confessions. These problems can be summarized as the conundrum of “imagining the unimaginable,” since one has to account for the difficulty of ascribing an image to memories that cannot, as we would say today, be “visualized”: that is, memories of emotions and feelings (10.14.21–22), or the memories of pieces of innate knowledge that presumably are not mediated by any image (10.11.18–12.19). When I think, for example, of free will, do I recall the concept of free will or free will’s image? And what would the image of a concept be like if not a concept itself? Is, then, the recollection of a concept mediated by the concept of a concept? And would not such mediation require always new and seemingly endless intermediaries? What about memory and forgetfulness? “Does this mean that memory is present to itself through its image, and not in itself?”3 Here St. Augustine seems to come to the root of these paralogisms: forgetfulness is an absence—to say that I think of an absence by means of a presence (an image presented in memory) is to annul the very thing I am trying to think, and to explain it by means of representation is to do away with what stands in need of explanation. Let us continue briefly along the same line of inquiry by rehearsing some of the fundamental positions of the phenomenological method—first, by asking the questions that seem to point to the root of our misunderstandings: Is consciousness the consciousness of someone? Is there, in other words, a subject of consciousness? And were we to say that, how would we be able to distinguish between the two (the subject and its consciousness) in however formal a way? Would such a subject perhaps predate or precede its own

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consciousness with all the absurdities and difficulties that this might entail, such as of an unconscious subject that, in some inexplicable way, becomes conscious or obtains a consciousness as its property? Phenomenology has made clear that there is no room for such a subject in the life of consciousness,4 that what one might continue calling a “subject” cannot be anything other than an embodied consciousness (and there can be no consciousness that is not embodied).5 The I does not have memories—that would still imply the mediation of the image—but the I is that memory when it remembers, the image when it imagines, the thought when it thinks. So St. Augustine correctly writes that “the person who remembers is myself; I am my mind.”6 There can be no distinction, therefore, between the memory of this talk and I: while remembering myself presenting these thoughts, it is not I that am having, or the “I” that is having, that memory but rather that I am, or the “I” is at that moment, that memory. The crucial clarification here becomes whether I am only my memory “and nothing more.” We tend to assume that remembering is an act of being and not the whole of a being that remembers (that is, the remembering being). Such an assumption makes it necessary to search for a certain interiority into which the subject withdraws—itself or its other activities—while given to that memory, without losing its whole. However, is the subject not that whole already given in the remembering of that specific memory? In other words, is it not the case that in every act of consciousness the whole consciousness is invested without reservation, since any reservation would have been part of the investment? And likewise, therefore, for perceptions, imaginations, judgments, anticipations, and all the other kinds of intentionality that make up the life of consciousness, our life. Yet we admit that this picture, in its bold vision and elegant economy, does not satisfy us entirely. We feel that something more should be assumed and presupposed if we are to speak precisely as we did a moment ago of “our life.” The question, then, becomes that of the principle that unifies the various intentionalities and guarantees the continuity of the self. The answer is again prefigured in St. Augustine’s treatment of time in Book 11 of the Confessions, and it is telling that it is precisely to that text that Husserl returns in search of an answer to the unity and continuity of consciousness.7 Unity and continuity: to bring under the one, to appeal to the one. Two competing metaphors present themselves as distinct paradigms for the understanding of consciousness. Is consciousness the operation of a transcendent ego that, like a spectator in a theater or at games, observes and, most important, by its observation unites what appears to it and what appeals to it for its coherence? Or is consciousness rather like the actor or the athlete of being, playing what it is and being what it plays?

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Perhaps what is at stake in our questioning will become clearer if we transpose the same inquiry into a higher key. Let us ask, then, what constitutes the continuity of history? Speaking of personal history, the history of a particular individual, one assumes the existence of an I that endures through time and is thus the guardian of one’s memories and, by extension, the guardian of one’s identity—the I as the archivist of one’s past. If, however, the discussion is that of transindividual history, say the history of a nation or of a people or even the history of humanity as such, in the absence of such a universal I (besides, who or what could such an I have been or, indeed, how could it have been an I?) one substitutes a series of individual “I”s in succession. Our question is legitimized by establishing an analogical correspondence between the unity in past, present, and future of an individual act, such as the recitation of a poem; the unity in past, present, and future of a complete human life; and the unity in past, present, and future of human history itself. This parallelism was in fact suggested by St. Augustine when he wrote the following: What is true of the poem as a whole is true equally of its individual stanzas and syllables. The same is true of the whole long performance, in which this poem may be a single item. The same thing happens in the entirety of a person’s life, of which all his actions are parts; and the same in the entire sweep of human history, the parts of which are individual human lives.8

What the parts of a poem are to the poem as a whole is what the deeds and actions of a person’s life are to his or her life as a whole; and what a person’s deeds and actions are to that person’s life as a whole is what the lives of all human beings are to the macroscopic span of human history—and this is a unity brought about by time and over time. The juxtaposition of these two levels of history reveals a problem: in the case of world history one dispenses with the necessity of one, individual, permanent I without being bothered that the fragmentary plurality of individual “I”s—all of whom would be equal among themselves—could not in fact account for what we sought to establish in the first place, namely, continuity. Each individual I is born and dies like moments—preceded by nothing and followed by nothing. How could they establish continuity insofar as nothing from the one survives in the next? And yet there is history; there is the memory of a past that exceeds me and every synchronous I by far. The past of this town, thousands of years old, still shapes and informs my experience today. Thus, we know that continuity is not the byproduct of synchronicity; in fact, synchronicity, by its nature, knows nothing of continuity and the experience of history.

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Why, then, do we still demand that the particular and individual I be such an allegedly synchronous entity? Because, as Kant rightly said, any experience must be accompanied by an I.9 We begin to see now, however, that this I cannot be the selfsame, identical I throughout, unless we are prepared to admit that one has only one experience given in a nunc stans. In other words, it makes no sense to assume one single enduring I (synchronicity) in order to account for the unity of the multiplicity of one’s experiences, for what one has to sacrifice then is nothing less than the same multiplicity of experience whose unity we seek to safeguard.10 At the very minimum, we must admit that the I finds itself at different chronological moments, that this I has time and is in time. Admitting, however, the diachronicity of the I is to already admit too much. There cannot be only one I; rather, as in our example of world history, there must be one I after another that transmits to its next not only its own content but also that of all its predecessors. The phenomenological analysis of internal time reveals time as the perichoretic intertwining of three ecstasies: impression, protention, and retention. It is important to note that in what we call the “now,” all three temporalities are to be found: there is a present-present, a present-past and a present-future.11 And the present-present, in turn, springs its own branches of protention and retention. This seemingly endless process affords us with a much more nuanced conception of temporality than that of a linear succession of “nows.”12 Thus, the naïveté of immanentism is averted. The memories I have are not stored somewhere in my mind to be recalled or put aside at my will, as one picks photographs from a drawer. Neither the I nor its “contents” have an essential permanence: they are not solids but moments or, as Eli Schonfeld would say, “movements.”13 Consciousness has no depth, no interiority to which it can withdraw. It can assume “weight” or “force”—that is, intensity—but, as Bergson has already shown, it has no extensity;14 hence, the existentialist manifesto of the priority of existence over essence, with all that this axiom implies.

Time In previewing my day, as in those moments when I lie awake but am still in bed, my life takes the form of a series of “things to be done” (agenda). Some of these “things” are already there as part of my living existence (like lunch); I do not normally think of them (unless they rise to the level of an unusual event, for example, lunch with a friend) but they provide my schedule with its frame. Then, there are some tasks that need to be performed

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as part of my professional life (for example, classes to be taught, meetings to be attended, and so on). Through them my life is carried on. They present themselves as stepping stones that can take me across—to the same point where, lying in bed and about to fall asleep, I might repeat the morning review of my day. What we call life is a series of intervals from sleep to sleep. In the morning, when the hour strikes at which I am accustomed to rise, I might receive this impression ıઃȞ ੔Ȝૉ IJૌ ȥȣȤૌ, as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused mass of impressions which fill my mind; perhaps in that case it would not determine me to act. But generally this impression, instead of disturbing my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the water of a pond, merely stirs up an idea which is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attending to my usual occupations. This impression and this idea have in the end become tied up with one another, so that the act follows the impression without the self interfering with it. In this instance I am a conscious automaton, and I am so because I have everything to gain by being so. It will be found that the majority of our daily actions are performed in this way and that, owing to the solidification in memory of such and such sensations, feelings, or ideas, impressions from the outside call forth movements on our part which, though conscious and even intelligent, have many points of resemblance with reflex acts.15

In the meantime, one does things—so much so that in the event that one has nothing to do, one must find things to do. “Nothing to do”: this phrase presents us with an important clue in our analysis. “Nothing to do” reveals that in between these “to dos” lies precisely nothing—that the stepping stones of daily tasks, goals, and events take us through the dark waters of nothing. Yes, in the unlikely eventuality that one is left with “nothing to do” one must find, invent, things to do lest one be swallowed up by nothing. When is one left with nothing to do? Is it even possible that one can be left with nothing to do? It is not the possibilities one lacks, and perhaps not even the actual tasks—for I feel that I have nothing to do when I have a lot to do. It is rather the motivation that one finds lacking. I am stepping on stepping stone x (which in all likelihood I have done already countless times) and, suddenly, the next step to stone y seems impossible or, better yet, meaningless. Impossible, insofar as it involves an insurmountable effort; meaningless, for I cannot see any reason why I should carry on with this futile game. Yes, I can step on the next stone, which means I can keep my next appointment; I can perform my next task, but so what? What is the point? Sometimes, or for some people, this is the point: avoiding the pointless. Therefore, one throws oneself into the faithful execution of steps.

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For one such as this, however, one who has already caught this vision of pointlessness, proceeding is indeed physically impossible. The futility of what we call “a game” is more than a thought. In fact, even before rising to mind as a thought, futility paralyses one’s members with what Levinas has called the stiffness and the numbness of fatigue: “Fatigue—even, and above all, the fatigue that is unthinkingly termed physical—presents itself first as a stiffening, a numbness, a way of curling up into oneself.”16 But why should I lack the motivation, especially since we are speaking not of a motivation for this or that but ultimately motivation for life itself— that is, connatus essendi? Is the reason not that futile game described above, the masquerade of desire that knows no end? Is it not this continuous succession of goals and tasks, of things to do and to be done, propelled by an insatiable desire that desires only its own continuation, its empty desiring? How then can one lack motivation? How can one lack the lack that desire is? That would be a double lack. Fatigue demonstrates not the lack of motivation but rather a suspension or, better yet, an obsession. Desire is not mitigated; rather, it is frustrated, and this frustration signals an intensification of desire. In fatigue, desire places itself on hold. It waits, and it is this waiting that explains what appeared earlier as a “lack of motivation,” a “refusal to go on.” While waiting there is nothing to do, perhaps because one is already consumed in doing something—namely, waiting. While I am waiting for my train to arrive, I cannot seriously engage with anything for two reasons. First, my primary engagement is precisely the waiting-for-the-train-to-arrive; therefore anything else (such as reading a book or smoking a cigarette) can only be a way of “measuring” the time of waiting—that is, a form of parergon to waiting itself. Second, the arrival of the train can interrupt these other activities, thus rendering them pointless. Therefore, as long as I wait I cannot do anything: there is nothing to be done. The point that needs to be stressed in this rather commonplace analysis is the following: if there is nothing to be done while waiting, it is neither because I cannot find something to do, as if I were lacking the means or the ideas, nor because I do not want to do anything else, as if I were lacking the desire. I am neither imprisoned nor bored. In fact, there may be many things I would like to do. As long as I am waiting, however, there is nothing to be done. To say, as we have just done, that “as long as I am waiting there is nothing to be done,” is to say precisely the opposite of what Samuel Beckett showed us on stage in his play Waiting for Godot. The opening words of that famous play are exactly these: “Nothing to be done.” But whereas Vladimir and Estragon wait because there is nothing to be done, we, on the contrary,

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have nothing to do because we wait. The difference is decisive. One would be justified, I believe, in saying that what Beckett put on stage was a grotesque exaggeration of what Heidegger had predicted in one of his dark prophesies concerning our scientific age: that the “hidden goal toward which all of this and much more rushes, without having the slightest hint of it—and without being able in the slightest to have a hint—is the state of total boredom.”17 Boredom, for Heidegger, is modernity’s destiny—as much as it was, ironically, for Greek antiquity the primordial origin of man. We remind the reader that for someone who, like Origen, thinks from within the paradigm, and indeed the culmination, of Greek metaphysics, history is the result of the boredom (țȩȡȠȢ) that the pre-existing souls experienced in a state where there is nothing to be done other than contemplating the Good.18 Yet we overlook the possibility that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot might also be a very ancient story: the story of an endless (and thus pointless) repetition, of the infinite return of the same, the same at the beginning as it is in the end. Heidegger’s analysis of boredom belongs to a conception of homogeneous time as cyclical chronos.19 It is, however, quite a different conception of time that is operative in our analysis of waiting, insofar as waiting—even when one knows not what one waits for, or especially then—is open to what we can call an eschatological expectancy that is neither for “the beings as a whole” nor for Dasein’s “resolute self-disclosure.”20 Not everything, however, arrives with the precision of a train. Indeed, many events lack a schedule: one can anticipate them but not their arrival. Thus, one does not quite know what one waits for. There is an element of indeterminacy regarding the object of one’s expectation. One, of course, is free to give it different names and imagine it under different categories: it might be a better future, a phone call that would magically transform my dull life, the beloved that I have always dreamt of, or perhaps death or the Messiah. Insofar as one can have something to expect, there is waiting. As long as I wait, there is nothing to be done. Every action, as long as it can be seen on the horizon of a time suspended by waiting, is pointless. Perhaps this is what Prof. Schmidt meant when he said that “nonerotic time becomes potentially a ‘waste of time,’ a ‘nontime,’ . . . a time of nonbeing.”21 In another sense, waiting itself is an activity. “The existence of an existent,” Levinas writes, “is by essence an activity. An existent must be in act, even when it is inactive.”22 Thus, the expression “nothing to do” implies that in waiting one indeed does nothing (where this “does” is understood in all its active sense). Think of the paradox of an “active inactivity” as the tension23 expressed in the positioning of an athlete who is about to run (to return to one of our opening metaphors). The athlete has not yet begun running. In positioning, he assumes the immobility of a statue, frozen, as it

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were, in the instant. And yet, all the subsequent activity, the energy that will be released once he leaves his mark, is gathered in the tension of his muscles. There is an entasis in waiting. I am borrowing this technical term from classical architecture, a term that usually denotes the convex curve of a column. The word “entasis” itself can be translated as intensity. To the question of why the masters of old applied the device of entasis in their buildings—superficially understood as nothing more than an optical illusion—one would have to answer with reference not only to the anthropic ideal of classical architecture, where the proportions of the human body were applied to buildings, but also to the extraordinary sensitivity of the ancients, who understood perfection as including imperfection or, rather, they understood that there is no perfection without imperfection and therefore created columns that, like the muscles of the body, bulge under the weight they support. Waiting is such entasis, such intensity. But this is a paradox, perhaps greater than that of an “active inactivity.” We understand waiting as a category inseparable from the amount of time one waits. There is no waiting without time. But also, we understand time as extensity: as the measure by which one calculates the duration of an activity. So, it takes fortyfive minutes to go through this lecture and ten minutes to walk to my hotel. In talking in this way, we imagine time in terms of space.24 In the second example, time is a correlate of my moving from point A (say, this room) to point B (my hotel). In the example of the lecture, time is the correlate of my covering the “distance” from the beginning of my talk to its end. Here again, although more subtly, one thinks of time in terms of space, that is, in terms of extension. Although this conventional way of thinking about time cannot be dispensed with, since it is part of our everyday language, the analysis of waiting has revealed another aspect of time: temporality as intensity. We noted above that when one waits for certain events there is a certain indeterminacy both in the form of the event (for example, I am waiting for a better future, but I do not know, in fact I cannot know, in what form that future might arrive) and its time (its “when”). What I am expecting does not always come with a predetermined schedule—in fact, I might not even be sure that it will come. Like Estragon and Vladimir, I am not sure whether it is today, tomorrow, or possibly even yesterday that Godot was to come. In the absence, therefore, of a fixed point B, a terminus by which one might feel justified in giving up one’s waiting (for after that one knows that what one expected has either come or not), the time of waiting lacks all extensity. The moment I am waiting for is not anymore distance but rather instance: it might be “any moment now,” or worse, “already here.” So waiting becomes a pure intensity—under which everything else—and above all, economic time— collapses.

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Self and Time It was interesting that the title of the conference that provided us with the opportunity for these reflections was “The Resurrection of the Subject.” First of all, I thought that it was quite fitting for a conference that is convened in Jerusalem to bear in its title the concept of “resurrection.” On the other hand, the title of that conference implied that the subject is dead and indeed might have been dead for some time now: Can it be resurrected? And, more important, would such a resurrected subject still be the same—that is, a subject? Please do not rush to judge my questions as frivolous, for it was the Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead that gave a terrible headache to many scholastic heads during the Middle Ages. In classical metaphysics, death and resurrection are what Aristotle had called substantial changes— changes, that is, that affect the bond between form and matter. Once this bond has been changed, and not only once but twice, how can we still speak of the same subject? Put simply, the question for scholasticism was whether a person can still be the same after the corruption of death and the generation of a new life. If the answer to this question is negative, then one cannot speak of the resurrection of the subject but, at best, of its reincarnation, and therefore the fundamental doctrine of the Christian church is lost. Ecclesiastical doctrine aside, this problematic raised, with clarity and force, the question of the subject’s identity, of what makes the subject what it is. Perhaps you realize now that we have been asking the same question since the beginning of this paper. The phenomenological given is of a consciousness as sheer spontaneity, as a moment, that derives its unity not from itself but rather from its objects—so much so that one could say that consciousness itself is not only a subject, or not primarily a subject, but also an object; that is, consciousness does not only constitute the world by its intentionality but is also, in turn, constituted by a counter-intentionality. This presents us with a subject, without subjectivity, defined by its passivity or affectivity. All of this is described and explained in detail by Sartre, Levinas, and Marion.25 I had to speak at some length in order to arrive not once but twice at the phenomenon of intensity. In the first part of my essay, I have shown how consciousness can be understood as intensity; in the second part I tried to show that time assumes the same characteristic of intensity. The conclusion that I had hoped to draw at the end of these deliberations should be fairly obvious now: the self is time. Time is the event of being—a being understood not in terms of substance but of becoming. This, however, does not mean that time “comes from the self”; that would imply the untenable position, as Prof.

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Motzkin made clear in his presentation on “Post-Subjectivity and Historical Consciousness,” of an uncreated self.26 I believe, in agreement with Sartre27 and Levinas,28 that the instant that is the life of both self and time constitutes a creation ex nihilo—to such a degree that it requires a continuous creation.29 This ever-continuous opening of the self to the Other that constitutes its “resurrection” is what Levinas calls in his Diachrony and Representation the “deformalization of time.” Allow me to close by borrowing Levinas’s voice: It was important to me above all to speak in this study about how, in the human intrigue, past, future, and present are tied together in time, without this resulting from a simple degradation that the unity of the One could have . . . undergone, dispersing itself, in the movement that since—or according to— Aristotle was acceded to time in its diachrony. In such a view the unity of time would lose itself in the flow of instants, to find itself again—without truly finding itself—in re-presentation, where the past gathers together instants by way of the memory’s images, and the future by way of installments and promises. But I have sought for time as the deformalization of the most formal form that is, the unity of the I think. Deformalization is that with which Bergson, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger, each in his own way, have opened the problematic of modern thought, by starting from a concreteness “older” than the pure form of time.30

Notes 1 This paper was originally given as a presentation at the Post-Subjectivity Conference organized by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (December 23, 2009). I would like to thank Professors Gabriel Motzkin and Christoph Schmidt for their kind invitation. The paper was delivered again, in a revised version, as a presentation at the series of Colloquia organized by the Department of Philosophy at the College of Holy Cross (May 7, 2013) in Worcester, MA. 2 The terminology is borrowed from Robert Sokolowski as he warns us that “there is always a danger that we will separate the inseparable, that we will make the abstractum into a concretum.” Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25. William James, in a protophenomenological essay entitled “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” had similarly denied the entitative aspect of consciousness. See William James, Writings 1902– 1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1141–1158. 3 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), (10.15.23), 252. [Editor’s note: Standard references for works are in parentheses and are followed by the page number for the particular edition.] 4 This is the thrust of Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument in his essay The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).

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5 “My body is thus inescapable for me: both as a condition of consciousness and as perpetually present to consciousness.” Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 8. What we see around us, going by us, and carrying on with their business are persons, not consciousness. We interact with persons, not with consciousness. 6 Augustine, The Confessions, (10.16.25), 253. 7 “The analysis of time-consciousness is an ancient burden for descriptive psychology and epistemology. The first person who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in this analysis, and who struggled with them almost to despair, was Augustine. Even today, anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study Chapters 14–28 of Book XI of the Confessiones thoroughly. For in these matters our modern age, so proud of its knowledge, has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid achievement of this great thinker who grappled so earnestly with the problem of time.” Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Barnett Brough (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 3. 8 Augustine, The Confessions, (11.28.38), 309. 9 “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), (B131), 152. 10 These paradoxes arise from our failure to recognize that multiplicity is itself multiple. Bergson distinguishes between two multiplicities that can be roughly called quantitative and qualitative. The former is derivative and secondary, a mere projection “in space” of the experience of multiplicity that the consciousness enjoys in time: “It follows from this analysis that space alone is homogeneous, that objects in space form a discrete multiplicity, and that every discrete multiplicity is got by a process of unfolding in space. It also follows that there is neither duration nor even succession in space, if we give to these words the meaning in which consciousness takes them: each of the so-called successive states of the external world exists alone; their multiplicity is real only for a consciousness that can first retain them and then set them side by side by externalizing them in relation to one another. If it retains them, it is because these distinct states of the external world give rise to states of consciousness which permeate one another, imperceptibly organize themselves into a whole, and bind the past to the present by this very process of connexion. If it externalizes them in relation to one another, the reason is that, thinking of their radical distinctness (the one having ceased to be when the other appears on the scene), it perceives them under the form of a discrete multiplicity, which amounts to setting them out in line, in the space in which each of them existed separately.” Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: CosimoClassics, 1910), 120–121. 11 This was also St Augustine’s description: “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.” The Confessions, (11.20.26), 300. 12 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, 3. On the same subject, see also Neal DeRoo’s analysis in Futurity in Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). This perichoretic intertwining of three “ecstasies” of time is what Martin Heidegger calls “the horizon of time.” See, for example, The Fundamental Concepts of

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Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), especially 146–150. 13 See his essay “Thinking Subjectivity after Heidegger: A Phenomenology of Plato’s Concept of the Soul” in this volume. 14 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 120–121. 15 Ibid., 168. 16 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 30. That fatigue is the fatigue of one’s own existence is made clear in a series of remarks: “There exists a weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our life—our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself” (ibid., 24). “In weariness we want to escape existence itself. . . . Prior to every judgment, to be tired of everything and everyone is to abdicate from existence. The refusal is in weariness. Weariness by all its being effects this refusal to exist; it is only in the refusal to exist” (ibid., 25). 17 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), (§76), 109 (emphasis is mine). At the end of this quotation, Heidegger makes an explicit reference to his 1929/30 lecture course, published under the title The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (cited above in note 12), which includes Heidegger’s most systematic and extensive analysis of boredom. Misled by the German term Langeweile, Heidegger thinks of boredom in terms of extensity, that is, as time that grows longer, instead of intensity, that is, as time that is felt “heavier.” Thus, he writes: “In boredom, Langeweile, the while [Weile] becomes long [lang].” The Fundamental Concepts, 152. 18 Origen on First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the De Principiis, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), (2:8), 125. It was on account of boredom that the souls fell away from God, a falling described as a process of losing their old fervent love, thus growing cold (psychesthai), from which they derived their names (psyche). Ibid., (2:8), 123–124. 19 And that is in spite of the few redeeming references to Kierkegaard’s concept of the (kairological) moment. See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts, 150–151. 20 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 87; and The Fundamental Concepts, 149. 21 See Christoph Schmidt, “‘Till the End of Love’: Eros and Time in the Constitution of Modern Subjectivity,” included in this volume. 22 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 35. 23 Ibid., 36. 24 As Kant has already implied. See Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic, §6, A33/B50. 25 “How can the subject be given a definition that somehow lies in its passivity?” Emanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1990), 81. 26 See Prof. Motzkin’s essay in this volume.

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Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 99–101. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 75. 29 “The theory of continuous creation in Descartes and Malebranche refers, on the phenomenal level, to the incapacity of an instant to join up itself with the following instant. . . . Malebranche places it in its inability to preserve itself in existence in its need to resort to divine efficacity at each instant.” Ibid. 30 Levinas, Time and the Other, 119. For a further reading on the concept of deformalization and time in general in Levinas’s work, see Eric Severson’s recent study Levinas’s Philosophy of Time: Gift, Responsibility, Diachrony, Hope (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2013). 28

DOES TRUTH REQUIRE A SUBJECT? MICHAEL ROUBACH

In recent years we have witnessed a renewed philosophical interest in the question regarding the value of pursuing truth. This renewed interest is a reaction not only to the philosophical critique of the notion of truth and its value (in thinkers such as Rorty and Foucault) but also to a larger cultural phenomenon (“postmodernism”) in which the pursuit of truth is not conceived as an important or worthy goal. In the present article I will briefly discuss some recent contributions to this question by, among others, Harry Frankfurt and Bernard Williams; I will then propose my own approach, which is based on Heidegger and Levinas. Last, I will relate this discussion to our current era and its postsecular character. Why should truth be pursued? One obvious answer is that truth is necessary for our survival. This answer seems to be obviously right, but it is not sufficient for two main reasons: first, not all truths, nor even most of them, are necessary for our survival or well-being, and second, sometimes lies can be very useful for our survival or well-being. So it seems that this answer does not meet the requirements of valuing the pursuit of truth. Moreover, the answer seems to assume a correspondence theory of truth, a theory that faces well-known difficulties. It is not clear what corresponds to a true negative judgment such as “there are no tigers in Jerusalem.” Another difficulty concerns ethical truths, a case where (under most interpretations) nothing exists that corresponds to them. If providing an account of the value of the pursuit of truth requires a correspondence theory of truth, it might be seen as a problematic requirement. A different answer to the question of why truth should be pursued is proposed by Harry Frankfurt. According to Frankfurt, through truth we discover reality and, more specifically, the distinction between ourselves and the reality that is outside ourselves.1 This answer is better than the previous one for two main reasons. First, it is more inclusive concerning the truths that we pursue. Since we care about the distinction between ourselves and the reality outside ourselves, our interest in truth is not limited to the practical aspects of our lives. Second, in Frankfurt’s conception lies cannot play a role in the motivation to pursue truth. Nevertheless, I think that it does not fulfill the general requirement concerning the pursuit of truth because it limits the

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pursuit of truth to those truths that are in some way relevant to the distinction between me and the world. But not all truths are of this kind. For example, general truths whose scope includes both me and the world, such as the law of gravity, should not be pursued according to this position. Should the pursuit of truth be therefore characterized in terms that do not refer to the first person? Such a position is suggested by Paul Horwich. Horwich defines the pursuit of truth, saying that “it is desirable to believe what is true and only what is true.”2 The idea is that if we pursue truth, then we wish to believe all truths, and whatever we believe should be true. I think this position is problematic for several reasons. Let us begin by noting that this position implies that for all P, if P is true then it is desirable to believe it. It seems strange to maintain that we ought to believe every truth, for example the truths that we find in a telephone book concerning all the telephone numbers that are written in it. There is no reason to adopt such a position, and it does not seem to capture the ideal of the pursuit of truth. We might admire a person who learned the telephone book by heart for his incredible memory, but we would not think that he exemplifies the ideal of pursuing truth. One option for solving this problem, suggested by Pascal Engel, is to limit the truths we should pursue to those that are in some way relevant for a certain task.3 But this limitation is, in my opinion, too strong: the ideal of the pursuit of truth as something that should not be limited in scope is not preserved. If we limit ourselves to truths that are relevant to us, we do not meet the requirements for the pursuit of truth, which requires the pursuit of truth as a whole. Moreover, this position resembles the one suggested by Frankfurt, which we criticized above. The other side of Horwich’s characterization of the pursuit of truth—that is, that it is desirable that all our beliefs should be true—is also problematic. As Christian Piller has convincingly argued, this demand resembles the desire to be right more than the desire for truth.4 The person who maintains this principle wants whatever he believes to be, in fact, true, but this desire is not the same as desiring truth. For all these reasons, I find Horwich’s characterization to be problematic. A different approach to the question of the pursuit of truth’s value is proposed by Bernard Williams in Truth and Truthfulness. Williams rejects the idea of assigning a value to truth itself because truth is a property of propositions or sentences and therefore is not the sort of thing that can have a value.5 Assigning such a value is a category mistake. Value should be assigned to truthfulness and not to truth. Truthfulness is the striving for the avoidance of deception or illusions; it aims at seeing things correctly. The value of truthfulness is based on the virtues of accuracy and sincerity. Williams’s argument is based on describing a society in which there is a

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division of epistemic labor—that is, not everybody knows everything. In such a society (and our society is an example of such a society), communication plays a crucial role. Williams argues that in order for communication to work in such a society, accuracy (willingness to arrive at truth and having methods of investigation)6 and sincerity (a disposition to make sure that one’s assertion expresses what one actually believes)7 should have intrinsic value. Attributing an instrumental value to accuracy and sincerity will not fulfill the required aim of securing communication, since we must think that other people are always reliable. According to Williams, ascribing a value to truthfulness does not depend on a specific notion of truth. For example, it does not require a substantive conception of truth such as the correspondence theory.8 Concerning the notion of truth, Williams accepts Alfred Tarski’s famous requirement that any account of it should explain sentences taking the form “‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white” (T-sentences).9 What he does not endorse is the view that accepting this requirement commits one to a correspondence theory of truth. In this respect Williams is closer to minimalist positions concerning truth. According to him, such minimalist conceptions are not problematic from the viewpoint of truth’s value since, as we saw above, the weight of the value is not on truth but on truthfulness. I think that Williams’s view has considerable merit. I agree that assigning a value to the pursuit of truth should contain an ethical dimension. The practical dimension by itself cannot give adequate support for valuing the pursuit of truth. I also agree that truthfulness plays an important role in attributing a value to the pursuit of truth. Nevertheless, I think that valuing the pursuit of truth cannot be completely separated from the notion of truth itself. Michael Lynch has argued that sincerity is good because true beliefs are good and that a minimalist conception of truth cannot explain why true beliefs are good.10 Given this justified critique, one option is to amend Williams’s position by adding to it a correspondence conception of truth. Viewing the problem from the perspective of the value of pursuing truth, such an addition is better. But this option faces two main problems. First, as discussed above, the correspondence conception of truth faces many more problems than a minimal approach to truth. This is the reason why Williams did not accept it in the first place. Second, I think that even if we accept this change in Williams’s position, it would still leave us with the question we discussed previously: Why is truth as correspondence good? Given the above, I would like to suggest another option that, although different from those of Frankfurt and Williams, takes some of their ideas into account. As the basic notion of truth, I propose to adopt Heidegger’s account in the first part of Being and Time. Concerning the pursuit of truth, I propose

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a position that is based both on Heidegger’s account of conscience in the second part of Being and Time and on Levinas’s idea that the self is determined by the call of the other. I will first present this position and then show how it can provide an adequate model for the pursuit of truth. Let me begin with Heidegger’s notion of truth as it is developed in the first part of Being and Time, in section 44. Heidegger argues there that truth as correspondence presupposes the uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) of the entity toward which the assertion is directed: To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, “lets” the entity “be seen” in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering. Thus truth has by no means the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one entity (the subject) to another entity (the Object).11

The second step in Heidegger’s argument is that uncoveredness presupposes uncovering, which is a way of Being-in-the-World, and more specifically it presupposes disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) as a basic characteristic of Dasein.12 The grounding of truth in disclosedness is the primordial phenomenon of truth. According to Heidegger, disclosedness can be authentic or inauthentic. Therefore, Dasein is in both truth and untruth. The advantage Heidegger’s conception of truth has for an account of the value of pursuing truth is the strong link between Dasein and every truth. This conception deals well with the difficulties in Frankfurt’s position. The problem in that position is that not all truths seem to be related to the distinction between self and world, but if the notion of truth itself is related to the self (or to Dasein) then this problem does not occur. All truths play a role in revealing something about the self and its relation to other things in the world. But how should this conception of truth be related to the pursuit of truth? Neither Frankfurt nor Williams provides, in my opinion, an adequate answer: Frankfurt, because his approach cannot answer the question as to why disclosedness should be pursued and Williams, because his account does not succeed in relating truthfulness to any specific notion of truth—in our case the Heideggerian one. Therefore, I would like to propose another approach to the pursuit of truth, one that takes into consideration the notion of truth as disclosedness. This approach is based on Heidegger’s discussion regarding the voice of conscience in the second part of Being and Time. Conscience is a call away from the “they” (das Man) toward oneself. It therefore enables the change from inauthenticity to authenticity. This change is made through resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). Resoluteness leads Dasein to the primordial

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truth, which is that disclosedness characterizes Dasein.13 Therefore, truth as disclosedness is given to Dasein through the call of conscience. With the call of conscience we have a sort of basic directedness toward the revelation of truth. One can therefore interpret it as the basis for the pursuit of truth. But the problem with Heidegger’s account of conscience is that it does not give any preference to the directedness toward truth. Truth is not related yet to a specific positive norm of pursuing truth or a negative norm of avoiding lying, but Heidegger’s account does advocate the idea that part of the notion of the meaning of truth is that it is given within the context of such directedness. How can a preference for truth be created in the framework of Heidegger’s approach? One option can be extracted from Levinas’s position in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. In Levinas, there is also a place for a call, but this call is primarily the call of the other. This call is directed toward the subject; in fact, it is what determines the subject.14 The subject’s identity is his irreplaceability as one-for-the-other. To the call of the other he answers, “Here I am.” This answer is sincere. The sincerity is related primarily to the saying and not to what is said. One could say that regardless of what I say in my answer to the call of the other, the act of answering is itself sincere.15 Therefore, the other is the one who directs the subject toward truth. The value assigned to the pursuit of truth does not rest solely on the relation between self and world but requires the other as well. This position is in some way closer to that of Williams than to that of Frankfurt. According to Frankfurt the pursuit of truth is related to the relation between self and world. In Williams’s position the value of the pursuit of truth is based on the relations between persons. The Heideggerian/Levinasian position I propose contains an intersubjective component. We can now look at the structure of this conception as a whole. The call of the other or of conscience can be met only by sincerity. The reason for this is that there is no subject before the answer. This sincerity is the ground of truthfulness. The notion of truth that is connected to this sincerity is disclosedness. It is essentially connected to the one who answers. In this position the value given to the pursuit of truth is ethical in the Levinasian sense, since it is guided by the call of the other. One can therefore say that the other’s call is, in one of its aspects, the basis for “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” This model of the pursuit of truth creates a close link between truth and the subject, both in the notion of truth itself and in characterizing the pursuit of truth. One can therefore conclude that in order to establish the value of pursuing truth, a tight link between truth and subject is needed.

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In conclusion, I wish to add a few words about the connection between the conception of truth discussed here and the question of postsecularism. Although my discussion is conceptual and the model I present does not depend on a specific historical situation, the question I raise is motivated by the current historical situation in which the pursuit of truth seems to have lost the value it had in previous epochs. This situation can be viewed as an aspect of our postmodern era, but I think it is related to a much larger phenomenon whereby it is assumed that truth can take care of itself, that truth does not need us. The roots of truth’s separation from the subject can already be seen in the beginning of the modern period, but it was significantly accelerated with the distinction between logic and psychology at the end of the nineteenth century. The beginning of a separate discussion related to the notion of truth can also be located in that period. Truth has, of course, been discussed since philosophy began, but it was not considered as a separate issue. Relating truth to the subject is therefore a reaction not only to postmodernity but to developments in late modernity as well. A position in which there is a close link between truth and the subject can also be viewed as postsecular in two main senses. First, according to the model we provided, this link was based on the call of conscience. This model can fit the religious conception of the Bible in which the call to truth is made by God. This does not mean that the biblical interpretation is the only one possible, but it can provide an interpretation of this position. A second aspect of the link between our position and religion can be found in Jesus’s saying, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”16 This saying requires a close link between subject and truth. It can be interpreted as claiming that truth is inseparable from a subject that reveals it. Truth cannot stand by itself, detached from the one who pronounces it. It can therefore be an example of our claim in this paper that truth requires a subject. Furthermore, as Michel Henry has suggested, this position can be related to Heidegger’s notion of truth as uncoveredness.17 In this sense, the position articulated in this article can be interpreted as related to the Christian conception of truth, and viewed in that way it is postsecular.

Notes 1

Harry Frankfurt, On Truth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 99–100. Paul Horwich, “The Value of Truth,” Noûs 40, no. 2 (2006): 347. 3 Pascal Engel, Truth (Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2002), 128. 4 Christian Piller, “Desiring the Truth and Nothing but the Truth,” Noûs 43, no. 2 (2009): 193–213. 5 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6. 2

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Ibid., 127. Ibid., 97. 8 Ibid., 65. 9 See Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944): 341–376. 10 Michael Lynch, True to Life: Why Truth Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 155. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 261. 12 Ibid., 263. 13 Ibid., 343. 14 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 53. 15 Ibid., 143. 16 John 14:6, The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 17 Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. S. Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 7

IS A WORLD-ETHIC POSSIBLE? POSING THE QUESTION PHENOMENOLOGICALLY1 KLAUS HELD

In the age of increasing “globalization,” the various cultures of humanity, with their divergent moral and religious traditions, confront one another with a completely new intensity. For this reason the world is threatened by renewed conflicts, and the question arises, on what grounds might a peace be established in which it would be possible in principle for every humansubject on our planet to participate? One answer to this question, an answer exemplified by the work of the Catholic German Theologian Hans Küng, suggests the following: it is our most urgent task to develop a “WorldEthic.”2 What is intended thereby is a bundle of moral norms that would be accepted by all and able to mediate between the religious ideas of the great cultural traditions. In the following I would like to submit this project to a critical phenomenological examination and, in connection therewith, to clarify whether a religious and ethical consciousness that comprehends the different cultural traditions is even possible. At first the concept of a “World-Ethic” sounds easy to understand. However, upon careful examination it proves somewhat problematic, for the two concepts that it contains—“World” and “Ethic”—must be clarified, as well as the question of how ethics and religion are connected with each other. I would, first, like to begin with the idea of “world,” initially pointing out that the concept suffers from a certain ambiguity. With it, we are able to understand the totality of everything that is, in other words, the comprehending concept of all beings. However, in everyday speech “world” is first and foremost a context, a complex of meanings, in which whatever appears to us is embedded. It is in the world thus understood that “phenomeno-logy” is interested. As this term brings to literal expression, what we are concerned with here is a philosophical analysis of “Phenomena,” that is, of “Appearing.” “Appearance” or “phenomenon” is to be understood here as everything that confronts the human-subject, whether these are things, other humans, imaginary forms, numbers, events, institutions, thoughts, or what have you.

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Already with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, we find the fundamental observation that all phenomena confront us within a given context of meaning. This context is constituted by the fact that anything I have to do with refers me from its own meaning to other things that I at least could encounter. That to which I am each time referred is not just anything at all but rather a finite number of given things that, with the very givenness on which the reference depends, stand together in some context of meaning; for example, the staircase leading into a building refers to the building, the building to the rooms located within it, the rooms to the human beings who live or work there, and so on. The surface of this desk here refers me to the underside, this side of the desk immediately before me refers me to the front side turned toward all of you. Everything that confronts me comes into appearance for me within such a context of meaning. Every such context of meaning is, first of all, a limited area and a field of possibilities for my comportment; this is why Husserl is able to describe it as a horizon, for “horizon” means “boundary-line.” When employed in phenomenology, the concept of “world” means, first of all, nothing other than “horizon.” The horizon of the appearing of a soccer ball is first of all the world of the soccer game and everything that belongs to it: the teams, the trainer, the stadiums, the equipment, the rules of the game, the audience, and so on. However, when I buy the soccer ball in a store, it can also refer me to the world of the market, to the dynamic of supply and demand. And it is even possible that the presentation of the multicolored ball in a toy store will allow me to be attentive to the world of aesthetic design. Thus, every horizon, every particular world of appearing, is limited but at the same time open, since it refers to other horizons. This referring from one horizon to the next has no end; it is an endless “and so on.” This “and so on” forms a single, all horizon-encompassing referential context that Husserl, therefore, described as the universal-horizon. We become conscious of this universal-horizon if we use the concept “the world” and thereby understand it—grammatically speaking—as a singulare tantum, that is, as a word the plural of which is nonsensical. We can, however, also use the word in the plural when speaking of particular horizons, the worlds of soccer, of economy, and of artistic design, et cetera, as I have just done. Phenomenologically, we must therefore distinguish between the two uses of the concept “world”: on the one hand, there is the one and unique world as universal-horizon, and on the other, there are many worlds, the particular horizons, which for their part all belong together to the one world as a universal-horizon. Among these many horizons, the different cultural worlds of humanity play a special role, to which I will return.

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For the phenomenological concept of the Subject, one thing is essential above all—the subject is open to the world, to “world” as the universalhorizon of the one world and as the many worlds, that is, the particular horizons of meaning. If we use the concept “World” in a nonphenomenological sense, we understand for the most part what is included in the whole of everything that there is—that is, the comprehending concept of all beings. The world, as the whole of all beings, is even intelligible without the existence of the human. The world as horizon, however, can only ever exist in relation to the existence of the human as subject, the subject for whom the horizons constitute the sites or fields for his or her comportment; this world exists only as dependent upon the human-subject. But the converse is also true: the subject is dependent upon its horizon for its concrete existence; all our comportment is only possible because there is a field for it, a world-horizon and many particular horizons in which it can take place. Thus, the old Cartesian question of how we can gain certainty of the world external to our consciousness resolves itself. The world as a horizon belongs to subjectivity. The being of the human-subject consists in its fundamental openness to the universal world-horizon and its particular horizons. However, the phenomenological question then arises: In what way does the human-subject open itself to its horizons? How is it that I am opened to the world? Or, formulated in Husserl’s terminology, how is the world “constituted” for me? When I am referred by the side of this desk that faces me to the front side, which is facing all of you, I do indeed have an awareness of that front side, but in a peculiar way: The side of the desk facing me, I see with my eyes, here before me, and I can feel it with my hand. It is, in short, given to me as immediately present. In this sense, my consciousness of this side of the desk is a “presencing” and thus in a certain sense a “presentation,” which corresponds to Husserl’s German, Präsentation. The front side is not present to me visually, but I do have the possibility of making it present to me, for example, by walking around the desk. This possibility of leading that which is not now present, but to which I am referred, over into a presentation is the foundational capacity of my consciousness, through which all meaningful references are opened to me. This is true not only for simple examples from the realm of perception, such as the desk, but for any phenomenon with the specific referential context in which its appearance is embedded. Husserl described this co-consciousness of other things that could also appear to consciousness, but do not do so at present, as “appresentation”—that is, literally, an “ad-presentation.” It is through appresentation that the human-subject is open to both the many worlds and to the one encompassing world. The constitution of the world is, for me, based on appresentation.

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However, this thought requires an important addendum. When I appresent your presentation of the front side of the desk for myself, I set out from my own presentation, namely the perception that I now have of the back side of this desk, and include along with it the presentation of another subject, your perception of the desk’s front side, in constituting a world. To proceed in such a way is not in my power to decide. Seen more clearly, there is hardly a single phenomenon that does not appear to me within a context involving a more or less large number of other subjects. That is already the case, since we are able to speak about everything that confronts us. For the language I possess is not mine alone but is spoken in a community of people into which I was born or with which I later became familiar. Therefore, I do not carry out the constitution of the world by myself, like a philosophical Robinson Crusoe, but instead there are always more subjects involved in it and they comport themselves with one another in a web of multiple relationships, for which Husserl introduced the concept “intersubjectivity.” The world opens itself for human-subjectivity from the outset as an intersubjective world-horizon, which contains particular intersubjective horizons, the constitution of which being carried out through intersubjective appresentation. But what role does intersubjectivity play, more precisely understood, in appresentation? What do I know about your presentation of the front side of the desk? First, I might recall that I have already seen the desk from the front, or I could imagine as a future possibility of my own comportment that I will walk around the desk and then have the front side present before me as you do now. Second, in my imagination, I might envision myself taking up your spatial position and thereby as seeing the front side of the desk. What you tell me about the front side of the desk could perhaps contribute to this imaginary representation. I have, therefore, two options: I can now transport myself to your position and imagine the front side simultaneously with my presentation of the desk, but only as a fiction or in my imagination; I proceed as if I were in your place. Or I can—no longer fictionally but actually—refer to that which I have at my disposal, the past or future possibilities of the presentation of the front side of the desk. A third possibility would be the following: I have the front side’s presence not just in the past or future but rather now, simultaneously with my presentation of the reverse side of the desk, and this is not only a fiction but actually so. But this possibility obviously does not exist. I am able “to put” myself in the place of other people through reflection or feeling. But that in no way means that I could find myself in two places at once and that the presentation now taking place in other subjects would take place as my own presentation. Were that possible, the difference between the other subjects and myself would be dissolved, so that I would be, at the same time, both

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myself and the other person. Every presentation now being carried out by another subject is actually inaccessible to me. It is possible that another’s presentation would consist in perceiving me now. One might think that I could make present for myself that presentation carried out by another in which I appear to him or her, because that presentation would amount to a mirror image of my own presentation of the other. However, it is a fundamental phenomenological observation, which Husserl was the first to make and which later Emmanuel Levinas, in particular, reinforced, that there can be no symmetry between my experience of the other and other’s experience of me, because a current presentation of another subject simply cannot be my presentation. If it were, the other would not be an other, but only a duplicate, a doppelganger of myself. The asymmetry between my experience of the world and that of the other has a dramatic consequence for human living-together. I may be extremely familiar with a given person or with a circle of people, but nevertheless, I cannot be completely certain of the future comportment of another human subject, for I do not have access to what presents itself at each moment in the context of his or her comportment. That means, metaphorically speaking, that the structure of human living-together ultimately never stands on a firm foundation but time and again must be built upon quicksand or shaky ground. This, then, has fundamental consequences for the intersubjectively constituted world. To live with one another in peace and in well-ordered relationships, we humans have to know some foundation that allows us to calculate, at least to a modest extent, the foreseeable comportment of others. Such a foundation can only be an assemblage of common habits. A world held together through common habits is not possible for an indefinite number of people, for common habits can only emerge when the participating subjects gradually get used to living together. To accomplish this, the number of participants must be limited. The different cultural horizons of humanity, the worlds of traditional cultures, are based upon common habits, which come about in this way through history. Because of the intersubjective asymmetry, the horizons and the corresponding habits of the other are accessible only from the perspective of every individual inhabitant in such a cultural world. This is why shared or common habits can only be constituted through the fact that other habitual possibilities, which could have been freely chosen by those involved, are rejected and considered not “normal.” It is through the ruling out of possible anomalies that the deeply rooted common habits of a given cultural world possess the character of normality. From the perspective of the normality of their own habits, each intersubjective world with different habits appears as a

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strange or alien world, a foreign world. Only in the normalcy of their own intersubjective cultural horizon, do people begin to feel at home. That is why Husserl describes one’s own particular cultural world as a Heimwelt or “home-world,” and he describes those intersubjective horizons that appear anomalous from the perspective of the inhabitants of the homeworld as Fremdwelten or “foreign-worlds.” The foreign-world does not necessarily have to lie geographically outside a home-world. There can also be islands, as it were, of foreign-worlds inside a home-world, such as immigrant ghettos within a given country, red-light districts for sex-workers within a city, psychiatric hospitals with their patients, et cetera. Between home-world and foreign-world there exists the same asymmetry as that between my experience of another subject and the other’s experience of my appearing to him or her. The point of view within which my home-world appears to the current members of a foreign-world is not a mirror image of my home-worldly view of the foreign-world. Due precisely to this asymmetry of intersubjective horizons, one’s own normality emerges in contradistinction to the anomaly of the foreign-world. This reflection leads me to the second part of the world-ethic concept, the ancient Greek word Ɲthos. Because a cultural home-world is held together through the normality by which it distinguishes itself from the foreign-world, its shared normal habits have a normative character. Every subject is asked to direct his or her behavior in accordance with normal habits. Because of their normative character, the normal shared habits of a cultural world are taken for good and constitute the intersubjective living-space for action—what Aristotle, in his Ethics, described as Ɲthos. The attitudes that the individual person gets used to, and which he or she makes enduringly his or her own in practice in order to correspond to the normatively required habits of his or her home-world, are what are called “virtues.” The morality corresponding to the ethic of a prevailing home-world is always a virtue ethic. That is why the concept of virtue confronts us not only in the philosophers of ancient Greece, but in other great traditional cultures such as China or Japan. What is essential to virtue ethics is that it does not establish moral imperatives, rules, or prohibitions that would claim a validity or legitimacy independent of the traditional cultural background of the respective home-world as, for instance, Kant’s categorical imperative would seem to do. Rather, such an ethic describes the usual habits as acquired attitudes, by which good actions in a given home-world are supported. My guiding question is: Is a World-Ethic possible? Because the opinion prevails within contemporary philosophy today that ethics concerns providing a foundation for norms, one understands this question initially as though it were aimed at ethical norms. And in the concept “World-Ethic,” the word

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“world” refers not to one singular cultural world but rather to the world as a universal-horizon for the whole of humanity, within which the norms would be valid. This, however, contradicts the concept of Ɲthos in a twofold manner. First, an Ɲthos does not emerge from a catalog of home-world independent moral norms, but rather from virtues as good habits. And second, the Greek concept does not refer to the world as a universal-horizon, but rather to an individual cultural home-world, for which its respective ethic constitutes the space of action. So “World-Ethic” is, in itself, a double contradiction. The initial answer to my guiding question is, therefore, that a world-ethic is not possible. One might object that the various traditional cultures of humanity today, through globalization, seem to be growing together into the unified culture of a single “global village.” Will this not mean that, in the long run, the entire planet will become a single comprehensive home-world for all humansubjects? I do not believe so. First, because, as mentioned earlier, a homeworld, with its constitutive normality, arises by differentiating itself from the anomaly of the foreign-world. A foreign world composed of human, or human-like, subjects from another planet is, however, mere science fiction and not actually in view. Second—and this is phenomenologically decisive— the distinction between home-world and foreign-world is not an accidental characteristic of our experience of the world, which might disappear one of these days. This distinction results rather, as I said, from the irremediable asymmetry in the world’s intersubjective constitution and thus amounts to a non-eliminable structure of subjectivity’s openness to world. Jürgen Habermas, the most internationally recognized German philosopher, refers in his earlier writings, following Karl-Otto Apel, to a home-worldbound ethic as “conventional morality.” In so doing he awakens the anticipation that such morals will eventually become unnecessary through the progress of the Enlightenment and that a “post-conventional morality,” that is to say a catalogue of home-world-independent norms valid for the whole of humanity, will take their place. However, just like the Enlightenment belief that religion would eventually die out, which the early Habermas also shared, this conviction too has proven unstable, above all thanks to communitarian thinking in the United States. The reference to the universal-horizon of all conceivable subjects cannot easily take the place of the reference to particular world-horizons with its distinction between home-world and foreign-world. We always live—whether consciously or without ever thinking about it— in the certainty that there is a universal-horizon “world” that transcends every partial horizon, for we are aware that each particular horizon can refer us to further horizons. However, the one universal-horizon is, because of its universality, the intersubjective horizon of all actual and possible human-

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subjects. Due to the fundamentally insurmountable inaccessibility of other subjects’ presentations, this intersubjective universal-horizon can become accessible for me—and this is so for any other subject—only from out of that given particular world that constitutes for me either a momentary or an enduring home-world. This should suffice in order to support the thesis that a World-Ethic, as a bundle of habits for which the universal-horizon of all conceivable subjects on the planet would form the home-world, cannot exist. However, is it not possible that beyond the shared habits of the home-world there are some norms that apply to all subjects, regardless of the particular cultural world in which they live? Since such norms transcend particular horizons, they must stand in relation to the universal-horizon, “the one world.” For this reason the question arises: What meaning does the universal-horizon have for the comportment of humans insofar as this comportment orients itself by norms? We have seen that a fundamental insecurity of intersubjective living conditions results from the inaccessibility of other subjects’ presentations, from which we try to protect ourselves through the cultivation of normal/normative common habits within the ethic of a home-world. However, we do not thereby produce for ourselves any absolute security, for each cultural home-world, and with it each ethic, can be undone in the course of history. Despite this ineliminable threat to all home-worldly security, we human beings act as though we could bring about, through a common or shared ethic, the security of a peaceful and of a well-ordered social existence. Indeed, we must do so, for otherwise the intersubjective constitution of a common world would not come about. But from where do we derive this trust that the constitution can be successful, despite the non-appresentability of the presentations of other subjects? Since we are not able to overcome this restriction on our appresentationpossibilities, only one answer to this question comes into consideration: we trust in the fact that there is a power that transcends our human capacities, which stands good for, or ensures that, the intersubjective constitution of a common world can succeed despite this restriction. In his Politeia, Plato refers to that which “stands good” in such an encompassing way, the “Good” in this ontological sense, as “God.” This God guarantees the possibility of success for the intersubjective constitution of the world. That is why its guarantee refers to the world as a universal-horizon. Participation in intersubjective world-constitution is only possible for every human subject insofar as he or she trusts in the Good’s guarantee of its success. However, this trust is not knowledge, nor is it necessary that people even be aware of it. If this trust becomes a conscious attitude, it is a religious faith, a faith that refers to a power beyond human possibilities.

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The philosophical critique of religion, from the early Greek thinker Xenophanes to the critique of Christianity by the left-wing Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, has been traditionally directed against just such a faith. This critique, in any of its forms, assumes that the notion of God arises in one of two ways. Either it takes shape through the augmentation of phenomena such as power, love, knowledge, et cetera, to an extreme that then exceeds the respective experiences and then through the objectification of this extreme, or it is articulated through a negation of the features of human finitude, for example, the hypostasizing of the contradictory opposite of our mortality as immortality. Both of these, however, fail to hit upon that good that guarantees the success of the intersubjective constitution of a world. For, as I have said, a negating of the insurmountable inaccessibility of the other subjects’ presentations is not conceivable, since it would dissolve the otherness of the other. Moreover, the idea of augmenting, to the extreme, our possibilities for appresenting the conscious acts of other subjects, so that their presentations would become present for me, is for the same reason nonsensical. God as the Good remains, therefore, untouched by the traditional critique of religion. Insofar as God qua Good guarantees the success of the intersubjective constitution of a world at all, this guarantee relates to the one and only universal-horizon. That is why the divine good, which can offer such a guarantee, can only be singular. The uniqueness of the world as universalhorizon corresponds to the uniqueness of the one God, which so far as we know was accepted for the first time in human history in a religious form in Israel. The deities of the polytheistic cultures also, it is true, guarantee the success of the intersubjective constitution of the world. However, there are a plurality of these deities, for each of their guarantees holds only within a discrete particular horizon within a cultural home-world, for instance, the worlds of maternal care, erotic love, war, or the fertility of the Earth in a given season, et cetera. People’s expectations in such worlds and, along with these, the guarantees of the corresponding deities can come into conflict with one another, as the classic example of the fate of Homer’s Odysseus shows. Odysseus must suffer through ten years of wandering because the goddess Athena is kindly disposed to him while the god Poseidon hates him. In the ongoing process by which all cultures are today growing together, polytheism is condemned to extinction, for any deity, within whom strife reigns, cannot satisfactorily perform its task, that of guaranteeing the intersubjective constitution of the world. Only the Good as the one unique God can accomplish this.3 The disappearance of the polytheistic form of divinity from particular worlds leaves behind a secular world of many cultural home-worlds, all religious

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justification being absent from each respective ethic. What role can the one God as the Good play in such a world? The unreflective trust in the one God—just as the faith that is its reflective form—is actually no more than hope for the success of the intersubjective constitution of the world. As such, this trust does indeed have an addressee— God as the Good, although it contradicts the very character of that hope if this addressee becomes objectified in any way. Hence, in contrast to polytheistic deities, the one and only God, the God of Abraham, must refuse the objectification that occurs with His being given a name or with His being represented in an image. Then the question that arises, however, is: How is it even possible for the nonobjectifying trust in this one God to enter into conduct oriented by norms that are somehow related to this God? Whatever the relationship, it should be such that it corresponds to the one God’s freedom or independence from any bond to any specific home-world. But is such conduct even conceivable, a norm-oriented conduct that transcends the ties to a specific home-world? There does seem to be a rule for such conduct, a rule not bound to a specific home-world, articulated in the so-called Golden Rule, the regula aurea, which urges each individual human being to demand of him or herself what he or she expects from others. For this reason, the theologian Hans Küng refers to this rule in his justification of the “World-Ethic” project.4 But his comments concerning this theme remain superficial, for he has not thought carefully enough through the consequences of the difference between the negative and positive expressions of this rule. In its negative form, that is, as a prohibition, the Golden Rule can be formulated as a universal law that is valid for every human subject in every cultural home-world. In Confucius, one finds this law in the maxim “How you do not wish to be treated, so you should not treat others.”5 In this negative form, the Golden Rule is a proverb even in German, my mother-tongue, “Was du nicht willst, das man dir tu’, das füg’ auch keinem anderen zu!” The price for the universality of the Golden Rule expressed as a prohibition is its lack of content. It can, however, be expressed in a positive form as well. Thus, the commandment: “That which you would advise for your children, you should also follow that yourself,”6 turns up in its first formulation in European antiquity from the ancient Greek teacher of rhetoric Isocrates. We have this as well in the well-known English formulation: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!” Nevertheless, within such maxims the horizon of what is taken for granted as ethically desirable in a given cultural home-world, for instance the Greek home-world, remains implicit. Such positive forms of the Golden Rule make sense only under the condition that there is a self-evident canon or measure for what the “they”

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can expect as appropriate to the traditional habits of a specific cultural world. Thus, all such positive articulations are related from the outset to a specific, historically existing home-world and are for this reason not universal. The exception to this is that commandment that constitutes the quintessence of the “Sermon on the Mount” and which reads, according to Matthew, the oldest of the evangelists: “Everything you want other people to do to you, do this to them as well” (Matthew 7:12). But how should we understand this? Jesus of Nazareth—I speak of him here only as a Jewish teacher and not as the founder of a religion nor as the divine person of the Trinity—this Jesus of Nazareth brings the positive form of the Golden Rule, no longer bound to a particular home-world, into connection with the law of loving one’s neighbor from the book of Leviticus (19:18), “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.” What is intended in this commandment by “neighbor” Jesus illustrates in the narration of Luke (10:25–37) with the parable of the compassionate “Good Samaritan.” In this story, a man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is assaulted by robbers and left for dead. A priest and a Levite pass him by but do not care for the man in his distress. But then a Samaritan traveling the same road takes it upon himself to help the suffering man. Why did the priest and the Levite not care for the severely wounded man? I know that commentators have offered several answers, but I would like to suggest a new answer: The two high-ranking representatives of the Jewish religion do not help the severely wounded individual, because they think—just as the majority of people today do—that one need only take care of those others to whom one is already familiarly related through the intersubjective connections of one’s home-world. And indeed, the Samaritan’s home-world ethic does not dictate that one must help someone belonging to another people, let alone someone belonging to a given hated people. But Jesus, with the Samaritan’s behavior, demonstrates that the scope of the positive form of the Golden Rule can be expanded universally: insofar as I follow this norm as it pertains to those who belong to a foreign-world that is either internally or externally distant from me, I can come close enough to them to become a “neighbor” if I let myself be touched by their plight and offer help. Thus the boundary between homeworld and foreign-world loses its significance, and the norm relates to the universal-horizon of all imaginable subjects. The wounded individual in the parable is found in the most desperate circumstances, through which he must feel abandoned even in his own homeworld. But even the one who falls into such isolation nonetheless still has a world. But if it is no longer a home-world, it can only be the world as universal-horizon. To the uniqueness of the one world corresponds the

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solitude of the one who through his distress has lost protection within the home-world. Therefore, I open myself, through mercy for the other’s distress, to the one world, and thereby the boundary between home-world and foreignworld loses its meaning for me. With my help, I do good for the other, but a form of good that extends out beyond the good demanded by the Golden Rule when it is given content by my home-world’s norms and that extends out over all particular ethical worlds. Thus, the norm that demands that we love our neighbors relates to the universal-horizon of all conceivable subjects. But is this norm related to the nonobjectifying trust in the one God of which I spoke earlier? Yes, for it is not actually possible for human beings themselves to allow the tension between the home-world and foreign-world to become meaningless, since that very tension is rooted in the intersubjective asymmetry constitutive of our experience of a world. In this sense, the help given by a merciful human being to another in hopeless distress exceeds one’s strictly human capacity.7 That is why it is based, no matter whether the merciful individual knows and recognizes it or not, upon a trust in the power of the one good for which the boundary between the home-world and the foreign-world is meaningless, insofar as it guarantees the success of the intersubjective constitution of the world. The reflected form of this trust is the nonobjectifying faith in God as the one Good. Complying with the home-world-transcending norm that requires me to help people in hopeless distress, therefore, is intrinsically connected to a religious trust in God as the one Good. This observation leads to two further questions: First, are there other home-world-transcendent norms? And second, are such norms conceivable without their being religiously anchored—that is, without an internal connection to trust in a God? It is tempting to answer both of these questions in terms of human rights, since Kant’s philosophical attempts to justify human rights without recourse to the belief in the one God are based on the freedom of subjects. However, it does not seem very likely that such cultures as that of the Japanese will be convinced of the intercultural validity of human rights, cultures that even in their language lack a grammatical subject and therefore, from the outset, do not interpret the human being as a subject. But this would be a topic for another lecture.

Notes 1

The present unaltered reproduction of my 2009 lecture has since appeared in a more fully developed German version under the title “Ist ein Weltethos möglich? – Phänomenologisch gefragt.” That essay can be found in ed. Inga Römer, Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität in der Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2011). I would like to express here my gratitude to Benjamin Frazer-Simser (DePaul

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University, Chicago) for his translation of this text into English. [Editor’s note: This chapter has been edited for consistency in style.] 2 Cf. Hans Küng, Projekt Weltethos (München: Piper Verlag, 1991). 3 Cf. Klaus Held, “Phänomenologische Begründung eines nachmetaphysischen Gottesverständnisses,” in Phänomenologie und Theologie, ed. Klaus Held and Thomas Söding (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder-Verlag 2009); and Klaus Held, “Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, Filip Mattens, Phaenomenologica, vol. 200 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010). 4 Cf. Küng, Projekt Weltethos, 84. 5 Confucius, Lunyu, 15.23. 6 Isocrates, To Nicocles, § 11. 7 Cf. Klaus Held, “Ethos und christliche Gotteserfahrung,” in Intersubjectivité et théologie philosophique, ed. Marco M. Olivetti, Biblioteca dell’ Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 26 (Padua: CEDAM, 2001).

TIME TRAVEL: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS JOEL PEARL

Introduction Relying heavily on scientific methodology, modern psychoanalysis has reduced the therapeutic subject to an isolated entity, which precedes any personal experience. Trusting the intersubjective sphere, where one’s self is entirely absorbed in its cultural and social context, the postmodern psychoanalytic encounter excludes the capacity for genuine personal experiences from the therapeutic subject. In aspiring to preserve the bond between personal experience and the living subject, this paper aims to reexamine the way the notion of time played a key role in the birth of psychoanalysis and in the formation of the therapeutic subject. By showing that psychoanalytic doctrine discloses the therapeutic subject in light of the metaphysical assumption that time is linear, this paper concludes that at the heart of psychoanalysis there is a fundamental suppression of temporality, which is ultimately a suppression of the personal domain.

Historical sketch: The therapeutic event and personal experience The significant transformation that the psychoanalytical method has undergone since its establishment by Freud does not accord with the traditional theoretical foundations of the psychoanalytical encounter. Although the clinical scene always remained Freud’s main focus of attention, his attentiveness to psychological occurrences was ultimately attuned by the scientific concept of validity. From a metapsychological point of view, unconscious fantasy was understood as the source of psychic conflicts, and the aim of the psychoanalytical encounter was to understand the conflicting drives in a rational manner. The goal of the actual encounter was to liberate the ego from

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the grip of the primal process and to set the secondary process in motion. In that respect the analyst’s role was to untie the patient’s complex by objective interpretations of the unconscious process. Freud’s archetypal model for the analyst’s objective interpretative role was the scientist who observes his objects of investigation as independent entities that exist devoid of any dependency on the researcher’s own perspective. Referring to the role of science in respect to the existence of the external world, Freud asserts that its endeavor is to arrive at correspondence with reality—that is to say with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfillment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call “truth.”1

Science is therefore the facilitator of truth and its preserver. As such, while the Freudian analyst listens to his patient, the patient’s words and attitude find their proper, analytical interpretation in the science’s frame of meaning. An explicit criticism of the attempt to present psychoanalysis as a natural science can be found in the writings of Kohut, who claims that psychoanalysis has lost its scientific character and become a moral system.2 Winnicott’s formulation of the “intermediate area” where transitional phenomena exist between subjective and objective experiences seems to imply disapproval of the attempt to restrict the boundaries of the clinical scene to the scientific paradigm and to the categorical subject/object division.3 In attempting to reveal the significant transformation that the psychoanalytical corpus of knowledge has undergone since Freud, Mitchell states: Freud thought that the analytic method itself was an empirical method, with the analyst as observer uncovering and cataloging data. Today a dwindling number of authors still think this way. For most, the proliferation of different interpretive systems and the inevitable participation of the analyst in what he is observing make the analytic process not an unimpeachable platform from which to determine truths about the patient’s experience and life.4

Referring to contemporary thinkers who take issue with the Freudian worldview, Mitchell alludes to a wide range of current psychoanalytic theories, such as object relations, relational and intersubjective theories, constructivism, narrative, perspectivism, and self-psychology. In many ways current research is a constant effort to overcome the gap in the theoretical foundations of the psychoanalytical encounter, which came into sight at the moment the Freudian empirical method was relinquished. While the significance of this gap for the development of psychoanalysis was not totally

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disclosed until the emergence of the above-mentioned theories, the discontent with the manner in which scientific values shaped the interpersonal boundaries in the clinical scene was already present from the very early years of the psychoanalytic community. Ferenczi’s assertion in 1918 that the therapist should use “active intervention” in the clinical dyad is not consonant with Freudian technique. In 1928 Ferenczi claimed that the therapist should psychologically situate himself in the patient’s place in order to acquire an adequate understanding of how and when to offer his interpretations. According to Ferenczi, the general aim of psychoanalytical treatment was not so much objective interpretation per se as it was to make the patient feel good by way of encouragement and genuine empathy: I have come to the conclusion that it is above all a question of psychological tact whether one should tell the patient some particular thing. But what is “tact”? It is the capacity for empathy.5

Ferenczi thus undermined the boundaries of the clinical scene as they were phrased by classical psychoanalysis. His criticism of the classical techniques and innovations in the field were so far ahead of their time that several scholars consider him to be the herald of the current relational approach to psychoanalysis.6 As a matter of fact, there were several other occasions, in the early days of psychoanalytic doctrine, in which Freud’s colleagues found themselves in significant disagreement with the canonical approach. Seeing disassociated phenomena as the result of an ecstatic state of mind rather than as a result of topographic structure, Breuer broke away from Freud in 1896. Denouncing the priority of sexual drives over the ego, Adler left the psychoanalytic society in 1911. Jung parted ways with Freud in 1912 as a result of disagreeing with Freud’s accounting for the unconscious (as repressed sexual drives); Jung believed that it is a collective reservoir of symbols and images that synchronize our personality. Rank left Freud in 1924, arguing that Freudian analysis focused on past obscurity and on transference phenomena, thus neglecting what Rank called the therapeutic of the here and now, and the pre-Oedipal complexes. Prima facie, as each of these analysts criticized and developed classical psychoanalysis according to the way he, personally, found himself involved in the clinical scene, it appears as if there is no leitmotif among them. Nonetheless, it is precisely in the analyst’s personal perspective, and the personal dynamic promoted by the patient, that the above diverse ideas and criticisms come together. Even though the above-mentioned thinkers did not phrase their discontent in terms of opposing the scientific model, recurrent

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encounters with clinical phenomena that did not correspond with the Freudian theory compelled them to change the rules of the game and pave the way for theories more attentive to the analyst’s personal perspective and its implication for the patient’s persona. The shift to theories that take into account personal experiences that transcend objective parameters and categories had already begun in Freud’s time but reached its climax with the establishment of theories such as the relational, the constructivist, and the interpersonal. In mapping the current psychoanalytic situation, we notice that the attempt to identify psychoanalysis with a scientific method became marginal and that diverse approaches to the therapeutic event have found their theoretical justification in a postmodern and intricate fabric of doctrines. However, with the establishment of psychoanalysis on postmodern theoretical foundations, new voices began to be heard; among them were Roger Frie,7 Betty Canoon,8 Jon Mills,9 Eugene Gendlin,10 and M. Guy Thompson.11 These thinkers began to question the very possibility of understanding the therapeutic subject solely by means of postmodern notions. That is, if from the point of view of the postmodernist therapist human existence is understood as entirely absorbed in social, linguistic, and historical contexts, then it completely subordinates all lineaments of the personal dimension to contextual structures.12 This reductive approach left the psychoanalytical method orphaned with regard to the primary object of its concern: the actual experiencing subject struggling to integrate his life experiences into a whole. To conclude, the psychoanalytical method has undergone a significant transformation since its establishment. The way the human subject is understood and approached has changed fundamentally. However, while the scientific approach to the therapeutic event could not “make room” for the personal perspective, the postmodern account of personal experiences utterly absorbed them in a historical, social, and linguistic matrix. What should be apparent by now is that the question of the ontological meaning of personal experience is of crucial significance for understanding the clinical scene in general and for approaching the therapeutic subject in particular. Moreover, this connection between the development of psychoanalytical methods and the ontological meaning of personal experiences does not only characterize present-day theories. Rather, as noted previously, it already existed (albeit implicitly) in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement, in the works of Ferenczi and others. If indeed this connection plays a key role in the development of psychoanalysis, then to understand its implications for contemporary theories, a further genealogy is required: one attuned to the particular way that

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personal experience had already been omitted since the early days of psychoanalytic theory.

Time travel from philosophy to psychoanalysis One of Freud’s earliest works, which treat the basic structure of the analytical method, is the Project for a Scientific Psychology.13 This essay is especially illuminating for our purposes because it presents itself to the reader as a text written exclusively from a scientific standpoint, thus offering a brilliant opportunity to trace the specific way in which the theoretical formation of the psychoanalytic theory forsook the personal domain.

The Project The Project is a daring psychological endeavor to create a scientific image of the human psyche. The method that underlies this attempt is founded on mechanistic metaphors and quantitative data, and its aim is to create an atomistic model that will enable the articulation of a set of operative laws connecting the original parts of the system with human experience and consciousness.14 What makes Freud’s account of the human psyche fascinating in practice is the fact that the theoretical model he offers can work both ways—that is, it also allows the psychological phenomena to influence physiological process. Hence, Freud asserts that pleasure and unpleasure sensations15 and the ego as the authority in charge of reality testing16 constitute human experience and behavior. Referring to the psychological theory employed by Freud in the Project, Geerardyn claims: Freud’s psychology neither ensues logically from scientific frames of reference familiar to him nor from what he could learn from Meynert, Charcot, Brenheim or Breuer about neurological and psychological theory. Rather, his theory results from his adoption of a new epistemological view point. Once Freud had well and truly subscribed to the view point on the operation of psychical mechanism, it became possible to speak of a logical dialectic with the clinic.17

Geerardyn rightly maintains that Freud’s epistemological viewpoint is the theoretical source for his psychological method. Cohen demonstrates that, as a young student at the University of Vienna, Freud participated in Brentano’s seminars and lectures (1873–1875), thus coming under the influence of one of the most novel approaches to epistemology of the time.18 However, as I will show, while Freud adopted Brentano’s epistemology, he also incorporated

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into it a notion of time that shaped the boundaries of the human subject in the method he was developing. By doing so, Freud implicitly (or, if you will, unconsciously) excluded the personal domain (the experiencing subject) from the therapeutic encounter. In what follows I will first explain the problematic role that time plays in the Project and then illustrate its origin in Brentano’s formulation of “temporal awareness.”

How do psychological phenomena influence the physiological process? At the heart of the Freudian model in the Project lies what Freud referred to as “neurons,” which function as an extended network. Within the network of neurons flows energy that he refers to as “Q.” The flow of energy among the neurons is not random—it obeys specific laws of motion. The primary principle that outlines the energy flow in this model is the principle of consistency. According to this principle, the psyche is engaged in stabilizing the energy quantity embedded in the system. Accumulation of energy by the system equals a state of tension and thus the system is constantly compelled to regulate the emission of an energy discharge. Freud refers to the specific energy that moves through the neural network as Q’n. The source of the energy that flows in the body is twofold. It arises from outer stimulation (of the five senses) and from inner stimulation, such as appetite and instincts. Discussing the outer stimulation, the principle of consistency is kept in its simplest form. The neurons are charged with energy due to outer stimulation and then discharge this energy in order to release the tension stored in them. The case of inner stimulation is rather different, and the principle of consistency must undergo a certain modification. Since, by definition, the inner stimulation cannot be gratified at all times, the process of neural discharge must be suspended. Therefore, at any given moment the mechanism has to learn to identify when to allow the neurons to discharge the tension and when not to. Identifying the different shifts in the tension conditions, and the adjustment of the amount of tension discharged or suspended, presupposes two patterns of activity in the psychic mechanism: aptitude to recollect energy, and stability in the face of tension, as the tension is postponed in order to permit the psyche to execute actions in the outer world that are required for gratifying the inner need. A clarification of these two patterns demands a further explanation of the neural network: There are two classes of neurons: [1] those which allow Qƌ to pass through as though they had no contact-barriers and which, accordingly, after each passage of excitation are in the same state as before, and [2] those whose

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contact-barriers make themselves felt, so that they only allow Qƌ to pass through with difficulty or partially. The latter class may, after each excitation, be in a different state from before and they thus afford a possibility of representing memory.19

The network of neurons is divided in two: those that are entirely permeable, meaning they exhibit no resistance while the energy passes through them, which Freud names Ɏ, and those that do not permit energy to fully penetrate and manifest diverse forms of resistance, which cause an accumulation of energy, and are called ȥ. The existence of these two neuron clusters permits the psychic mechanism to recollect the trail of the Q’n flow as it is fixed in the system by the ȥ neurons. The particular way in which the energy is utilized by the ȥ cluster does not negate the consistency law but rather represents a modification of it. The psychic mechanism has to not only discharge inner tension but also preserve it at a level sufficient for carrying out essential activities in the world. In fact, the way the psychic mechanism operates in light of the modification of the law of consistency is understood by Freud as a secondary function, while the way the system operates in light of the consistency law as it is, is understood as a primary function. The neurophysiological image of the psyche portrayed by Freud unites the neural network and the world in the following way: cluster Ɏ receives outer stimulations that pass through it without any resistance, the Q’n continues toward the ȥ cluster, and there the process of energy alteration and channeling takes place. This explanation of the psyche manages to cope with most of the inner phenomena, excluding the phenomena of quality. The problem that then arises is as follows: How is it that a system that primarily operates on a quantity level enables the existence of quality phenomena? In tackling this difficulty Freud assumes the existence of an additional cluster of neurons: Ȧ. Thus we summon up courage to assume that there is a third system of neurons—Ȧ perhaps [we might call it]—which is excited along with perception, but not along with reproduction, and whose states of excitation give rise to the various qualities—are, that is to say, conscious sensations.20

According to Freud the very occurrence of conscious activity is equivalent to quality perception. But the question remains: How is it that the quantity components in neuron clusters ȥ and Ɏ appear in the cluster Ȧ in the form of quality? Here Freud takes a step backward, as it were, and improves his earlier assumptions. He goes back to his account of the way the energy increases and decreases in the psychic mechanism while passing from the outer world to Ɏ to ȥ to Ȧ and inserts into this process a new component he calls a “period.” The periods are embodied in the flow of energy and carry

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data that measure the duration of the energy flow as it arrives from the external world. So far I have regarded it only as the transference of Qƌ from one neuron to another. But it must have still another characteristic, of a temporal nature; for the mechanics of the physicists have allowed this temporal characteristic to the other motions of masses in the external world as well. I speak of this as period for short. Thus I shall assume that all resistance of contact-barriers applies only to the transference of Q, but that the period of the neuronal motion is transmitted without inhibition in all directions, as though it were a process of induction.21

Being the last link in the chain of neurons, consciousness is responsible for perceiving the qualities that reach it as duration’s data encrypted within the flow of energy (while not recognized by the ȥ and Ɏ clusters). Thus, consciousness is in charge of perceiving duration (energy frequencies) that it then translates into qualities. It is not for nothing that Freud ties consciousness to qualities. This link makes it possible to situate pleasure and unpleasure as fundamental principles of consciousness. Consciousness receives the durational data from cluster ȥ, thus recognizing them as qualities. Only as such can the psychic mechanism identify the energetic stress in the system as unpleasure rather than just pure tension, and the relief of energy not just as relief but as pleasure. Another central notion that fundamentally depends on the shift of quantities into qualities in consciousness is the ego. Portrayed as a cluster of neurons that supplies energy for the secondary functions, the ego enables the psyche to distinguish between illusion and reality.22 This aptitude is of extreme importance as it protects the psychic mechanism from reacting falsely upon imagined images (whether wishful or remembered) as if they were real. When an object image is present in consciousness and the necessity for relief of tension rises, the ego’s role comes into play by suspending the discharge and sending a side charge toward the image. If it turns out that the image endures in itself nothing more than quantitative data, then the psyche will recognize it as solely belonging to the neuron cluster (ȥ) and will not try to discharge energy, thus avoiding unpleasure. On the other hand, if the image includes qualitative data, the psyche can safely discharge the energy knowing that it represents an outer object that will gratify it with a pleasure sensation.23 To conclude, according to the Freudian model of the human psyche, the very existence of the psychological phenomena (and, consequently, the very possibility of the psychological phenomena influencing physiological processes) is dependent on the presence of qualitative phenomena, which are in turn completely conditioned by the existence of the period phenomena.

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The meaning of the concept of time in the Project From the epistemological point of view, the relation between the subject and the world takes place by way of mental content that is present in consciousness in the following way: neuron-system Ɏ presents the sensory data, neuron-system ȥ produces representations of the neurons that are charged by outer stimulations, and system Ȧ functions as the conscious system of the mental content. From a theoretical point of view this mental image of the world does not correspond to the way the world appears in our everyday life, given that the above epistemological account of the psyche fundamentally consists of quantities. From an epistemological viewpoint, temporal duration is a necessary condition for an object to appear as possessing quality. Freud’s methodological demand to explain the human psyche as an empirical process does not illuminate the way in which the object manifests itself in consciousness as possessed of duration. In other words, if the representation of physical stimulation is an actual representation of the external stimulation itself, how is it that consciousness perceives the object as enduring in time and not as momentary pulsations of presence? Freud’s solution to this epistemological predicament was to insert a temporal feature into his model in the form of periods. In the empirical-mechanistic plot that Freud generates in his model, the phenomenon of time can be understood not as an original attribute of the psyche but rather as a deus ex machina. In fact, Freud’s theoretical model is primarily founded on an atemporal worldview in which the present is an everlasting now. Only because Freud pins the notion of period on the initial empirical-mechanistic premises we have mentioned does his model pretend to explain the world and human behavior as enduring in time. By discussing in the next paragraphs Brentano’s notion of time and the specific role it has in his epistemological theory, I intend to shed more light on Freud’s solution to the problem of the enduring object.

Brentano’s account of human perception and temporal awareness Disclosing Brentano’s influence on Freud’s formulation of human perception will be carried out by outlining Brentano’s empirical epistemology in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.24 Early in the first chapter, titled “Concept and Purpose,” Brentano states the following: We have no right, therefore, to believe that the objects of so-called external perception really exist as they appear to us. Indeed, they demonstrably do not

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This statement should be read against the background of modern Western philosophical discourse, in which the existence of the external world is questioned. This philosophical difficulty was a central theme in the thought of philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, and Kant, who believed that epistemology can provide us with a firm foundation for the natural sciences. Like his predecessors, Brentano thought that we ought to direct our philosophical investigation not to the world as it is but to the way we perceive it: Natural science may not be defined as the science of bodies nor may psychology be defined as the science of the soul. Rather, the former should be thought of simply as the science of physical phenomena, and the latter, analogously, as the science of mental phenomena.26

If by taking the world literally (as what stands outside us as a whole) as our primary object of investigation we cannot clear a way for the certainty of natural science, then perhaps the title of our investigation should be altered. Thus, natural science should investigate “physical phenomena,” or the objects of sense perception, and psychology should deal with the “mental phenomena,” or the objects of inner perception. To grasp Brentano’s account of the empirical process of perception we ought to clarify his notion of “intentionality”: Every mental Phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object. . . . Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself.27

Intentionality for Brentano is a characteristic of all mental phenomena; in fact, there could not be any mental phenomena without it. He divides the mental phenomena in two: on the one hand, presentations, and on the other hand, mental states such as believing, wishing, and judging—that is to say, the cognitive apparatus of the mind. The latter are founded on the existence of the former; hence, presentation should be understood as having a primordial status within the mental phenomena: We may consider the following definition of mental phenomena as indubitably correct: they are either presentations or they are based upon presentations.28

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Any indication of quality that belongs to the mental phenomena and cannot be acknowledged as mere presentation is to be regarded as a cognitive function of the mind, which as stated above is ultimately constituted by presentations: “By ‘presentation’ we do not mean that which is presented, but rather the presenting of it.”29 Brentano makes it clear that there is an essential difference between the “presentation,” that is, the act of presenting, and the “content” of the presentation. The presentation is supposed to be directed toward an object, thus the content “intentionally inexists” in the presentation, but in itself it is not a part of the presentation. The content belongs to the presentation only as far as it is a part of the intentionality as a character of the mental phenomena. Thus, the mental phenomena include both the presentation and the content. The presentations in themselves are divided into two different classes: “inner presentations” and “outer presentations.” The former are best characterized as acts of reflection, thus gaining a status that sustains both one’s mental and emotive states. The latter are presentations of what Brentano calls “physical phenomena.” As I noted above, for Brentano the phrase “physical phenomena” refers not to the objects themselves but rather to a “sensory presentation.” This has the capacity to explain more adequately why the content cannot be understood as a part of the inner presentation but rather as that toward which the presentation is directed. According to Brentano we come to know the world through mental phenomena that are best characterized by the notion of intentionality. Intentionality in turn is best characterized as a basic law of the mental phenomena, under which every presentation is directed toward an object. The objects are not observed by themselves but rather via a specific kind of presentation, which he termed “outer presentation,” consisting of sense qualities. From this first glimpse into the process that involves perception, we can say that according to Brentano we are not simply observing the physical entities via our sensory faculties. Sensation first supplies us with sense qualities, such as color, sound, temperature, and so on, but as for the actual encounter with the ordinary object, an additional occurrence is required to be present within the realm of the mental phenomena—what Brentano refers to as “temporal awareness.” Thus, we come back to the problem of succession; the whole notion of our ordinary perception is entirely dependent on the way the duration of physical phenomena is constructed as a presentation within the mental phenomena. The difference between the two types of presentation is founded on a typology of contents: one presentation has mental and emotive states as its content, and the other has sense quality. In order to understand the full significance of temporal awareness for the empirical process of perception,

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however, we require an additional distinction in the realm of the presentation. The next distinction within presentation takes place in outer presentation; the criterion for this classification is founded upon the “causal origin.” The outer presentations are divided into sensations and “phantasy presensations” (Phantasievorstellungen).30 The “outer-sensation presentation” occurs as a result of a causal impingement on the sensory organs: “Sensations are effects of physical stimuli. Their origin is thus a psychophysical process.”31 Whenever we approach the occurrence of the mental phenomena via physiological antecedent conditions, the explanation . . . would involve merely an enumeration of the immediate and proximate physiological preconditions . . . excluding any element which is not immediately connected with them.32

In order to understand the different types of outer presentation, we should clarify the way outer-sensation presentations come into being through an immediate effect of the sensory organs. The fantasy presensations are outer presentations that are directed to the same content but in a mediated manner. Phantasy-presentations “differ from sensations only in their origin, not in their content.”33

Fig. 5-1

While the inner presentation is directed toward the object of an act, the outer presentation is a mental act of either an unimmediate or immediate presentation. This different function of the presentations plays a crucial role in Brentano’s understanding of the realm of consciousness in the process of perception.

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Whenever a mental act is the object of an accompanying inner cognition, it contains itself in its entirety as presented and known, in addition to its reference to a primary object.34

The notion of the “present object” emerges from the fact that there is a cognitive process between the inner and the outer presentations. Consciousness is thus an inner event (inner consciousness), an occurrence situated between the inner and outer presentations. However, cognition is more than just presentation; it functions at an additional level as judgment and feeling.35 Consequently, for Brentano consciousness is constructed by means of intentionality in a threefold manner: at the first level there is an outer presentation, at the second level there is judgment regarding the existence of the object as it appears in the outer presentation, and the third level consists of one’s relation to the presence of the object in innerperception as a feeling of pleasure or unpleasure.

Fig. 5-2

Brentano’s account of temporal awareness according to Husserl An important text that enables accurate understanding of how Brentano solves the problem of endurance in the temporal object is documented in Husserl’s book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.36 In the introduction Husserl describes the lectures37 he attended at the University of Vienna (1871) in which Brentano dealt with the origin of time. These lectures deal with the problem of temporal awareness by discussing the way one hears a melody. Explaining the cognitive process involved in the act of listening to a melody in light of his empirical epistemology, Brentano maintains that after

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a particular tone is grasped by the listener it is somehow retained by consciousness. However, establishing the presence of the presentation (of a tone) in consciousness does not yet guarantee the existence of a temporal object. As long as the presentation maintains a constant identity with the represented phenomenon (the tone), and as long as it is not open to alteration, the only path left for perceiving the music would be fundamentally cacophonic. Husserl used these words when describing Brentano’s explanation: Were they to remain unmodified, then instead of melody we should have a chord of simultaneous notes or rather a disharmonious jumble of sounds such as we should obtain if we stuck all the notes simultaneously that have already been sounded.38

Brentano’s conclusion is that the outer presentation of the physical phenomena is obliged to go through a constant alteration. Thus, methodically speaking, the problem manifests itself at two levels. At one level, if Brentano’s epistemological system is fundamentally constructed on empirical foundations that allow an adequate relation with the sense data, how does the alteration of presentation (through which the mental object is constructed) come into being? At another level, not only does the presentation have to be altered to become adequate to the physical phenomena, but consciousness must have access to something such as simultaneous awareness of the alteration that takes place in the presence of the presentation. No awareness, tied as it might be to the presentations of the tones, can itself be the origin of the object’s duration. Successive awareness of a successive tone already presupposes a simultaneous awareness of the tone’s alteration in time. Thus, the presentation and its awareness cannot be the origin of temporal awareness. If it were the case that awareness itself was the origin of the temporal aspect of the mental object, the cognitive process would be an impossible procedure in which awareness of presentation needs an additional presentation of the awareness, thus producing an endless chain of presentations. Brentano’s solution to this problem is a psychological law he terms “primordial association,” or as Husserl cites his teacher’s words, Brentano believed he had found the solution to the problem in the primordial associations, in the “genesis of the immediate presentations of memory [Gedächtnisvorstellungen] which, according to the law that admits no exceptions, are joined to particular presentations of perception without mediation.”39

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The origin of duration is based on the law of primordial association. The outer presentation is divided into two types: the immediate and the nonimmediate. While the former, the presentation of the sensory data, is an actual presentation of the sensory data and would represent a quantity relation of the physical phenomena, the latter represents the temporal perspective of the sensory data, thus enabling access to the quality dimension of the mental object. The nonimmediate presentations are referred to by Brentano as “phantasy ideas” or presentations responsible for creating the temporal aspect of the mental object: We arrive at the idea of succession only if the earlier sensation does not persist unaltered in consciousness but in the manner described is specifically modified, that is, is continuously modified from moment to moment. In going into phantasy, the sensation preserves its constantly varying temporal character; from moment to moment the content thus seems to be shoved back more and more. This modification, however, is no longer the business of sensation; it is brought about through the stimulus. The stimulus produces the actual content of sensation. If the stimulus disappears, the sensation also disappears. But the sensation itself now becomes productive. It produces a phantasy idea [Phantasievorstellung] like, or nearly like, itself with regard to content and enriched by temporal character.40

The notion of time in Brentano’s philosophy preserves the empirical disposition that characterizes his epistemological narrative: it emerges in consciousness merely as a product of a cognitive process. That is to say, the sound stimulation is the cause of the tone’s presentation, which brings about the enduring, fantastic image in consciousness. Thus, the fantastic presentations are in charge of creating the particular interrelation between the sense-data presentations. Parallel to every conscious perception, a fantastic presentation generates an additional presentation that remains in the consciousness for a further period of time until it fades away. The outcome of this process, the temporal awareness, is that the mental content of the perceived object is reproduced, but the vividness of its perception is continually declining. To conclude, Brentano explicitly preserves the empirical premises as he portrays the very act of perceiving sensory data by consciousness as a consecutive sequence. He assumes that the physical phenomena themselves appear in a consecutive sequence situated in a linear flow of time. In order to solve the problem of the enduring temporal object he creates a mental system that operates under empirical epistemological regulations that associatively produce the perception of duration. Implicitly, the ontological meaning of the associative procedure is that the phenomenon of duration itself is not an actual phenomenon but rather a set of cognitive images interwoven into a set

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of immediate images that appear to consciousness in the form of temporal awareness. Brentano’s epistemology presupposes time as a linear succession of homogenous moments.

Concluding time Reading Freud’s Project in light of Brentano’s epistemology leaves no doubt about the latter being Freud’s source of inspiration for the creation of his model of the psyche. In the opening of his Psychology, Brentano writes: Not only may physical states be aroused by physical states and mental states by mental, but it is also the case that physical states have mental consequences and mental states have physical consequences . . . the psychophysicist, too, will have to investigate the first physical effects of mental causes.41

As a reply to this very call, Freud opens the Project with the following words: The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles.42

In fact, as the next graph shows, the epistemological structure that Freud created matches Brentano’s.

Fig. 5-3

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Freud, who took upon himself the goal of rephrasing Brentano’s epistemological structure in physiological terms, incorporated Brentano’s notion of time in his model and encountered the problem of the mental object’s endurance—just as his mentor did. In other words, the linear notion of time traveled from philosophy to psychoanalysis and shaped the metaphysical, epistemological, and physiological foundations of the new method. Freud named the rephrasing of Brentano’s epistemological structure from a physiological point of view “the quality problem.” Both thinkers attempted to solve the duration/quality problem of the mental object by inserting an additional component into the cognitive scheme (the fantasy representation/period). Without this insertion, consciousness would have remained unaware of the outer world or, even more to the point, would have no knowledge of its own existence. Brentano’s and Freud’s solution constitutes a fundamental error: it explains the phenomenon of duration as an exact restoration of the time sequence as it appears in the data-sensory flow. In fact duration is “pinned” to the sensory data that are observed a priori as a sequence of consecutive data already embedded within a linear form of time. This implicit notion of duration, which lies at the heart of the epistemological structure of both thinkers, functions as an Archimedean point that enables a connection between the inner and the outer worlds. For Freud, the periods supply consciousness with the same ability as the neurons to measure the endurance of the outer stimulation, and thus they permit an unmediated access to time. From the perspective of the psychic mechanism, time emerges as a linear succession of stimulations that follow one another, just as every given moment trails another moment in the outer objective world. Freud’s account of mental perception implicitly creates, just as Brentano’s account of temporal awareness does, an absolute identification between the phenomenon of time and the empirical data, thus flattening the phenomena of time to the specific changes occurring in the empirical sphere.

Time and personal experience Although Freud did not address the concept of time in a straightforward manner, it is clear that, implicitly, time plays a key role in his model. It functions as an ontological connector between the inner world and the outer world, between subject and object. As such, the genesis of the psychoanalytic method bears the marks of linear time. This fact shaped the theoretical manner in which, according to Freud’s method, the relations between the human being and his world are perceived and the way we clinically

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understand the psychological dynamic between the patient and the therapist. Freud’s deus ex machina solution cannot generate a valid explanation of the phenomenon of duration, and the most apparent manifestation of this flaw is the suppression of personal experience.

The linear notion of time as the suppression of temporality While Freud’s genuine intention was to reach his patient’s world, his model actually generates a split between the inner and the outer worlds and a fatal gap between his clinical technique and the patient’s own experiences. Constructing the Freudian theory on the assumption that the psyche is determined by linear time molded, unintentionally, an interpretative technique that treats the human subject as an object. In this model the human subject is disclosed from the point of view of the objective world. The psychological treatment seems to operate on a temporal ground in several ways. It makes use of concepts such as fantasy, which entails a futuristic dimension, repressed content that carries a past-tense dimension, and egoformation and the defense mechanisms, which are in charge of the present dimension. Nevertheless, the theoretical explanation of the psychic as well as the analytical treatment seeks to rearrange the phenomenal occurrences, inner and outer alike, in a consecutive order. The basic shortcoming of such an attitude is that the temporal complexity of human life is lost, and the subject is bound to be understood merely as a present-tense entity. In this respect the future and the past in the Freudian scheme are merely representations rather than an actual human phenomenon. From a philosophical standpoint, Freud’s model is trapped in the metaphysics of the presence, and as such it addresses time as a constant flow of moments that convert the temporal dimension into spatial elements. Such an approach does not reveal time as a phenomenon in itself but instead reduces it to a worldly physical event. In a world that appears through the horizon of linear time, human experience is reduced to consecutive, objective, and homogenous moments, while the possibility of the personal dimension remains out of reach. In this context the therapeutic subject can be understood either as utterly enmeshed in the objective world—and thus robbed of subjectivity—or as preserving subjectivity at the price of utter detachment from the world and the course of time. The employment of both linear narrativity and factical terminology to explain human beings is founded on the repression of temporality. If we wish to understand our lived experiences as nonreductive manifestations of our selves, time must be considered an integral part of both the self and the world.

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In his attempt to break away from the grip on Western thought of the metaphysics of presence, Heidegger promotes a phenomenological approach: the phenomena of time.43 He claims that every live moment is structured by the unity of the three ecstasies: future (Zukunft), past (Gewesenheit), and present (Gegenwart), which are intrinsically open onto a horizon in which beings and events manifest themselves. Since “there” is part of Dasein’s existence, temporality enfolds within itself three modes of openness: the future, as the moment that enables Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself; the past, as that which grounds the very possibility of Dasein’s being-already-in-theworld, and the present as that which makes possible every relation to something as something. However, since in everyday life we tend to understand ourselves and the things around us as entities persisting along a linear sequence of “now moments” (as they are perceived from an egocentric perspective), this primordial phenomenon is not readily conceived and remains, for the most part, concealed from our gaze. Dasein derives the time with which it reckons, and the linear sequence of nows, from its own temporality. As such it is a self-transcending being—that is, in being outside of itself in its very existence. Dasein understands and relates to itself by expecting its own possibilities and retaining what it has already been, along with the way it now finds itself. Thrown away from itself toward what occupies it, Dasein exists outside of its own present while being carried away to its own future and past. Dasein’s self-transcending structure is the three-fold ecstatic character of time, in which each of the ecstasies opens up toward a horizon that determines the boundaries within which beings and events can appear. Future, having-been, and present show the phenomenal characteristics of “toward itself,” “back to,” “letting something be encountered.” The phenomena of toward . . . , to . . . , together with . . . , reveal temporality as the ekstatikon par excellence. Temporality is the primordial “outside of itself” in and for itself. Thus we call the phenomena of future, having-been, and present, the ecstasies of temporality.44

Heidegger speaks of two distinct motions within this horizonal structure of temporality that generate two distinct time formations within ecstatic unity. In the first the horizon of the present dominates the other two ecstasies; it generates a concealment of the ecstatic nature of time and represses their ontological difference. The outcome of this temporal disposition is that the world appears as a sequence of events grounded in the law of causality and ordered in a linear flow of before and after. The second, dominated by the future ecstasy, offers an alternative to the notion of linear time. Instead of conceiving time as a succession of moments stretching out from the future

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toward the present and the past, this time formation actualizes itself in the present only after Dasein’s possibilities (future), become its own (past) and appear as presence (present). In other words, in original temporality time stretches itself from the future to the past and on to the present. Following Heidegger’s distinction between the two modes of temporality, Kenaan explains the language of facts—that is to say, a worldview that is grounded in a linear notion of time as the outcome of repressed temporality: A language of facts is typically a language of repressed temporality. This is a language in which the temporal unfolding of a person’s life can only become meaningful through the form of an objective linearity that is regulated by the relation of “before” and “after.”45

An epistemology grounded in an implicit or explicit linear notion of time of “before” and “after” cannot generate an explanation of duration. In fact, such an approach to the living subject gains its “objective” perspective only through a concealment of original temporality. If personal experience is to be accounted as belonging to the therapeutic subject, if it is to be part of the clinical encounter, the fundamental epistemology of psychoanalysis will have to be rethought.

Temporality and personal experience Today the psychoanalytical project has reached a crucial intersection where on the one hand, maintenance of a scientific approach to therapy would preserve modern concepts such as truth, freedom, and autonomy while augmenting the estrangement from personal experience on the part of both participants in the clinical dyad. On the other hand, the postmodern approach would liberate the clinical scene from modern essential depiction of the subject only to absorb him completely in historical, social, and linguistic matrices. Beyond the apparent discrepancy between the modern and the postmodern approaches, there is a significant resemblance: neither one grasps time as an ontological feature of human existence. It is also not a mere coincidence that both disciplines “leave no room” for personal experience. Personal experience can be part of the psychoanalytical process, without reduction or deconstruction, only if we relate to it clinically and theoretically as a constant manifestation of temporality. In light of the modern and postmodern reduction of personal experience, the notion of temporality offers an alternative theoretical approach. As opposed to the methodological assertion, which views time as a measurable sequence, temporality discloses the past, present, and future as unified, interwoven phenomena. Seeing time from this perspective discloses the

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phenomenon of duration as belonging to the fundamental structure of human subjectivity. Now, if temporality can serve as sufficient theoretical ground for the phenomenon of duration, then personal experience can be understood as the inimitable overlapping and interaction between past, present, and future. In fact, the unique temporal span that constitutes the subject’s personal experience is the singular way its future passes from the past on to the present. As such, personal experience is not the outcome of sublimated drives, nor is it a result of the cultural structures in which we dwell. Rather, the subject’s personal existence is the singular way in which her self transcends itself within the ecstatic structure of time. Hence, by observing the subject through the prism of linear time, we confine our gaze to a developmental or pathological ordering of the sequence of events rather than opening it to the subject’s personal disposition to these events. Grounding the structure of the human subject in temporality, personal experience is not a reductive phenomenon; it is our constant duty to travel in time. In light of this crucial juncture, where one is required to choose between employing modern or postmodern ideas for the theoretical ground of psychoanalysis, currently one must face the question of the ontological meaning of time for the human subject. That is to say, can psychoanalysis face the task that every person must face in order to preserve personal experience and see time travel as its destiny? Can psychoanalysis admit the particular way in which the notion of time traveled from Brentano’s epistemology to Freud’s therapeutic method? And can it acknowledge the need to reconsider its own beginning in time, a reconsideration that starts by returning to the moment of its birth, continues along the path from Brentano to Husserl and to Heidegger’s notion of temporality, and reaches its climax in rethinking the basic concepts of psychoanalysis from a temporal perspective—a path Freud never took?

Notes 1

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, vol. 22 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 170. 2 Heinz Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 63 (1982): 395–407. 3 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971); “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–97. 4 Stephen A. Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 48.

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5 Sandor Ferenczi, “The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique,” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Method of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Michael Balint (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1980), 3:89. 6 Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, eds., The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1993). 7 Roger Frie, “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Rethinking Psychological Agency,” in Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism, ed. Roger Frie (New York: Routledge, 2003); Frie, “Understanding Intersubjectivity: Psychoanalytic Formulations and Their Philosophical Underpinnings,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 37, no. 2 (2001): 297–327. 8 Betty Canoon, “Sartre’s Contribution to Psychoanalysis,” in Frie, Understanding Experience. 9 Jon Mills, “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 28, no. 1 (1997): 42–65; “A Phenomenology of Becoming: Reflections on Authenticity,” in Frie, Understanding Experience. 10 Eugene Gendlin, “Beyond Postmodernism: From Concepts through Experiencing,” in Frie, Understanding Experience. 11 M. Guy Thompson, “The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 36 (2000): 29–56; “The Primacy of Experience in R.D. Laing’s Approach to Psychoanalysis,” in Frie, Understanding Experience. 12 On the problem of the postmodern denial of the subject, see Frie’s most illuminating preface to Understanding Experience. 13 Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in Strachey, The Standard Edition, vol. 1. 14 Ibid., 295. 15 Ibid., 312. 16 Ibid., 323. 17 Filip Geerardyn, Freud’s Project: On the Roots of Psychoanalysis (London: Rebus Press, 1997), 21. 18 Aviva Cohen, “Franz Brentano, Freud’s Philosophical Mentor,” in The PrePsychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. Gertrudis Van de Vijver and Filip Geerardyn (London: Karnac, 2002). 19 Freud, Project, 299. 20 Ibid., 309. 21 Ibid., 310. 22 Ibid., 323. 23 Ibid., 326. 24 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 25 Ibid., 10. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Ibid., 85. 29 Ibid., 77.

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30 While Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint translates Phantasievorstellungen as “phantasy presensations,” thus keeping the German spelling with “ph,” in the rest of the text I will use the English spelling: “fantasy.” 31 Ibid., 46. 32 Ibid., 47–48. 33 Ibid., 316. 34 Ibid., 139. 35 Ibid., 142–144. 36 Alongside the work of Freud, another line of thinking was being developed from Brentano’s philosophy. In contrast to the underlying motivation of the Freudian project (studying the mechanism of the human psyche vis-à-vis its symptoms), this strain of thought endeavored to develop Brentano’s theory of intentionality into a comprehensive phenomenological doctrine. Edmund Husserl, attending courses similar to Freud’s, noticed the crucial implications of linear temporality on Brentano’s epistemology in its entirety. Husserl elected to devise an alternative to Brentano’s notion of time, one that is delineated in his 1905 lectures. Martin Heidegger, his student, elaborated this alternative into the creation of a new way of understanding the unique character of human existence in the world. He emphasized that human existence should be construed, first and foremost, in light of the temporal horizon of meaning. 37 Lectures whose content was known to Freud, who became a member of the intellectual milieu surrounding Brentano and participated in the lectures and seminars Brentano gave between the years 1873 and 1876. 38 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 30. 39 Ibid., 29–30. 40 Ibid., 32. 41 Brentano, Psychology, 6–7. 42 Freud, Project, 295. 43 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). In many ways the Heideggerian project is a daring philosophical attempt to offer an alternative approach to the Western tendency to base its philosophical explanations on the categorical subject-object metaphysical division. In order to make it possible for philosophical investigation to attend to the pre-thematic relation between ourselves and the world, Heidegger approaches philosophical investigation from a new starting point that includes, a priori, the subject’s involvement in the world. That is to say, the human being, Dasein, as a being whose very existence is-always-already an event involved in the very “there” in which we live. 44 Heidegger, Being and Time, 302. 45 Hagi Kenaan, The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 155.

AGAPEIC SELVING AND THE PASSION OF BEING: SUBJECTIVITY IN THE LIGHT OF SOLIDARITY WILLIAM DESMOND

Love and its forms It is not always easy to speak philosophically about love. The word “love” sounds and resounds so easily on our lips that, we fear, it is being abused in being so used. Not least in popular culture, images of love circulate, often more to sell some product than to celebrate the glory of human existence. There is the fact too that we live in sentimental, not to say sensational times in which the delicacy and ultimacy of love are easily dissimulated. Sentimental—love is frequently identified with a feeling. Sensational—we crave impact on the senses, addicts of a sensational “wow” experience, as if that were the rupture of love opening us up. Too often there is much of dissimulated narcissism in all of this. We live in the counterfeit doubles of love. We shun the deeper suffering of love. I will come back to this suffering, for there are a number of senses of suffering at issue: suffering as passion, as pathos, as patience, as undergoing, as pain, as purgatory, suffering as opening our porosity to other-being, suffering as death. But I think it helps to speak of “loves” rather than of love, as if there were but one univocal sense. There are different loves, different forms of love.1 At the outset I mention these four: self-affirming love (selflove); eros as a self-transcending love that seeks the overcoming of its own lack in and through the completing, fulfilling other; friendship or philia as the mutual reciprocity of receiving and giving in all things good and excellent; agape as a love out of surplus generosity that gives to the other but not necessarily with the intent to secure a return to itself, but gives goodly for the good of the other as other. In all these forms of love some relation between self and other is at issue. This is obviously so with eros, philia, and agape. In eros the other is needed to fulfill something in oneself, and we are given to ourselves again by the beloved other, though frequently we forget or underplay that gift. In philia the other as friend can come to us in different

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ways—as someone who pleases us, someone who is useful for us, someone who is loved for his or her inherent excellence (I reproduce Aristotle’s classic tripartition).2 In agape the other may gift one through their surplus of generosity, or the other may be gifted by us from out of some source of surplus generosity with which we ourselves are blessed. In all there is no selving3 without being diversely in relation to the other of self. What of self-love? Does this not escape such relation to other? I would say no. We are all marked by an elemental self-love: to be is to love the “to be” as singularized in our own being. Each of us intimately loves ourselves, our own “to be,” but the meaning of this singularized love is enigmatic. We live it, live in and out of it, but we do not think of it, make it an object of thought, do not acknowledge and understand it, and yet it is astonishing. We are this self-love because we have come to be, have been given to be. We do not give ourselves our own “to be” at the outset. We are from the outset endowed as an ontological self-love—but as endowed, there is more than self-love in the self-love. There is an enigmatic reference to something other to self in the intimate ontological roots of selving. We might think of a kind of inward otherness, and indeed a kind of otherness as other than our own inward otherness. Even in self-love, even in its intimate sources, there is relation to other. Of course, when we think of self-love we think of a love that is only contracted on self: the selving has regard for itself and only itself. We tend to call this “selfishness.” I would say selfish self-love does not understand itself, refuses the opening of the other to self that is in itself, an opening that is itself. Selfish self-love also refuses the full pull of the opening in itself to the other out beyond itself. It closes off the more intimate participation in the first endowment of being as given to be, as if this were one’s own, and nothing but one’s own. It is not. What is most one’s own is not one’s own, and hence in every self-relation, other-relation appears once more. We must keep in mind this doubleness, this double togetherness of self-relation and otherrelation in what now is to follow. It has much to do with understanding our being in solidarity with others.

Questioning subjectivity How might we look at the question of selving in the light of recent concerns raised about modern subjectivity?4 Let me first briefly note some of these concerns, and then in response I will talk about selving and the passion of being. I will speak about a certain patience of being that is largely underplayed or ignored or mutilated in modernity. This will allow us to look

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anew at the four above-mentioned forms of love in connection with this passion. Much of the criticism of “the subject” in recent philosophy concerns various attacks mainly on something like the Cartesian subject: an independent mentalistic self, set in dualistic opposition to the external world, and self-enclosed in its own rational immanence. While this view might be developed in the direction of a transcendental or more idealistic subjectivity, these latter too come under critique. One thinks of post-Kantian idealism, with Schelling and Hegel especially, as evidencing efforts to deal with transcendental subjectivity, beyond the subject-object separation—and with an emergent trend to do justice to the historical subject—trends that themselves have been criticized as remaining too much within the frame of the “idealistic” subject by thinkers like Marx and Kierkegaard.5 One thinks also of an analogous aftermath of Husserlian transcendental idealism, with thinkers like Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and others grappling with the other in a way that differs from transcendental subjectivity.6 Of course, with respect to the mentalistic Cartesian subject, we also find contrary movements—in particular, in the direction of a more materialistic reductionism, those in which there is no self beyond the biological organism, for we are material beings all the way down, and up. We find responses that deny any disjunction between the “in here” and the “out there”—these two cannot be separated. We are beings in the world (Heidegger), or holistically defined by relations with others and in diverse social networks. There is nothing in self, except what we are in relations. This last view might be further specified by proposals such that the self is defined by culture or history or language or class or structures of power and so forth.7 There is also the view that more generally might be called a constructivist one: we construct ourselves—there is no given self, no really original self. Interestingly, the denial of an original self is often a version of an original self in the following sense: it is said there is no original self except what we construct ourselves, what we originate through ourselves. Voila—there is no original self because we are original as “selves.” How else would we be able to “construct” ourselves? “We have undoubtedly the honour of being originals,” as Shaftesbury said a long time ago.8 Indeed, if truly there were no original self—here, in the sense of an originating source—there would be no construction either, and no constructing of the self. Of course, construction and deconstruction are Siamese twins. Hence there are those who want to deconstruct all fixed, or fixated selves. Selves who stubbornly refuse to grant that they are constructed must be deconstructed, just to bring home to them (to whom?) that they are constructions. Let deconstruction do its work in unbuilding the construction

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and what are we left with? It is not always clear what. Nothing much, one worries. Who is doing the deconstructing—ourselves? But we are deconstructing ourselves. How can we deconstruct ourselves if we are as if nothing? Nothing deconstructs nothing, and we are left with nothing—or the original situation in which enigmatic “selves” reappear once again to face a perplexing world and, indeed, perplexity about themselves. Can we deconstruct ourselves without being ourselves—and in some sense we cannot deconstruct? There is an enigmatic “being oneself” accompanying every deconstruction we undertake, a “being oneself” more than all deconstructions. And this “being oneself” is not a construction either. Of course, the thought can strike one that perhaps we are the mere surfaces of a darker origin that exceeds us all, all our piddling claims to be constructors notwithstanding. One thinks of those who want to dethrone the self of rational autonomy (psychoanalysis, say). How deep into the darkness can we go, must we go? This question is unloosed in the wake of the idealistic subject and its activity on the bright surface of intelligibility: there is a darker origin at work, it will be said, beyond the principle of sufficient reason (Schopenhauer).9 This darker origin will be called will, will to power, you name it; and we too (who are we?) are somehow the issue of this darker origin. Even in this extreme descent into darkness, “we” keep coming back into the picture, even pictures that systematically try to erase us. One aspect of the question of subjectivity bears on an antihumanism present in some trends of postmodern thought, but it is interesting to recall a number of ascents and descents of the modern subject that lie in the prehistory of this hatred of humanism. If we return to Hegel we find that he sublates the human spirit into divine spirit, dialectically blurring the difference between human and divine subjectivity. Absolute subjectivity, speculatively unifying human and divine subjectivity, seems to attain a consummation in which rational thought becomes absolute knowing: selfknowing. With Hegel’s critics his ascent to absolute knowing is reversed, and the power of the dialectic to negate is utilized to produce what I would call a “de-sublation.” A de-sublation is a reverse sublation that, instead of elevating the lower to the higher, brings the higher back to the lower. Instead of the human subject being sublated to the highest identity of human and divine power, in a reverse sublation downward divine power is de-sublated to human power. Initially the fruits of that de-sublation are harvested in a claim that ingests the transcendent otherness of the divine into human power. This is well known in Feuerbach, Marx, and others, but thereafter this follows a second de-sublation that descends below the surface of human subjectivity itself. And it now appears not only that Hegelian reason is fated to front for some non-rational other, but human subjectivity is itself the surface of such

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an other. The first de-sublation promises ultimate power to us, the second desublation descends into what is below reason, and the bright claims of subjectivity find themselves thrown into disarray. There is a kind of depth, but it reverses the Platonic analogy of the sun that draws us beyond the cave toward the transcendence of the Good. In the cave we are underground men, but now the analogy suggests a de-sublating directionality, pointing down and down into original darkness. We are digging below the cave to pits where the sun seems not to penetrate. In place of the Good above us, below us the inhuman is the immanent other of the human.10 These considerations might be developed in a number of directions, but for now I will only say that I am not unsympathetic to the critique of an excessively fixated sense of self. Rather than such hatred of humanism, however, in the light of love I would prefer to speak of a more original porosity of being in which the energy of selving comes to form—indeed also comes to form itself, but in a relative sense. There is a kind of fertile “nothing” there, and yet there is selving as exceeding this or that fixed thing, selving as a strange conjunction of lack and plenty, of something almost nothing and yet more than all things, a place/no-place of emptying and surplus. I will return to this porosity as bound up not only with selving but also with being in relation to others.

Subject, object, project, intersubject I want to note two things now. There is a massive tendency toward objectification in modernity: we reduce what is given to a set of objects that are neutrally there, stripped of all qualitative textures, open to mathematical univocity and scientific exactitude, and hence also to technological exploitation. Then also, at the same time, there is a huge subjectification of human life; recall the so-called “turn to the human self” in modernity that generated all the talk of subjectivity and of which some in postmodernity claim to be tired. As we reduce the external world to neutral objectivities, the human self steps into the center of the picture and becomes inordinately significant as the source without which objective being would have no intelligibility, and life would have no worth. We are the origins of intelligibility and value, nothing other—it will be said. One can see this also as connected with the stress on autonomy and human self-determination in modernity. One can see it as connected with the way many think that “freedom” is the only value in recent centuries that has not been controverted. It has become that greater than which nothing can be thought. But what is it? There is something of a paradox in this: Massive objectification goes together with huge subjectification, but which comes first? Does objectification

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open a space for subjectification? Is it rather that subjectification is the real origin of objectification? For is not objectification a “project” of the subject? Do not both go together? If objectification is all there is, it seems to do away with subjectification. But if subjectification is sovereign, it too seems to weaken or eviscerate strong claims to objectivity. We seem caught between the evisceration of human subjectivity and its tyranny over all objectivity. In fact, when considered more closely, we see that objectification is something we do: we are the origin of the project of objectification, so in a sense the subjectification is more primary than the objectification. Objectification is a project of the subject which, as such, cannot be completely objectified. This creates other, similar paradoxes. We might want to reduce everything to “matter”—but what then of our own desire to reduce everything to matter? Is this also reducible to matter? What then of the status, not to say value and ultimate truth of the whole reduction? The truth and value of the reduction seems itself subject to reduction and so vanishes into something without truth or value, indeed into its own always-threatened nothingness. The claim of the reduction of truth and value is itself subject to reduction. The reduction reveals the subject sitting on the branch it is blithely sawing off. If the sawing is successful—that is, if the complete objectification is carried out successfully—there is no longer “anyone” sitting on the now vanished branch. But with this, then, the objectification itself has also vanished, just in its complete success. Is there not always something presupposed and required that is not reducible? And is this so for all projects of reduction? Notice how the word “project” has begun to repeat itself here. “Project” is another word that has assumed huge currency in our times: subject, object, project—all of these are forms of throwing—from the Latin “jacere.” First, ob-ject: to be thrown over against, or to throw over against. Second, sub-ject: to be thrown under, or throw under. Third, pro-ject: to throw before or toward, or to be thrown before or toward. The latter, pro-jectare, seems to be a throwing of oneself or a being thrown, into a future that one anticipates in one’s projects. Pro-jecting is laying a course out in advance—as if one would be master of the process of becoming with regard to what is yet to come. In our projects we are as projections toward what is not yet, what is yet to be, and so in some measure we hold ourselves to constitute ourselves as mastering the equivocal impermanence of time. The subject as project(ing) makes itself, in advance and in principle, the master and possessor of objects within the universal impermanence. Not surprisingly, there is a totalizing impulse to projection. Even when the impulse is not yet carried through, we give ourselves an advance, as it were, on what is to come. An advance—an anticipatory payment to ourselves

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for work we have not yet done. We are crediting ourselves in advance with the power to deal with all that is to come. So almost everywhere today the word “project” turns to greet us as a virtual omnipresence. There are economic projects, there are political projects, there are scholarly and scientific projects, there are children as the projects of parents (though not quite yet parents as projects of their children); there is life itself as a project. How all-around-us is this enveloping language! Outside our projects there is nothing. Life becomes the project greater than which nothing can be projected. I want to question this language of projection. I see one example in academic life with regard to what used to be called the “life of the mind.” There was a time when, having found something fascinating, a thinker or scholar might dedicate himself or herself to its devoted study. Now one fears that everything is seen, or looked upon, as a possible “project.” This means the slow death of mindfulness—mindfulness ready for the surprising. Nothing is of interest to the project-driven scholar, the middle managerscholar, except what fits with the project. Nothing of interest in this sense: nothing of being (esse) in the between (inter) where exposure to the true is always the risk of the surprising. Life as “project” has become a kind of Heideggerian Ge-stell (but do not forget Heidegger’s own entanglement in the language of pro-ject, Ent-wurf, for much of his career).11 You might want to object or even interject thus: surely subjectivity has always been balanced by concerns with intersubjectivity? There is something of truth to this.12 But the point is this: intersubjectivity is still defined by “jecting,” by throwing. There is an inter, yes, and this is crucial, but how to view the “-ject,” the “jacere”? Does this not also partake of the project, and with this the danger of an opening to the between, in the between, that already has closed the between in terms of the project that will be projected there. Is even intersubjectivity, then, also in danger of disallowing the event of anything other in the between that is not itself a “-jecting,” or (common) pro-jecting? Think of love as intersubjective: There is an inter, a between in love, but what of the throwing? We sometimes say of someone in love: he threw himself at her; she threw herself at him. This is a passion, to be sure, but it is not a project. It is sustained by something that is on the other side of all projections. It is being taken out of oneself by a love that has stolen into one’s soul and made one to be beside oneself. We talk about being in the “throes” of love, but being in these throes does not conform to projective throwing. “Being beside oneself” is a way of describing transport: we are carried, in an initially unchosen way, into a new space of being. “Being beside oneself” is also a way of describing a kind of madness. Love can be a benign madness, but there is no project of love, if we think of “project” in the sense of modern

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autonomous planning or the self-determining foreclosing of future energies of selving and ways of being together with others. Perhaps the ancients had a better sense of things when they talked about Cupid. The arrows of Cupid are projectiles—but we are hit first by something. There is the pain of a sting that comes to us from beyond ourselves, and then we awaken in a sleeping bewitchment where we throw ourselves at the beloved, most often not knowing why at all, sometimes even madly. We are beside ourselves in the inter—though as so beside ourselves in love, perhaps life never seemed so exhilarating, so enchanting. In sum I want to say there is something prior to all our projections that cannot be at all described in the language of project. There is an elemental being given to be—given to be with porosity to what is other to us and that is always presupposed by any of the constructions or projections we ourselves undertake. This is not a matter of being thrown in the Heideggerian sense (certainly not the earlier Heidegger, though the later Heidegger comes a bit closer to the agapeics of being). As I will suggest, it is a matter of a secret agapeic promise—a surplus of goodness there at the very origins of what it means at all to be a self. This means we are creatures of love—in a double sense: creatures of love as given to be out of an enigmatic source to be defined as the agapeic origin, and ourselves creatures of love as taken up, caught up in a passion of being in which we are to love not only our own being for ourselves but also being that is other to us. By now turning to what I think is both prior to and beyond the “-jection” of ob-ject, sub-ject, pro-ject, and intersub-ject, I will try to address something of this. Something other is at work in selving before we become subjects or confront objects or construct projects. It is transsubjective, transobjective, transprojective. Out of its intimacy, subjectivity comes; out of its otherness, openness to the objective comes; out of its passion, our projects are born. In it is a more original solidarity with what is other to self, more even than intersubjectivity.

Selving(s) We must think of selving as a process rather than the self as some univocally fixed fact. The human self comes into being, emerges, unfolds, becomes or betrays what its energy of being promises. Nevertheless, there is no doing away with selving, even when we claim to be “beyond” self. There is an elemental sense of integral being in and across this process of being, emergence, unfolding, realization. Being here is as much verb as noun—the activity of being, as well as the being so acting. This is why I would speak of “selving.” “Selving,” like being, is plurivocal. It is spoken, or speaks itself, in

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a manifold of ways of being, all of which are yet its own, are yet simply itself. In Being and the Between I speak of this plurivocity in terms of idiotic, aesthetic, erotic, and agapeic selving,13 but given our concerns here aesthetic selving will come less into consideration than the other selvings. I will look at the process of selving with some reference to the forms of love I mentioned at the outset, being mainly concerned with what might be called its agapeic promise: its giving of itself beyond its own being for itself. Being given and giving of self are inseparable from selving as a becoming marked both by self-relating and other-relating. More, agapeic giving cannot be described as just a lack trying to complete itself. Rather, there is an affirmative surplus that is genuinely and generously self-transcending. What I mean by agapeic selving cannot be dissociated from what we might term the passion of being (passio essendi). We are given to be ourselves before we endeavor to be ourselves. This primal givenness is marked by an elemental porosity to what is beyond “self.” It is seeded with the promise of agapeic selving that does not fit into modern paradigms such as objectification, subjectification, projection, or intersubjectification. It is also more appropriate to speak of a selving rather than of some fixed substantial self, given what I suggested above—namely, that there is something that is presubjective and preobjective, something that enables subject and object and project to be, something that is transobjective and transsubjective, indeed transprojective. Selving carries the suggestion of process that cannot be made univocally determinate and also not just dialectically self-determining. Does this mean it is merely indeterminate? I would say that selving, as more than determinate, is overdeterminate. This means that selving is not just process alone. There is a certain elemental, surplus givenness out of which the more determinate processes of selving(s) come to be. This being given to be is not our self-giving but a giving of our selving. Selving comes to selving from this original being given to be. The surplus of the elemental givenness is experienced in a certain incontrovertibility about being a self at all. So we come to discover ourselves as a certain integrity of being, just so even in process of self-becoming. We do not create this primal integrity. It is lived, not known as such, at the outset. We may come to know it more mindfully and come more fully into an explicit relation with it, with ourselves. But we are what we are, even if what we are is to become what we are more fully. There is no fixed univocalization of self, but there is, I would say, something idiotic about selving. I use the word “idiot” with something of its Greek connotation of the intimate: the private in a sense, but not the merely privative. Rather, it is an intimate privacy that is the enabling center of singular and singularly inflected

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communication of this self.14 There is something irreducible about this elemental idiocy of selving. There is a more primal and presubjective sense of the intimacy of being that we undergo in ourselves. This is an intimacy to us, undergone in a manner hard to render in the more generalized language of what is determinable in a more generally public manner. This is an intimacy that is not merely autistic, and yet it does signify a certain singularity to each one of us. Not autistic, this intimacy of being is what comes to flower into communication. We speak of the “idiom” of a people—its own signal language, or singular way of speaking. The idiosyncratic—think of this as the singular stress of the individual person. We all are idiots in that sense. We all are as an emphasis, or a stress of singular selving. This intimacy is not precious narcissism, as I will argue further in a little while. Quite to the contrary, it is the basis of all personal communication and especially evident in the more normal happening of love. We especially love this idiocy in those we love: that they are this singularly irreplaceable self. Consider here the impossibility of love without a certain intimacy of being. Think of the special attunement to a certain irreplaceable singular other. Think of the eyes of love: there is a looking, a gazing on the other – the look of love – but it is disarmed of the danger of violent objectification we sometimes find with the look (consult Sartre15). Think of the softer eyes of love. In softness, in the melting of love, there is a fluidity, a porosity. Disarmed, we are exposed, hence vulnerable, hence risking ourselves in an open between, where the eyes of the other do not turn us into interchangeable objects. Loving eyes look out in tenderness from a place of porosity—look toward the other as an intimate singularity. There is something idiotic about this too. The idea of a neutral love, even if perhaps it proclaims itself as the universal love of philanthropy, does not seem quite to make sense. There must be something of this more intimate stress even in the universal if love is at issue in the communication. Love may be the most ultimate witness to what I call the intimate universal. (And perhaps we need God to think the intimate and the universal together, to think the intimate universal—an agapeic God, at that.16) This idiotics of selving means we cannot jump over our own shadow. Deny it, and you affirm it. Deny self, and you affirm selving; for the denial is itself selving and its issue. Advise “selflessness” and there again in the “selflessness” is the selving. The usual discussion of egoism and altruism is an important topic, but there is an incontrovertible selving that is not defined by these terms. One can argue for “selflessness” and not deny this, but the question is then how one is selving when one is selfless for the other. There is also the richness of the notion of self-love that I noted at the beginning. In

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what is usually called “selflessness,” there is a kind of “becoming nothing.” I connect this with the intimately strange event of the idiotic. Suppose one were to say: “I am nothing.” This is a contradiction—to be, hence to be something, and yet also to be nothing, as this singular happening of selving. In one sense it seems as if it is the “I am” that sustains the nothing—and yet I am nothing and yet not nothing. I am as nothing. I am incontrovertibly in this situation, but in being for the other, I am as nothing, to allow the other the way of the between and be itself there, and be for itself there, without my imposition on him or her of what I would the other be. The being of the other is for the other to be, and not for me to determine it as I would want the other to be. I am willing to will it to be as for itself, not as I would will it to be for myself. There is a kind of fertile void in this “being as nothing.” I would not at all liken it to Hegelian negativity or Sartrean nothingness. We might rather look again at this being as nothing as a porosity open with agapeic promise. It is a porosity as allowing the fluid passage from one to the other and from the other to one. There is agapeic promise in it as making way, in this passage, for the other, and getting out of the way of what hinders love between self and other. There is a doubleness in this: self-relation and other-relation cannot be entirely disjoined from each other—the two always go together. Even in our singular being, we ourselves are that doubleness. This is the basis of our essential equivocity, even if in an idiotic sense we are ourselves and ourselves alone. There is no being-self so alone that it is not, as selving, defined by its being in relation to the other of itself.

Loving and the porosity What here of love? We are a love of being, a love of our own being, a love inseparable from a love of other being. We love what we deem as worthy to be affirmed. What is worthy to be affirmed is affirmed as lovable. Thus the lovable is impossible to think without some sense of the good of what we affirm to be. Our self-love itself presupposes this worthiness to be affirmed of the selving to be loved. But we do not bring to be this worthiness to be ourselves, in the first instance. We find ourselves as selving already in this affirmation, in this love of the “to be,” as worthy. We find ourselves in an affirmation, a love that in us is more than us. We come to the love of selving from a love beyond selving. We are as an endowed love of the “to be.” All our so-called “projects” are sustained by some kind of love—what we deem worthy to seek or pursue, worthy to work toward, worthy to contribute the energies of our lives to, and so on. All the latter presuppose this more original ontological love of the worthiness of the “to be.” And this is never a project,

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or the product of our projection. Our “to be” is a received “to be,” coming to itself in a porosity of being that exceeds it and opens it to what is more than itself. While this individual love comes, the porosity is evident, for instance, in moments of astonishment or wonder.17 Something comes over us, with a surprising stress of emphatic otherness. The porosity is thus especially evident in the earlier parts of our lives. When children we are more attuned to the newness of being, again in the mode of wonder. One thinks too how the infant is porous to the mother—something passes between them, something passes into us as children. This passing between is impossible if we fix one side or the other; there is a communication back and forth, but it happens in a space of porosity. Or think how when younger we might blush on thinking someone could see into us, see through us. We have not yet grown a hard skin, putting the porosity under guard. Or think of how later in life we have the experience of falling in love: we thought ourselves masters of our destiny and suddenly we are overcome by an attraction or enchantment—we are struck by the arrows of Cupid and we fall in love. In the summersault of love, out is in, in is out, up is down, down is up, and we do not know whether we are coming or going. If there opens a tender porosity to this other, the tenderness seeps beyond this other, and indeed the whole of being seems then to radiate a secret benevolence. Or think again of how later in life age and suffering can return us to another kind of tender porosity that is just the lack of fixity in our finiteness itself. Time is the undoing of the fixity of our finiteness. We suffer in our ageing bodies, and suffering may return us to a wise patience in which we see again that we were not the sovereigns we took ourselves to be. This porosity makes us vulnerable, makes us seem almost like a nothing. We are as nothing, though we are not nothing. The question is, is love just a nothing seeking to fill itself up, or is its opening possible because a paradoxical plenitude is already at work in the nothing, and hence love is never a matter of filling a lack but of the communication, or broadcast, of a more affirmative surplus that comes to form in the porosity? How we understand the question relates to differences between the erotic and the agapeic, two of the most significant forms of love. We cannot understand projects without this prior porosity. Think of conceiving a project. Before there is any project, there must be an opening to something promising in the situation of the person or the team. Something of opportunity is seen in what now is marked by a kind of dormancy, or in the light of possibility as yet undeveloped. We must have the presentiment of promise before we can formulate a more definite project. Only then can we either make the presentiment more definite or formulate definite plans to

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effect a practical transition from the intimated promise to the realized goal. There is a passage from conceiving any project through the middle space of its unfolding to the end of its achievement, first only glimpsed in the presentiment, and all this passage takes place in a more original porosity of being in which we receive as well as give, in which we are endowed as well as released into being creatures who endeavor to fulfill the promise. This porosity is the opening of the enabling between which is not anything, nor anything we do nor we ourselves nor indeed the other to which or to whom we relate. It is not any of these just because it is the enabling possibilizing of all of them. It opens ways, and gives way, and does not get in the way, and we have to make our way in a space not first enabled by us but enabling us as wayfarers.

The passion of being If there is a more primal porosity of being, we find it hard to settle only into the language of “throwings,” be it of ourselves into objects, into subjects, into projects, even into intersubjects. Instead of our conatus essendi, our endeavor to be, being the ground way to describe our being, we have to grant that there is a passio essendi, a patience of being that is more primal. Spinoza tells us that the essence of a being is its conatus (Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 7), and this is defined by its power to affirm itself and its range. This range for Spinoza is potentially unlimited (Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 8) in the absence of external countervailing entities who express their power of being in opposition to or in limitation of the self-affirming. Note the fundamental nature of the claim: conatus is the being of a being. The point holds universally, hence holds also for the being of the human being. Without an external limitation the endeavor to be is potentially infinite, like a motion that will continue indefinitely without a check from the outside. What might one infer from this, in the sphere of human relations? An external other always presents itself equivocally, either as potentially helpful or potentially hostile to my self-affirming. Of course, the potential for help of the other is potential for helping me. Its being for itself is then brought into relation to my own relation to my self. The other, so seen, even while possibly needful for my flourishing, more deeply is potentially alien to my unconstrained selfaffirmation. The other also will tend always to its own infinite selfaffirmation and hence hinder the tendency of my self-affirmation to unfold to infinity. One strategy to ensure my unhindered self-affirmation and the continuation of my conatus, so conceived, would be for me to disarm that other in advance. I would be the big fish, and I find that big fish, by eating little fish, grow bigger.

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If this is how we bring self-relation and other-relation together, we must grant that an implicit ontological hostility deeply determines our embodied relation to the rest of nature. The otherness of nature and other human beings, while capable of being a source of our sustenance, is so as a threat to the integrity of our self-affirming being. The world in its otherness is equivocal, and the dangerousness of this equivocity is most known in the threat to us that we meet in disease, infection, and finally death. Against this equivocity we must protect ourselves by overcoming the threat. I point out how, in this view, any “passivity” is generally something to be avoided or overcome. Being patient seems to place us in a position of subordination. To receive from the other becomes a sign of weakness. To receive is to be servile; to endeavor and to act, by contrast, is to be sovereign. The emotions, for instance, are servile, the dominating reason is sovereign. In a broad sense, this fits in with the ethos of modernity in which the autonomous subject as self-law (auto-nomos) is implicitly in ambiguous, potentially hostile relation to what is other, or heteros—hence the modern dread of heteronomy (consult Kant in the Groundwork of a Metaphysics of Morals). I want to take issue with this. Even our conatus is not ours alone. It is a co-natus, a being born “with” (natus-cum). Hence our origination as selving is always bound to the terms of a “being with,” a “co.” The doubleness is very important: being self-related emerges as and out of a being in relation to other. Other-relatedness and self-relatedness are inseparable. This is relevant to an understanding of all forms of love. One thinks here of the Greek word for erotic union: sunousia—literally “with-being.” The intimate implication of “being with” another is signaled in the act of generation, in the doing of the act itself. The same intimate implication is signaled from the side of conception coming to first fruition in birth in the “with” of co-natus. What is promised in the “with” will never leave us, or let us rest, in the course of our mortal life. Above I tried to make this point with respect to self-love—namely, that there is no self-relation without other-relatedness, but one can see how it might apply to the erotics of selving. The erotics look like our selfsurpassing, and thus our endeavoring, but there is here a more primal porosity and patience. I might make the point with reference to one of the myths about the origin of eros in Plato’s Symposium (203a–204c)—namely, the tale told by Diotima/Socrates. Eros is conceived from the union of penia and poros: there is a poverty and lack (penia), yes, but there is more than that in poros. The tale tells of the feast of the gods, drunk on nectar, and poros falls asleep, and somehow penia manages to unite with poros and conceive their child, eros. There is a seed in eros exceeding finitude. The divine is seeded in infinite desire with a seed making us both extraordinary creatures and

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extremely foolish—from the animal point of view. I am inclined to say that there is a kind of sleeping agapeics at the conception of eros, an agapeics in this sense of a divine festivity, the meal of joy as the gathering of the divine. In this agapeics, as in all such sacred festivity, there is a kind of seed of surplus generosity at the origin. This “too muchness” is there from the origin, and so eros, even while lacking, is always more than lack. It is the secret surplus of the divine agapeics that also companions its restless search for a fullness beyond itself. The fuller unfolding of eros, as reflecting this doubleness, is not reducible to one whole in this story of Diotima/Socrates. This is unlike the myth of origins so brilliantly told by Aristophanes, also in the Symposium (189c– 193d): there the original whole—the being that is double what we now are— is split in two because its abundance was hubristic. The original humans challenge Zeus and are cut down to size, halved, cut in two. Such a surplus of hubris is not the agapeic surplus of divine “too muchness.” In Aristophanes’s story, archaic humans were one whole; now we are one of two halves, each of us in search of the lost whole, the other who is our own lost half and with whom we can reconstitute the one whole. In the account of Diotima/Socrates, by contrast, there is difference, but it is not the difference of a hubristic fullness. It is, rather, reflected in our doubleness as a mingling of poros and penia. Poros alone might perhaps tempt us to think ourselves as gods were there not also the doubleness of our being neither empty nor full but partaking of emptiness and fullness. Penia alone might be tempted either to negate itself and become nothing or to negate its lack and try to be everything. That this is not to happen follows from truthfulness to the doubleness, from fidelity to the fact that eros is the carrier of this different doubleness. Eros unfolds in both the anticipating openness of its poverty and in the porosity to divine agapeics inherited from the sleeping divinity of poros on the ground. Eros is not cut in half as a punishment for the hyperbole of hubris. It is, rather, in search of a huper above its own poverty, in search not just for itself but in search because the trace of the god is in the eros as a porosity to divine agapeics. There are also different ways of apprehending the suffering of the endeavor to be that is presented in these two accounts. In the one, there is the pain of being split in half and the pain of seeking oneself as other, the other as oneself. In the other, there is the strain of being twofold and the suffering is not just in one’s lack alone but also in the seeking of the divine festivity, a seeking in terms of a seed of divine festivity in eros itself. In sum, then, the passion of being emerges in a more primal porosity, and we find ourselves endowed as an energy of selving that is our own and yet not completely our own, an energy in and through which we define ourselves, though never out of relation to what is other to us. The passion of being, and

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the forms of love in which it finds incarnation, is not to be understood in any philosophy that tends toward the self-absolutizing of our activist character or our endeavor to be. In such a philosophy, in fact, we are taken in by the way the conatus tends to override the passio, resulting in what we might call a constructivist view of selving. In this view we are not gifted with being what we are; we make our being, make ourselves as being for ourselves. We selfconstruct—even to the point of re-constructing, say, the bodies originally given to us. Witness today, in connection with eros and beauty, the cosmetic surgery industry: the language of industry shows the overtaking of elemental beauty by an economic project of reconstruction. We will not accept ourselves. Rather than love, we negate what is given and love only what we reconstruct. This means that the reconstructed self as loved is haunted by self-hatred. It tends to happen again and again that that there is an overriding of the patience of being by the conatus. Being alive is to find oneself always tempted to this impatient overriding. In time we find that the fulfillment of life is impossible if this happens. We have not taken the proper time, and respected the rhythms of time, to attend to what is within us and before us and hence to be truthful concerning our proper response to the promise of our being. One might say that the very perpetuation of life is conditional on a perpetual recurrence of the patience, and a perpetual receiving of the promise of life. Moreover, this recurrence is not only a matter of when the endeavor to be meets an external or hostile limit. It is always happening, and its gift of promise is always being offered, even though we do not notice or acknowledge it. It concerns the gift of life as received, granted to us in the first instance, but which, in the rush forward of the endeavor to be, is taken for granted rather than as granted. In the sweep of a life, the external limits of encroaching others and the limit of mortal time—both internal and external— can serve as reminders of this more primal patience of being in which we may again consent to the goodness of the gift of life. In the light of recurrence and perpetuation, eros and thanatos cannot, of course, be absolutely sundered. But our intimacy with thanatos is not a death-drive. A death-drive overplays the energy of the endeavor to the point where it is finally futile and underplays the wisdom of the deeper patience of being. Instead of granting that the gift of being at all is granted, we continue to turn against such givenness, just because it is given and not produced by us. We can so insist that everything be subject to our self-determination that we betray the joy of this gift, in the overriding of our own self-affirmation. Consent to death, in gratitude for the gift of life, may offer the final opportunity to make our peace with this patience. Eros, impassioned in being so patient, becomes porous to what exceeds the death-drive.

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The promise of the agapeic I would connect this patience with the possibility of agapeic love and indeed with the other forms I outlined earlier: self-affirming love, erotic love, friendship or philial love. Some will deny the possibility of agapeic love on the part of humans, and the deniers will span the spectrum. There can be an interesting coincidence of opposites here. Some theologically minded will say only God is agapeic, humans cannot be, for this is divine love.18 Some psychoanalytically minded will say that agapeic love cannot be possible for humans, for beneath all love is a more or less voracious self-love that worms its way secretly into all the hidden passages of the heart—not least those noble “idealists” pluming themselves with higher motives. Some more naturalistically minded and reductive will take a similar tack: surplus good is a fantasy, since nature operates according to an economy of scarcity, struggle for resources, and the programmed tyranny of self-insistent energies. The question then is, is agapeic love a promise for humans, a promise sometimes more or less redeemed? We can throw light on the question by considering the opposite case, the case of pure malice. “Motiveless malignity”—these are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s resonant words for Iago, the treasonous tempter of Othello. “Motiveless malignity”—is there such a thing? What would move motiveless malignity? If it is motiveless, it would seem nothing moves it. How then move motivelessly at all? If there is a “move,” would it not have to be an undoing, an uncreating, a nulling? But nulling must presuppose something to null, something already affirmative to negate. Otherwise, there is no “move,” and no “motiveless malignity.” This would seem to suggest that such malice is the reverse negative of creative love—a nulling that is parasitical on, that plunders the reserve of surplus goodness that is the promise of, agapeic love. Motiveless malignity would be, to put it hyperbolically, that is, in the dimension of the transfinite, the perverse parody of divine love. It would be a kind of parodia sacra that secretly lives from a desecration of divine love. Can we make sense of such a malice without the surplus of agapeic goodness and its promise? If there is this perplexing hatred, if there is, one might say, this surplus hatred—the strangeness of the phrase is apposite—is not its negative reversal also a possibility? If motiveless malignity is not only a possibility, but happens, is not the surplus agape of motiveless generosity, motiveless benignity, not in a similar situation? If we say “no,” does this owe something to our defect of seeing, defect of mindfulness, defect of love that withholds the granting of something to be? Perhaps there is a regard in which only love sees as only love grants. If this is so, the denial of agapeic love has something to do with defect of love in those who deny it, perhaps even as a

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possibility. Out of the heart, the idiotic selving, come the fruits, some of which are sweet, some bitter, some pretending to the final truth about the heart grown hard in its self-insistence. Can we understand what, in some sense, we do not participate in? Perhaps, with a bow to Heidegger, we cannot truly think that which we cannot thank. I think all the forms of love have something of the promise of the agapeic. Let me look at them in turn. First, one could say that true self-affirming love requires something of the generosity of the agapeic: an assent to what is good in being a self, a patience to oneself as selving that is no passive abdication of responsibility but is just finessed responsiveness to what is most intimate and true in our singular selving. It is sometimes extremely hard for us to love ourselves as we should love ourselves—hard to grant ourselves as being worthy of generous affirmation—by ourselves. Of course, we often know ourselves too well and live out (sometimes know we live out) of a contraction of generous self-love into selfish self-regard. Our own treason to the promise of the agapeic in ourselves is reflected in that contraction on ourselves, and hence, strangely, self-insistent self-regard reveals itself as secreting its own self-hatred. The betrayal of the promise of the agapeic in our self-love betrays our true self-love. Counterfeit self-love masks a hidden self-loathing. At an extreme our self-hatred regards the fact that we do not own ourselves and never can. This is why suicide shows a lack of true self-love, is a violation of it. Kant speaks of the selfishness of the suicide, and this seems odd, since the suicide seems to hate himself and his life. Yet from the point of view of true self-love, Kant is not entirely wrong. He wrongly moralizes this extremity rather than seeing it better in light of a violation of true self-love— with the promise of agapeic generosity that is there even in extreme suffering; promise there in the gift of life as given to be and not as self-determined; promise calling us to treat ourselves with something of this generosity, even if circumstances conspire against us cruelly. Second, one could say also that there is the promise of the agapeic in the erotic.19 In truth I never give myself to myself. Even when I deeply come to myself, I find I am given to myself through the other. Surpassing toward the other erotically, I can come back to myself; but ingredient in that coming back is being given back erotically to oneself by the other. Without that being given back there would only be tyrannical self-insistence or instrumental exploitation or even degradation. Granting that one is granted to be by the other gives me back to myself more fully, but it is not a simple matter of my own fullness affirming itself. I more truly am self-affirming because I am affirmed, more truly self-fulfilled because another erotically fills me. Third, and further again, there is something of a promise of the agapeic in certain occurrences of friendship. Think of how the balance of reciprocity

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between friends communicates generosity to each of the friends. True friendship is in this spread of generosity. I want what is good for my friend; I do not simply want my friend for myself as my own good. Freed from just wanting, or wanting my own good, my wanting in friendship moves into the space of a more released being able to give for the good of the friend, and indeed a more released receiving of good from the friend, a receiving of the good of the friend. For receiving from the friend is no mere passivity; it is a patience yes, but it loves what it receives and loves the giver in the receiving, and hence its receptivity is always awakened into a generous porosity to what comes to it from the friend as other. One needs generosity to properly receive as well as to properly give.20 Finally, in the case of a more explicit agapeics of love, one might say the following (though much more might well be said). At issue here is the promise of a surplus generosity lived as a kind of affirmative excess that we cannot completely master in our own self-mediations. Whether we mediate with ourselves or intermediate with others, there is the insinuation of a love that is not exhausted by any determinate formation of our own self-mediation, nor of any determinate formation of social intermediation. Both the selfmediation and the social intermediations find themselves in a love, patient to something that witnesses to a more original plenitude. Selving and othering are sustained in a between space that allows porous communication, and yet this is not a lacking indeterminacy but a surplus we cannot univocally pin down, equivocally disseminate, or dialectically self-determine. At the same time, being in this love, being in love in this space of communication, is not a matter of merely indefinite possibility. There is an overdeterminate communication of creative possibilizing in the surplus and enabling power of generosity. Original plenitude is communicated in the generosity of being. One might say that an agapeic selving (just to speak of selving) witnesses to the more unconditional communication of love. Agapeic selving shows the free power to give itself to what is other to itself, beyond the insistence on a return to self. Such selving goes beyond itself in giving itself, and though there might be a return to the self, this is not the point of the giving. The giving is not for the self but for the other, and though it may be the case that the other returns the generosity, that return is not asked or sought; if it never comes, the agapeic selving would still give beyond itself. It is true that in speaking of agapeic selving we would have to grant that we are always tempted to a closure on our own selves. Nevertheless, such closure repeatedly finds itself perforated, as agapeic selving shows itself as transported beyond self in the porous between. Neither possession of the other nor self-possession is to the point (as we could well learn from Plato’s Phaedrus, though the issue there is eros).21 While not wanting to portray eros

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and agape as opposites, we might say that in erotic self-transcending the selving is more than the transcendence, while in agapeic self-transcending the transcendence is more than the selving. Agapeic selving is intermediating between self and what is other, and yet something more than you or I is communicated. (This is one reason why the idea of the “intersub-ject” is not true enough to the porous between.) Agapeic selving intermediates because it continues both to receive and to give itself in the porous metaxu. There is a willingness beyond will to power, a willingness to let the promise of plenitude in both self and other come to communication in the between. Agapeic loving is not a will to power that would stamp the image of itself on the between. The plenitude cannot be thought without the porosity, and hence paradoxically, the plenitude seems to scoop out a hollowness in itself. This is a hollow that hallows, for it is really the shaping of the hospitable space in which both self and other are free to become themselves in being together. Agapeic selving, we might say, is then doubly stressed in the between: between the promise of something excessive communicated in its own passion of being and the willingness to reconfigure the empowering of the conatus in light of its loving of the other, between its own being there and its willingness not to be there in a manner that retards the coming to the between of the other. Agapeic selving is put there, and puts itself there, but as witness to a kind of putting of itself aside. Its possibilizing power is freed to the extremity of being able to consent to powerlessness. This consent paradoxically shows a power above and beyond power, in the free spread of being good. Nothing can be forced, nothing can be guaranteed. Agapeic selving gives itself to the space of hospitality between selving and othering with patience without imperiousness, with hope without self-insistence, with longing, and without demand. With fidelity it waits.

The agapeics of community and festive solidarity It need hardly be said that no selving can be thought outside social relations and their communal intermediations, and the point is especially true of agapeic selving. The agapeic selving as self might be understood as a singularization of communicative being. This does not mean that in the community of being it is devoid of deep interiority. Quite the contrary, this, its idiocy, is the basis of its desire to establish relations of solidarity and intimacy with others and, where possible, to foster the social conditions that allow the release of the original energy of other selves. Selving is called upon to be a witness to the agapeic, by itself trying to live up to the promise of its generosity. As being for the other, the self-transcendence of agapeic selving is decentered in so far as it is outside of itself in the between. And if it

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contributes to the shaping of this between, this is not just for itself but to free the other to be itself as other. In thus being decentered, being beside itself in love, it is also recentered—not in the sense of simply being for itself but in being-at-home in its not being-at-home with itself, solicitous for the other even when this means the extirpation of its own self-regarding contentment. Whether decentered or recentered in the between, no one fully comprehends the enigmatic surplus promise of community that is there at work. There is no one, humanly speaking, who can stand outside the intermediation of the between and be the full measure of the mystery of love that passes there. Exposure to the excess of this mystery is essential to agapeic being for the other, so far as human beings try to live up to its promise. The participatory interinvolvement of love is as love, in the love that passes our determinate understanding. As selving, as othering, and as being othered, we do not know ourselves fully. At best and at extremities of exposure, we know ourselves as the trust that there is good at work, and it is to the fostering of this good in the between that we are called. Neither I nor you are the good; we are in the service of the good. There is a “here we are” that answers the summons of the good. There is a “we are willing” beyond the communal will to power, a willingness to be as nothing if this is the way to open a porous milieu of generous availability. The “we are willing” is the “here we are,” now ready, when the need arises, to offer ourselves as a sacrifice for the other. This happens. “Sacrifice” literally means to “make sacred” (sacer facere). There is an agapeics of community that sanctifies the willingness that gives itself up as an offering for the good of the other. It should be evident that if agapeic selving is not conatus essendi in the modern sense, neither is it self-relating negativity, as Hegel would have it. Deeper than all negativity, self-related or not, there is a more primal plenitude in selving, in its endowed being given to be. The passion of being promises an overdeterminate willingness to give up self-insistence for the good of the other, even in the face of the negative. (There is a way of giving up selfinsistence, too, that reveals true self-love.) We might say agapeic selving reveals the possibility of a paradoxical “heroism”—paradoxical because it is a heroism not of the endeavor to be but of the passion of being in a generosity beyond negativity. This generosity may even reach beyond death. This is not just the communal self-insistence of the group that would glorify itself beyond death. The community of agapeic service is more ultimate than the community of erotic sovereignty, as I put it in Ethics and the Between.22 The community of erotic sovereignty is often tempted with just its own selfglorification. In life the community of agapeic service is called beyond death to a heedless love of the others that may count its own life as nothing, if this proves necessary. Even if the point is not the heroic pathos of communal self-

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congratulation, there is still a call to something heroic, in the sense of something superior, something above us, something huper. Agapeic selving, in its intimate porosity, offers itself as the outpouring of a surplus affirmation of being, a redoubled amen to being, even in the face of suffering, of ugliness, of mourning, of loss. Worthy of remembering is care for the weak and the abandoned, at the vulnerable extremities of life, at the time of birth and the time of death. Worthy of remembering is how the passion of being often overtakes us with the sorrow of transience and the pathos of finite mutability, and yet still agapeic selving lives in light of the redemption of the ever reborn promise of life. It lives being as a feast, being as a festive celebration. The gift of praise comes in this festive celebration—praise that reechoes the primal “yes” to being as good. And festive celebration is no “project” (to recall an earlier theme). We cannot determine it through ourselves. It is not a “set-up” that we can set up. We can prepare for the feast, even prepare it within certain limits, but it asks of us the spirit of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving also is not a project that one would construct or deconstruct. One is given something, but it is received as a genuine gift only in being hospitably welcomed. And it is not the thing or the possession that touches us in the gift but the generous freedom of the endowing source that has made itself available without care for itself. Real thankfulness has nothing to do with abjectness before an other who has us in his or her debt. Real thanks is simple, elemental appreciation of the transcendence of self-insistence by the goodness of the giver—the endowing source that secretly companions us. It may be true that redeeming the promise of the agapeic is too rare among us. It may be true that we cannot see the promise because we do not love, because we ourselves do not embody it faithfully. It may be true that only God is truly agapeic. And yet, for all that, the communication of the agapeic is at work among us, in us. We participate in it when we do not finally seek ourselves when we seek ourselves. We seek what is good and we find ourselves in finding that goodness. I say we find, but this means we lose ourselves and are found. Being in the agapeics of love is both losing ourselves and being found and, in being found, finding ourselves beyond the distress of our being at a loss. The “we will” of erotic sovereignty is taken into a “we are willing” of agapeic service in which we are willing to supersede ourselves, or be superseded, in accession to a purer willing of the good. This purer willing could equally be called will-less, for it is the passage of released love in the porous between. A willingness more than the “we will,” more than the “we are willing” takes possession of the passion of our being, bringing it closer to a purer willing, marking out its ethical and religious exposure to the divine with a purer trust in the good. We often clot

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on ourselves, clog up the passage of this love. In the communication of the agapeic, the porosity of our being comes to undergo its passion anew, and it finds itself in being purged of such clotting. The flow of the passage of the love finds itself newly in a festive forgiveness, a forgiveness offering, again and again, the re-creation of the good of the “to be.” After its descent into the dark pits below the bottom of the underground, agapeic selving brings us up again to the surface of the good earth, and we rejoice in beholding the bright things under the shine of the sun. The morning of life keeps coming back— and the day breaks again.

Notes 1

See Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 2 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 8. 3 “Selving” is a word I adopt from G. M. Hopkins and adapt. I quote from his marvellous poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame”: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 51. 4 See Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject?, trans. B. Fink (New York: Routledge, 1991) for a collection of the main contributors to the French debate on the issue. As Nancy puts it in the introduction: “The critique or the deconstruction of subjectivity is to be considered one of the great motifs of contemporary philosophical work in France, taking off from, here again and perhaps especially, the teachings of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Bataille, Wittgenstein, from the teachings of linguistics, the social sciences, and so forth” (ibid., 4). 5 Still worth noting is Karl Löwith’s classic work From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, new foreword by Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann, intro. Fred Dallmayr (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). 6 See, for instance, Simon Critchley and Peter Dews, eds., Deconstructive Subjectivities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 7 See Calvin Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) for a more praxis, narrative orientation. 8 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists (pt. 3, §3), quoted in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 252.

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Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 2:579. 10 One thinks of an earlier form of this descent in connection with surrealism, for instance, in André Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism, vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 791: “Let us remember that the point of Surrealism is simply the total recovery of the powers of the mind by a means none other than a vertiginous inner descent, the systematic lighting up of all our hidden places, and the progressive shading off of the others. A ceaseless promenade in full forbidden zone.” This might not quite show the current skepticism about the “inner,” but yet how current its desiderata do sound, if one can call them desiderata. One also thinks, for instance, of George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986); with Bataille excess borders on a mysticism of the obscene. For a voice of spiritual sanity from another world, see Gabriel Marcel on Bataille, “The Refusal of Salvation and the Exaltation of the Man of Absurdity,” in Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 185–212. 11 The language of Entwurf is that of Being and Time (1927); the language of das Gestell is that of “The Question Concerning Technology” (1949, revised 1955), in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Did Heidegger ever entirely free himself from certain questionable presuppositions nesting in the language of Entwurf? 12 One thinks of the importance of recognition, even at the high noon of idealistic subjectivity, in Fichte and Hegel, for instance. See Robert Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); also his Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). One thinks today, of course, of Jürgen Habermas and, most recently, Axel Honneth, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). 13 William Desmond, chap. 10 in Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 14 On this, but also on the sense that there is a kind of “field” of idiocy, see William Desmond, “The Idiocy of Being,” chap. 3 in Perplexity and Ultimacy: Metaphysical Thoughts from the Middle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), (pt. 3, chap. 1, § 4), 340–400. See the discussion of Being and Nothingness by Gabriel Marcel in Homo Viator, 166–184. 16 See William Desmond, “Neither Cosmopolis nor Ghetto: Religion and the Intimate Universal,” in The Future of Political Theology, eds. Peter Losonczi, Mika Luomaaho, and Aakash Singh (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishers, 2011), 87–113. 17 See William Desmond, “Ways of Wondering: Beyond the Barbarism of Reflection,” chap. 10 in The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012). 18 Jean-Luc Marion makes the contestable claim about the univocity of love—the love of God is the same as our love—in The Erotic Reduction, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 221.

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Again one is surprised with the univocal conception of love by Marion at the end of The Erotic Reduction: “Love is said and is given in only one, strictly univocal way” (217). Am I mistaken that Marion wants to eroticize agape (220–221) whereas I want to recollect the promise of agape in eros? I demur concerning a dualism of eros and agape, but I demur also at a univocalizing of the two and plead for a metaxology of love that allows a between with plurivocal promise. In the many forms of love, it is the different forms of relativity between self and other that are at issue—from selfaffirming love, to philia, to eros, to agape. On the forms of relativity of different loves and their mutation into different hatreds, see William Desmond, “Enemies: On Hatred,” chap. 9 in Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 20 This spread of generosity in agapeic giving is not Nietzsche’s gift-giving virtue, the schenkende Tugend referred to in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 99–104. The gift-giving virtue is not at all a generosity given for the other as other. It is an overflow of the surplus of the selfaffirming will to power that rejoices in itself and that can do no other than give beyond itself. This giving beyond itself is simply its self-affirmation. It glories in itself as it seems to give itself away to the others, but it is not giving itself away to the other as other. It simply cannot contain its own surplus. Where then is the space of generosity that allows the other to receive or refuse the gift? And if there is no such space, what prevents the gift-giving turning into a fated force that might even be tempted to force its gift on the other? Is that then a gift at all? One could say that no giving is possible without receiving, indeed that receiving is itself a kind of gift. The giver has to let be the space of receiving in the other. A giver who will not take “no” for an answer can be a rather tyrannical giver. The generous giver makes way for the freedom of the receiver. Such a “making way” is not just a fated overflow. The spread of agapeic generosity makes way in making way. The generosity we receive is an occasion of gratitude but also more, for we find ourselves charged with the reciprocal living of generosity. Only a generous person can responsively receive a gift. Otherwise, the gift is not truly received. Consider, for instance, someone who begrudges receiving a compliment. Truly to accept a compliment is to witness to generosity in metaxological reciprocity. 21 See Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). 22 See William Desmond, “The Community of Erotic Sovereignty” and “The Community of Agapeic Service,” chaps. 15 and 16 in Ethics and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

“TILL THE END OF LOVE”: EROS AND TIME IN THE CONSTITUTION OF MODERN SUBJECTIVITY CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT

Introduction “Eros is dead.” With these words the sexologist Volkmar Sigusch concludes his diagnosis of a transition from the sexual revolution of the sixties to today’s age of so-called “Neosexualities.”1 To this diagnosis he adds: “If Eros ever really lived at all!” In the radical sexualization of love and Eros, manifest in the ongoing invention of sexual lifestyles including perversities, autoeroticism, sexual violence, and even sexual indifference, Sigusch recognizes the possibility of an end to Eros. For him what had been—since the Enlightenment—the goal of a utopian emancipation of Eros and Love from all domination and violence ended in radical disappointment, if not silent desperation, about its prospects. The liberation and autonomization of Eros has ended in new forms of domination! Can we think of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a dialectic of love? “If Eros ever really lived at all!” If one follows the phenomenologist JeanLuc Marion in his The Erotic Phenomenon,2 the history of modern erotic subjectivity has not come to an end because it has not yet begun. Since its foundation, or Urstiftung in the Cartesian cogito, modern subjectivity has been a function of a self-affirming and self-evident being that contradicts neediness and dependence on love and desire.3 It is precisely against this background that Marion wishes to initiate a radical act of phenomenological intuition of his own erotic subjectivity in order to lay the groundwork for a complete renewal of love beyond all its classical dichotomies between Eros/Agape, Sexuality/Spirituality, and Charity/Self-love.4 As opposed to its scientific or ontological orientation, philo-sophia, the love of Wisdom and Truth, must now be turned on its head and become a “Knowledge of Love” in order to rescue love from this total forgetfulness. Does philosophy represent the “great work of love of the future”?

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According to the sexologist Sigusch and the phenomenologist Marion, we live in an age without love. There is no time left for love! But while the sexologist asserts the end of love, the phenomenologist announces the restoration of love in the future. We live in a historical age without love, then, but this age without love is perhaps only an “interregnum of lost love,” a “time in between,” so to speak, since this age of erotic decline and forgetfulness is supposed to be replaced by the era of truly liberated Eros. In “searching for love lost,” we might take our lead from the statements of Sigusch and Marion in order to understand the nature of this erotic crisis. Both seem to agree at least on the following three suppositions: 1. Subjectivity has to be interpreted on the basis of Eros and Love. 2. Eros has something to do with Time and temporality as the scene of its appearance. 3. When subjectivity is understood in the horizon of Eros and Time, this horizon is connected to the destiny of Eros in a historical time, as the scene of their appearance or disappearance in a “History of Love,” a Liebesgeschichte.5 We could add other voices to the demand for a philosophical reflection on the destiny of Eros and Time and their impact on subjectivity, voices such as those of Niklas Luhmann, Martha Nussbaum, or Alain Badiou.6 All of them are concerned with the destiny of love and its possible disappearance in the age of radical autonomy. But here let me only briefly mention Badiou’s Éloge de l’amour, with its own specific diagnosis of a decay of Eros. Badiou is not worried only about a capitalist consumer’s attitude toward erotic matters aiming at an encounter of maximum intensity and erotic-sexual satisfaction “without risk,” leaving no time for any commitment to the “other” involved in this encounter. In his analysis of the “simple, all too simple” speech act “I love you,” he argues that it nevertheless not only aims at a true commitment to the other but also constitutes a promise of eternity: “Love forever!” Badiou is actually engaged in a “recherché” of this eternal time lost. “Tout le problem après, est d’inscrire cette eternite dans le temps” (The whole problem is to inscribe eternity into time).7 This means that the speech act “I love you” aims at nothing less than “une descente de l’eternite dans le temps”8—a descent of eternity into time. Must we think of lost love as lost eternity? This quite remarkable plea, by a radical Maoist, for a “descent of eternity into time” provokes an additional, rather untimely consideration that was left out by Sigusch and Marion: What has happened to the “long time,” the

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“patience” and “eternity” of love, usually associated with theology? The Maoist Badiou, needless to say, is an atheist, while the sexologist Sigusch can recognize in the Christian religion only a discourse of sexual repression operating with awkward concepts such as sin and sinfulness. Even Marion, a phenomenologist with a deep, Catholic religious commitment, who has dealt with love as the phenomenological ground of knowledge, nevertheless does not mention religion and its idea of an eternal love in his book on the erotic phenomenon. It is omitted precisely because he intends to save love beyond all its metaphysical and antimetaphysical dichotomies—namely beyond the split between Eros/Agape, Charity/Self-love, Eternity/Temporality, and Theology/Sexuality. In short, Badiou, Sigusch, and Marion do not refer to the religious dimension of eternal love at all. We might ask, then, whether the logic of erotic disappearance has anything to do with the elimination of the religious concept of love and, vice versa, whether the elimination of religious love is not connected to the logic of erotic disappearance, that is, to the loss of erotic time, which is deplored by all three thinkers. Is it possible, then, that the “end of love” is related to the contraction, with the secularization of love, of the religious threefold structure of love—love of God, neighbor, and self—to self-love alone? To understand the present situation regarding Eros and Time in the constitution of subjectivity seems, in the first place, to require an understanding of the very process of secularization of modernity. In fact, this process appears always to be in a specific state of ambivalence and thus is ambivalent in the erotic context as well. When secularization is defined as a process of detachment from religion and religious authority, it often simultaneously adopts a strategy of translation of the eschatological or messianic dimension of the negated religion into the realm of historical and political immanence. While rejecting orthodox religion, secular autonomy claims the right to actualize its messianic idea of the kingdom of God “here and now” as the adequate translation of its idea of a society of freedom and autonomy. Accordingly, when rejecting the idea of love of God on the grounds of an autonomous self-love, secular subjectivity strives to detach itself from divine eternal love while simultaneously aiming at an existential fulfillment of Eros as a redemption of the self “here and now”—that is, within time. We come now to the point I wish to make in this paper. In order to understand the relation of Eros and Time in the constitution of modern subjectivity, one must reconstruct the modern history of Eros and Love and its specific temporality in light of this ambivalent logic of secularization— that is, its simultaneous negation and adoption of the religious concept of eternal love.

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In the following I will give a preliminary sketch of the genesis of modern subjectivity in its erotic temporality and present the modern history of Eros as an ambivalent process of secularization of the religious concept of love. In this process, Eros detaches itself from religious love, on the one hand, while preserving its eschatological dimension on the other. While we are used to hearing about the repression of Eros and Sex in religion, it has seemed to be the case, for a long time now, that with every confession that we repress Eros, we are in reality repressing the religious layer of love. In a second step I will present a theological response to this modern “History of Love,” or Liebesgeschichte—with its specific dialectic of secularity and religion—in the orthodox Protestant theology of Karl Barth.9 Barth offers us a radical thought of Eros that, by adopting the modern dialectic of love, succeeds in both revealing its underlying theological meaning and pointing to the possible renewal of Eros and Time beyond their historical polarizations and dichotomies.10 It is Barth’s response—theology as the “unthought” of the modern history of love—that will have to be taken here into philosophical consideration.

Development In order to open this post-postmodern ad hoc “Symposium on Love,” I want to introduce another discussant, whose remarks on the history of sexuality might enlighten us a bit on our way to the specific modern love story and its specific secular logic. Let us begin the brief genealogy of modern Eros with a reading from Michel Foucault’s fine introduction to the History of Sexuality. “It appears to me,” he writes, that the essential thing [in the history of sexuality] is not this economic factor, but rather the existence in our era of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together. Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form—so familiar and important in the West—of preaching. A great sexual sermon—which has had its subtle theologians and its popular voices—has swept through our societies over the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real; it has made people dream of a New City. The Franciscans are called to mind. And we might wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long accompanied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial societies, been largely carried over to sex.11

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In these remarks Foucault, who is not suspected of any sympathy for theology, nevertheless points to a hidden theological agenda of the modern history of love and sexuality not mentioned by Sigusch, Marion, and Badiou. In fact Foucault hints at the existence of a double dialectic at the heart of the genesis of modern subjectivity on the basis of Eros and Time that reveals a fundamental ambivalence of the secularization of love. On the one hand, erotic subjectivity has emancipated itself from the theological concept of love by introducing Eros into a kind of immanent historical eschatology: the liberation of Eros from all theological domination is supposed to lead to a utopian form of sex without domination. This liberation from theology thus reveals itself as a kind of theology of liberation: Eros serves as a strategy of redemption from theology or, better, from the theological sin of having invented sin!12 On the other hand, this dialectic of theology and the secularization of Eros is characterized by a historical dynamic, a process of “autonomization” as liberation from all social constraints, in which the growing concentration on this Eros as a “jemeiniger Eros,” an Eros of “my own,” leads to a betrayal of the initial enlightened idea of a universal sociopolitical liberation that was supposed to be accompanied or symbolized by erotic liberation. Michel Foucault traces this process back to the eighteenth century. It is the process of a growing “autonomization” of love, reducing all erotic norms and rules defined by religion, society, and class to the individual desire and passion of the subject. This social and cultural transformation finds its best, explicit expression in the different strategies of philosophy and poetry. Both aim at the same reduction of Eros and Love from the religious sphere to the self’s autonomous desire and passion, but they differ in their approach.13 While Immanuel Kant14 and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing15 wish to translate the theological law of love of one’s neighbor into the rational law of the autonomous freedom of subjectivity, Goethe16 and Herder17 stress the need for a transformation of religious love into the individual freedom of sensual Eros and sexual experience. Both strategies coincide in the idea of autonomy and liberation from theological heteronomy, thus presupposing a correlation of Eros and time for this liberation of subjectivity. Simultaneously this correlation develops in light of a difference, inscribed from the beginning, between the social dimension of freedom and the freedom of individual selfaffirmation. This difference will later reveal itself as the dialectic between law and self, between the universal and the individual meanings of Eros. While both law and self develop in a specific time and temporality as the disclosure of the essence and truth of subjectivity, subjectivity founded on the law reveals itself in the political realm as a utopian orientation toward society beyond domination and power, while individual subjectivity orients itself

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toward the appearance of Eros within the existential horizon of time. Both temporalities—historical teleology and existential time—derive from the theological idea of the Christian “Kairos of Love” and strive to translate this unique moment into a specific time and “time limit” left for the immanent realization of love and Eros within time. Let us now reconstruct the modern history of love in a very schematic manner according to four representatives, whose names stand for four different stages of the secularization process: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille. When Goethe’s Faust renounces the theological idea of the “highest grace of love”—“die höchste Liebeshuld”—he not only denies St. Paul’s famous list of the Christian virtues of faith, love, and hope but also stresses the need to overcome patience! He rejects all forms of “consolation” that imply a deferral or postponement of erotic fulfillment. While the genesis of erotic subjectivity creates its specific time horizon of fulfillment, it simultaneously posits time as running out! Precisely because Eros has to be fulfilled within our lifetime, there is a limit to this fulfillment. Nonerotic time becomes potentially a “waste of time,” a “nontime,” a “time in the between,” a time of nonbeing and death to be overcome by erotic initiative and activity. Impatience, then, is the cause of a growing acceleration and intensification of temporal experience that, when it fails, condemns the subject to destruction. “Away then with the lamentation about the shortness of time. This is a feint of the godhead, through which it puts itself on the right way to our spirit and heart!”18 When Ludwig Feuerbach follows, in this note in his diaries, the project of the impatient Faust, he not only concerns himself with the problem of how to return the theological assets of love to man as quickly as possible but also asks why these assets were delivered to the godhead in the first place. Subjectivity as Eros can only be a kind of unconscious and blind act of projection, a creation of a divine object of erotic veneration, the true purpose of which is the possibility of developing a full self-consciousness. The representation of God, offering himself in an act of love for human beings, must then be deciphered as the mirror of the human self that sacrifices its own love to the godhead.19 Christology and its principle of “kenosis” serve Feuerbach not only as the object of secularization but also as its method: love is an act of renunciation and alienation. If Feuerbach intends a complete restitution of the erotic possessions delivered to God, the imagined time of the Christological Kairos as incarnated time has to be expropriated as quickly as possible. Feuerbach writes this in his diaries: The shorter life is, the less time we have, the more time we have in fact, because the lack of time doubles our forces, concentrates us on the necessary

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and essential, instills in us a presence of the mind, a spirit of initiative and determination.20

Through the temporalization of Eros that documents itself as a “not-having” of time, subjectivity is in need of an erotic essentialization and intensification that cannot and will not waste its time! When Feuerbach intends to integrate the theologoumenon of Trinity as the anthropological ideal of a community of love, he actually wishes to mediate between the teleological ideal of a society without domination and the dynamics of an existential erotic fulfillment in our lifetime. At the same time, the consistent exploitation of time as acceleration and intensification—mediated in a utopian synthesis of historical and existential time—already points to the rupture between these two forms of the genesis of subjectivity. Every deferment of the eschatological expropriation of the religious assets of love contradicts the spirit of determination that intends to exploit the short time left. Why, indeed, console oneself about the postponement of utopian time when it does not fall into one’s own lifetime? The idea of a full disposition of one’s own erotic time must lead finally to a new form of determination that will expropriate even the teleological and utopian time of Eros, thus preparing the constitution of an erotic sovereignty independent of the law. With the growing necessity to accelerate erotic fulfillment, which corresponds wonderfully with the capitalist dynamics of rationalizing work and production, the “erotic reduction” at work here also reveals the utopia of political liberty as an illusion. The more urgent time becomes, the more likely the reduction to the self will conquer the law of love of one’s neighbor as well. According to this “logic of erotic disappearance,” Freud defines love of neighbor as a fundamental injustice, “an injustice which the self commits towards all those whom it really desires!”21 The time that the self wastes on the abstract other has to be withdrawn from all those objects of real erotic desire. It is with this insight into the “Truth of Eros,” namely the “true” and “real” condition of erotic desire, that Eros has to perform a set of differentiations, beginning with the differentiation between the abstract other and the erotic object, leading to the differentiation between the “law of love” (love of neighbor) and Eros as individual fulfillment (self-love), and finally to the differentiation between friend and enemy. In the name of a true “erotic sovereignty,” the subject becomes entitled to suspend the law of love. Eros without domination then turns into a new form of Eros as power and domination that is able to carry through its preferences. Thus, the utopian concept of Eros has to be replaced by a scientific natural and biological concept reflecting two modes of politics: politics as emancipation versus a politics of sovereign power emerging from the retreat from all politics. Of course, Freud’s work reveals the origins and foundations of civilization in

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this radical “erotic sovereignty” only in order to reconstruct the historical process of civilization as a growing domestication of this radical sovereignty. Nothing worries him more than the return of civilization to this barbarous, archaic Urvater figure of total erotic freedom that was haunting the radical vitalism of aesthetics, poetry, and the philosophy of life and culture at the time. With Freud’s reduction to self-love only, the history of love nevertheless comes to light as the scene of a radical retreat from historical time and its politics. At the same time, this retreat opens the horizon for a completely different politics.22 If the autonomization of Eros is oriented now only toward the very moment of radical self-fulfillment in which the self potentially renounces all social norms, this moment becomes the beginning of a dangerous power game, potentially a war for life and death that contradicts all illusions and idylls of a love without domination. Analogously to the final emancipation of the modernist aesthetic sovereign subject from all traditional rules and constraints as the moment of absolute presence of beauty (a beauty beyond norms and concepts), Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Hugo Ball have revealed this moment as a radical crisis leading to a possible destruction of the very work of art. Similarly, erotic sovereignty appears as the moment of an absolute selfpresence and fulfillment announcing absolute power and violence—against the other and, finally, against itself. The life philosopher Ludwig Klages23 celebrated this moment of final liberation as an orgiastic ecstasy that occasionally turns into an ecstasy of violence and blood. The purpose of erotic transgression thus aims at a self-redemption that celebrates suicide and death as its ultimate purpose. In fact, Klages’s Vom kosmogonischen Eros (1922) can be read as a summary of the erotic ecstasies described in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde:24 erotic experience as a total retreat from world and society in a suicidal “Liebestod” (Love’s death) that in itself is a consequence of an absolute and unrepeatable erotic experience. The yearning for the absolute erotic moment of fulfillment in time turns out to be beyond any possibility of repetition and thus must lead to the redemption of Eros as ultimate Death. Klages’s visions parallel the orgiastic erotic scenes of Dionysian liberation in Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron culminating in the scene of the golden calf where the idolatric ecstasy turns into an erotic orgy and finally into acts of ecstatic violent blood sacrifice. Here, Eros is transparently the desire for ultimate transgression of all norms and rules by the sovereign erotic subject and thus the desire for power and violence against the other and ultimately against itself.

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Georges Bataille, in his Eroticism, summarized and elaborated on the dynamics of erotic transgression using the example of the Marquis de Sade as the hidden secret of the logic of erotic reductionism.25 The very last consequence of an absolute concentration on the erotic self, he demonstrates, must explode not only as pure violence against the other but also as a violence against the self that, in order to fulfill the radical logic of transgression, has to forbid itself all enjoyment. Bataille calls this terminal eschatological idea of erotic liberation “heroic cynicism.” Eros turns into pure terror that strives for the ultimate crime: There is a movement forward of transgression that does not stop before a summit is reached. . . . De Sade . . . accepted it [this movement] in all its consequences and these go further than the original principle of denying others and asserting oneself. . . . In the violence of this progression personal enjoyment ceases to count, the crime is the only thing that counts. . . . All that matters is that the crime should reach the pinnacle of crime.26

When Bataille thus reveals the final consequences of the logic of reduction, he arrives, with this absolute “end of Eros,” at the very beginning of the process of liberation that was hidden behind the pathos of enlightenment, liberation, and utopia. From the perspective of this last erotic reduction, Bataille seems to suggest that only now can one assess the meaning of De Sade’s writings for the whole of modern erotic dialectics. It is not by chance that the same Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis led to the anthropological reduction of Eros by removing all its utopian political and theological illusions, arrives at the same figure of anarchic, destructive violence that Bataille identifies as the “end of love” in the figure of the Marquis de Sade. But Freud not only carefully moves this figure from the end of modern eschatology to its beginning; he also banishes this frightening figure far back behind the very beginning of civilization itself. The utopia of an erotic presence at the end of history proves, for Freud, to be the very catastrophe that must have occurred in primordial times before culture and, if it should occur within the culture of today, could only lead to total terror and destruction. Freud’s ironic statement—that the superman whom Nietzsche expected as the teleological fulfillment of the critique of metaphysics and religion stands at the beginning of all civilization27—summarizes this major shift in the modern history of Eros from an eroticist eschatology to a mythical circular structure of Eros and violence, which unfolds as an “eternal mythical return of the same,” always already coming to an end and always already beginning! If the erotic sovereign represents the prototype of absolute freedom and desire—one who is beyond the law—then he corresponds to the fantasy of

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complete erotic fulfillment. He was probably the only really happy man in history, as Freud states with some melancholy. But his historical role consisted in the fact that the Urvater would be murdered by his sons and daughters taking revenge for their enslavement in the name of his erotic desire. It is this primordial murder of the erotic sovereign—which leads to the translation of Eros into the law of culture and civilization—that now defines the rules of sexual relations on the basis of the totem and taboo, the first laws and institutions of civilization.28 There can be no doubt that with this reversal of perspective from eschatology to mythology Freud wished to save the idea of a realistic enlightenment culture not confused by theological illusions or any idea of an erotic utopia beyond domination. The erotic sovereign at the beginning of culture must then be interpreted as a radical secular abbreviation of the modern drama and dialectic of love, which, aiming at a new correlation between Eros and law, depends neither on religion nor on utopia but is derived only from the logic of the process of civilization itself. It is this picture of erotic sovereignty as desire and death that leads Freud to his final, melancholy assessment of the viability of culture. In light of the late internalization of taboo and law as conscience and superego, erotic desire can only develop as increasing aggression against this superego. This must bring in its wake a suppression by the superego, turning the aggression back to erotic desire, so that the culture of erotic domestication faces a permanent war between Eros and law leading necessarily and finally to entropy and the death of both Eros and Culture.29 The skeptical and enlightened rescue of erotic subjectivity is only an infinite prolongation of its process of decay and dying. Practically speaking, it is beyond any hope. Although Freud manages to reconnect the end and beginning of Eros in his conception of the history of Love based on erotic myth, he leaves us with no consolation, since Eros will—after all and in spite of everything—nevertheless come to its end.

Eros as the “figure of this world” The connection between theology and sexology indicated by Michel Foucault can indeed be reconstructed as a sequence of philosophical, poetical, or psychoanalytic positions revealing the history of modern love as a dialectic of Eros. This dialectic unfolds as a double dialectic between the theological and secular concepts of love, on the one hand, and the utopian and naturalbiological concepts of Eros on the other. This double dialectic represents the very core of a parallel dialectic of the Enlightenment, one between liberation and domination. It is this dialectic of Enlightenment that results in a full consummation of the resources of historical and erotic time.

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Interestingly, regardless of which position they take in their erotology, this historical dialectic of Eros and Time, so fundamental for the constitution of subjectivity, has not been considered in any of the various philosophical discourses on culture and Eros. The greatest difficulty seems to lie in the theological dimension of this dialectic.30 I want to close these preliminary reflections with the suggestion that it is Karl Barth’s revolutionary commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief) that represents a fully developed theological reflection of this dialectic of Eros and its reconstruction as the fundamental dialectic of religious “Being in the World.” Precisely because Barth, the Protestant theologian, rejects the intervention of Metaphysics and the “Thought of Being”—the analogia entis31—in theology, he can immediately refer to Eros as the fundament of modern subjectivity and reread the function of this Eros and its dialectic in its theological meaning. His basic position can be formulated here in the following way: 1. Theology can only understand its task when it realizes its position as the ultimate repressed “unthought” of a modernity that—while talking about nothing other than the repression of Eros and sexuality—has in fact repressed all traces of theological love. 2. The modern position not only reflects the specific, secular state of mind, but reveals, for Barth, the fundamental condition humaine. Thus, the whole of this dialectic of Eros is not unique to modernity alone. It is in modernity that it becomes fully transparent as a twofold dialectic that in the immanent turn from liberation toward domination reflects the underlying dialectic between theology and secularization, a violent resistance to God that is always already at work. 3. In this sense modernity is nothing but the fundamental human scene of an enmity toward God already perfectly decoded in Paul’s epistles. Modernity, in its negative dialectic of Eros, opens itself to a rereading of St. Paul precisely because modern subjectivity has arrived at the full consciousness of the impossibility of all immanent eschatologies of human self-redemption, including the eschatology of the liberated Eros.32 Let us turn briefly to Barth’s text. In his exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans, Barth defines the very structure of human existential, social, ethical, and political experience on the basis of Eros, which he reads here as what Paul (1 Cor. 7:31)33 calls “the figure of this world” and which—after all—is supposed to pass away. This world has a figure, a scheme, a constitution. It consists of the universal craving for light, life, fullness, for procreation, for the creature, in the craving for enjoyment, possession, success, power and right. Maybe we fail the least if we define this figure of the world as Eros.34

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It is this “figure of this world” as the existential condition of subjectivity and its different ways of “selving”—in life, profession, culture, law, and politics—that indicates the necessary alteration from an intention toward freedom, happiness, and fulfillment (even toward the foundation of the kingdom of God as culture and law) to its opposite: decay, disappointment, domination, and destruction, which are symbolized by death and enmity. It is the erotic drive, then, that in its circularity of will and death becomes transparent in its mythical structure, turning all human teleology into a mythical “return of the same.”35 Eros as “the figure of this world” becomes, in this sense, the abbreviation of the dialectic of Eros, thus revealing not only the fundamental enmity and aggression of human Eros against itself and the other but also the more fundamental enmity of this Eros against God, which finds its specific modern reflection in the declaration that “God is dead.” Barth therefore presupposes the radical critique of religion and metaphysics initiated by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud so as to adopt it for the reconstruction of the fundamental religious “Being in the World” of subjectivity that determines all human action and thought—even the reconstruction of theology itself. According to this erotic disposition of human existence, theology can only be thought of as what is repressed and unthought in this existential figure. The “figure of this world,” beyond its secular constitution, reveals the whole of its dialectics only from the perspective of this theological “unthought.” This “unthought”—before it is developed in light of a religious revelation— reveals itself, in the dialectical process of Eros and time, to be the dimension of an intended liberation and redemption through Eros that necessarily turns into its opposite. Eros, then, presupposes in its very form an original intentionality that is directed toward intersubjectivity and recognition, which is disavowed in the reduction of Eros to the human self. Every human action has the tendency toward reduction and contraction of this original intentionality. The original intentionality of the self is reversed by the self’s insistence on itself, in which it sacrifices the otherness of the other for its own interest, desire, and passion. This reversal, as a reduction and contraction of Eros to the dimension of one’s own subjectivity, reveals a fundamental enmity not only toward the other and to the self but also toward God, in the sense that the contraction of Eros is contrary to the original erotic intention represented in divine love. This erotic reversal can be described as an “appropriation” or “expropriation” of divine love that turns this universally available love into the “private property” of the self. From the perspective of this fundamental enmity, love appears as an “erotic difference” between the universal, free divine love and its human appropriation in a self-centered passion that hides this very

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difference from itself. The difference between them is concealed by human enmity as a will to reduction, appropriation, and expropriation of divine love. God, as the ultimate other, can only be thought in terms of “the figure of this world,” meaning from the perspective of a human enmity that has become so transparent in the secularization process that its fundamental intention is not concealed anymore, not even by utopia. In this context, Barth develops two important issues concerning the meaning of this enmity: 1. Eros as enmity indicates, with its violence against man, the deep wish “to overcome” man in his very Being. Even though this violence might be directed toward the elimination of its enemy, Eros is compelled to recognize that this enmity remains an affirmation of the status quo of man’s Being.36 2. In its radical striving for emancipation from all gods and idols of ideology and utopia, secularity denotes at the same time a radical void that nevertheless can be interpreted as the “void of God.” Since this void is the result of a radical critique of God as human projection, Barth recognizes in it a kind of precondition for a possible new advent of God’s revelation beyond human intention—that is, beyond the human tendency to expropriate divine love and reduce it to the self. God can appear, according to Barth’s erotology, only as the “absence” behind erotic difference, the absolute difference from all intention, ontology, and construction—that is, in an infinite distance from the human subject. But by this infinite distance God already demonstrates his possible nearness, as the absent dimension present in the absence of love. Barth refers often to revelation in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, and the reader keeps asking where and how this revelation actually occurs. As already indicated the clue seems to be that revelation always already “reveals” itself, within the very process of immanent human culture and history, as the dialectic of Eros: as the turn of the original intention into its opposite which, through the enmity it causes, announces the divine judgment about human intention. Precisely because this dialectic functions already as judgment pronounced by the human self about itself, it points to the possibility of a return to the original meaning of Eros always already “given”—that is, presupposed and experienced as the meaning of the void of God. It is in its enmity that subjectivity can become conscious of the deep meaning of Eros and of its intentions as a fundamental deviation. By means of this consciousness, it can reveal to itself the absent “unthought” of its action, the “theological unconscious,” presupposed and present but repressed. According to Barth, then, it is in the figure of the enemy that man encounters the deep meaning of his own Eros and unveils the theological dimension of his existential life as the possibility of loving one’s enemy, just

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as God must be conceived as the one who loves man in spite of the latter’s enmity toward God. As the dialectic of Eros arrives at human consciousness as judgment, the possibility of a return to the original Eros reveals itself as the other side of this judgment, as Grace: for another constitution of subjectivity always available but refused. While getting lost in its own Time, erotic subjectivity has to come to its end—revealing itself as a “dead end,” as death and enmity, while emptying itself simultaneously for another time, another beginning, presupposing the death of this one-dimensional subjectivity itself. In this sense “the figure of this world” as Eros is not only “passing away” and has in reality “passed away,” thus coming to its end, it is already overcome by the primordial event of reconciliation through a primordial erotic intention that the Christian theologian identifies, of course, with the Messianic event on the Cross that has already occurred. Thinking Eros in light of its end is nothing other than revealing its beginning that has always already happened. Thinking till the end of love is, then, the very act of discovering the intended “unthought” of love, as its eternal potential for the beginning of love. Thinking till the end of love means to reveal the “theological unconscious”—the repressed in all erotic intentionality. But this beginning of love is available not just for thought; it cannot be dependent only on a new thought of the “unthought” or a sovereign action of intuition and restitution. It presupposes the acknowledgment of the fundamental failure of human intention, the acknowledgment of the fundamental decline and ruin of subjectivity, which has imprisoned itself in enmity and thereby shut out the primordial integral constitution of love. Only from this very borderline, which Barth recognizes in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, can the ultimate utopia of subjectivity be recognized as the identity of Eros and Agape—that is, of our time of decline and the beginning of another time, a time of reconciliation and redemption. Barth describes this integral Eros later in his monumental Church Dogmatics as an “integral time” (tempus incarnatum)—in the figure of the Messianic and Christological event. In light of this “utopia,” personalized in the Christological event of unity and identity of the divine with human nature, formulated in the Dogma of Chalcedon, subjectivity might establish the possibility of another experience of Eros as a simultaneity of the two erotic temporalities, the temporality of the past and the new temporality of the future, both already present in the permanent revolution of Eros and Time. In the erotic “time in between” the End and the Beginning, we are already experiencing this Incarnation of Time. The content of this recognition of the fulfillment of time in the presence of Christ does not show itself in the New Testament in an exclusive

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consciousness of presence but rather in the qualified knowledge typical of this consciousness of presence that differentiates between past as past and future as future. It is not only the knowledge of two different times, but also of two different ages: one that has in fact passed away but is still real in light of this presence, and a future age that is ultimately real already in light of this presence.37

Notes 1

Volkmar Sigusch, Neosexualitaeten: Über den kulturellen Wandel von Liebe und Perversion [Neosexualities: On the cultural transformation of love and perversion] (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005), 54. For some time now, Love and Eros have been the subjects of philosophical, cultural, and sociological investigation. To name only a few examples: Alain Badiou, Eloge de l’Amour [In praise of love] (Paris: Flammarion, 2009); Niklas Luhmann: Liebe: Eine Übung [Love: A tutorial] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008); Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 2 Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 1. Page one opens with this declaration: “Philosophers have in fact forsaken love, dismissed it without a concept.” 3 Ibid., 6: “Since I am as an ego . . . essentially cogitans . . . therefore the erotic event will never come upon me except as a second derivation.” 4 Ibid., 9: “I will say I. And I will not be able to hide myself behind the I of the philosophers. . . . I will say I, starting from and in view of the erotic phenomenon within me and for me—my own.” 5 This Liebesgeschichte could be constructed with some analogies to Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche 2 (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1961), chaps. 8–10, where Heidegger passes from Nietzsche’s hidden metaphysical agenda to the history of Being in several different versions, each one shorter and more concentrated than its predecessor. 6 See note 1. 7 Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, 45 (my translation). 8 Ibid. 9 Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief [Epistle to the Romans] (Munich: Kaiser, 1923); and Die Kirchliche Dogmatik 1/2 [Church dogmatics 1/2] (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1948). 10 See Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [On the concept of history], in Gesammelte Schriften 1/2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 693. Barth’s theology might take over the role of Benjamin’s famous theological dwarf, playing behind the secular scenes of the games while revealing its hidden religious logic. 11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1:7–8. 12 Ibid., 9: “What paths have brought us to the point where we are ‘at fault’ with respect to our own sex? And how have we come to be a civilization so peculiar as to

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tell itself that, through an abuse of power which has not ended, it has long ‘sinned’ against sex?” 13 Niklas Luhmann, Liebe: Eine Übung. Luhmann suggests that the bourgeois concept of love as passion is the erotic aspect of the emerging idea of autonomous subjectivity at the end of the eighteenth century and that this led to a growing need to reflect on the rules of love. This tendency corresponds with a growing sexualization of Eros, since the lack of preexisting norms turns sexuality to the ultimate “empirical” indication of the existence of love. 14 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [Critique of practical reason], in Werkausgabe 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 205: “Jenes Gesetz aller Gesetze stellt also wie alle moralische Vorschrift des Evangelii die sittliche Gesinnung in ihrer ganzen Vollkommenheit dar, so wie das Ideal der Heiligkeit von keinem Geschöpf erriechbar, dennnoch das Urbild ist, welchem wir uns zu nähern und in einem nunmehr unendlichen Progressus gleich zu werden streben sollen” (That law of all laws, therefore, like all the moral precepts of the Gospel, presents the moral disposition in its complete perfection, in such a way that as an ideal of holiness it is not attainable by any creature, but is yet the archetype which we should strive to approach and resemble in an uninterrupted but endless progress). The translation is from Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 207. 15 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Das Testament des Johannes [The Testament of St. John], in Theologiekritische Schriften 3, Werke 8 (München: Hanser, 1979), 18–19: “So ist die christliche Liebe nicht die christliche Religion? . . . Denn ein anderes sind die Glaubenslehren der christlichen Religion, und ein anderes das Praktische, welches sie auf diese Glaubenslehren will gegründet wissen.” (Therefore, is Christian love not the Christian religion? . . . For the doctrines of Christian faith are one thing, but the praxis, which that religion will recognize based upon such doctrines, is something else.) My translation. It is this demand for a practical translation of the law of love that leads to the idea of the possible creation of the kingdom of God within political history. See the famous paragraphs 85–90 of Lessing’s “Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts” [The education of the human race], in Theologiekritische Schriften 3, 508: “Nein, sie wird kommen . . . die Zeit der Vollendung, da der Mensch . . . Bewegungsgründe zu seinen Handlungen zu erborgen nicht nötig haben wird, da er das Gute tun wird, weil es das Gute ist” (No, it will come . . . the time of perfection, when man . . . will not be necessitated to borrow motives for his actions . . . for he will do the Good because it is Good). My translation. 16 Compare the endlessly repeated lines from Goethe’s Faust 1, which summarize the anti-Christian catechism: “A curse on love’s last consummations! A curse on hope! Faith, too, be cursed! And cursed above all else, be patience!” (lines 1604–1606). With this threefold cursing of the Pauline kerygma of faith, hope, and love, Faust calls for the destruction of the old world. See also line 1660: “Of the beyond I have no thought; when you reduce this world to naught.” Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963). 17 See J. G. Herder, Lieder der Liebe: Die ältesten und schönsten aus dem Morgenlande [The most ancient and beautiful love poetry of the Orient], in Werke 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990), 431–521. Herder wants to adopt the heresy of the

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early church father Theodore of Mopsuestia, who questioned the allegorical meaning of the Song of Songs, in order to free love from its religious burden. 18 Ludwig Feuerbach, Diaries, quoted in Hans Blumenberg, Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde [The practice of theoretical curiosity] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 263 (my translation). 19 Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums [The essence of Christianity] (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2005), 120: “Die Religion ist die Reflexion, die Spiegelung des menschlichen Wesens in sich selbst . . . Gott ist der Spiegel des Menschen” (Religion is human nature reflected in itself, God is the mirror of man). My translation. 20 See footnote 18. 21 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, vol. 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (Toronto: Hogarth, 1971), 102: “According to one ethical view, whose deeper motivation will become clear to us presently, this readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world presents the highest standpoint which man can reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.” 22 Ibid., 121: “It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense, and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.” 23 Ludwig Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros [On cosmogonic Eros], in Philosophische Schriften 3, Samtliche Werke in 8 Bänden (Bonn: Bouvier, 1996), 353–498. 24 See Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, in the famous scene of the Liebesnacht, the night of love, Act II, where the two lovers sing together: “Ohne Nennen. Ohne Trennen. Neu Erkennen. Neu Entbrennen. Endlos Ewig. Einbewusst. Heiss ergluehter Brust. Hoechste Liebeslust.” (Unnamed. Inseparable. New perception. New kindling. Ever endless. Self-knowing. A heart warmly glowing. Love’s supreme joy.) My translation. 25 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Calder, 1962). 26 Ibid., 175. 27 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition, 18:123: “He [the father of the primal horde], at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the ‘superman’ whom Nietzsche only expected from the future.” 28 See Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo, chap. 4, Standard Edition, vol. 13, part 5ff. 29 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 125: “A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt. At this point, too, the fear of being found out

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comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even its thoughts.” 30 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (New York: F. Ungar, 1972), originally published in German (1919), and Hanna Arendt’s Love and St. Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), originally in German (1929), seem to reflect the specific modern dialectic of love, without explicitly referring to it. 31 Barth’s critique led to an ongoing discussion following the 1932 publication of Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis (Munich: Kösel und Pustet, 1932), which was preceded by Barth’s own formulation of the possibility of an “analogia fidei” in Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum: Anselmus Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Denkens [Faith seeking understanding: Anselm’s proof of God’s existence in the context of his theology] (Munich: Chr. Raiser, 1931). Still, this later formula did not change Barth’s attitude toward the “analogia entis” as the fundamental Catholic principle that he defined in the preface to his Die Kirchliche Dogmatik as the principle of the Antichrist! One wonders how much of this “anti-ontological virtue” continues to exist in the present-day phenomenology of “beyond being” now turning its demonological instincts against Heidegger’s ontology as the secular form of this demonology! 32 It is no wonder that Karl Barth stands at the beginning of the renaissance of St. Paul that has influenced phenomenology as well as political theology ever since. Compare with Erik Peterson, “Der Brief an die Römer” (Lectures from 1924), in Ausgewählte Schriften 6 (Wuerzburg: Echter, 1997); Martin Heidegger, Phaenomenologie des religioesen Lebens (with a lecture on St. Paul from 1921), in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 60 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995). On present cultural and philosophical discourse see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jacob Taubes: The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 33 Wycliffe Bible. 34 Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 419 (my translation). 35 Ibid., 420. 36 Ibid., 454ff. 37 Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik 1/2, Paragraph 12: The Time of Revelation.

BEING THE LOVER: THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF MAX SCHELER SHEM SHEMY

In one of the notebooks that would eventually become the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote: “Certainly it would be correct to say—consciousness is the voice of the God.”1 The meaning of this assertion, and the ways in which it is linked to love and morality, forms the core of this paper. In what follows I will attempt to clarify the riddle that obscures the relationship between the consciousness of love and the foundations of moral thought through an examination of the foundations of Scheler’s moral phenomenology. This clarification, which naturally also requires a certain critique of Scheler, will hopefully lead to an explication of one of the most important issues facing modern subjectivity—namely, the search for a moral being. It is a search at least as old as the story of Cain and Abel, specifically the moment when the voice of the Divine sounds in Cain’s ears following the slaying of his brother: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”2 From a Schelerian perspective the voice can be interpreted as the voice of the Divine, which undergoes a transformation from the outward voice of the transcendent God to the immanent plane of Cain’s own consciousness—the consciousness of a murderer. Thus, the mark of Cain becomes a mental scar, etched into the consciousness of the killer. In this way a link is created between the voice of the Divine and moral consciousness. Moral experience is rooted in the manner in which human consciousness is intentionally encountered in its own world. And as readers and auditors of the story, it transforms our consciousness as well. For Scheler, probing one’s own consciousness is the starting point of morality, and it represents a pivotal test confronting modern subjectivity. The question I address in this paper is whether it is possible to consider love as a primordial intentional act of consciousness in order to explain the essence of morality. In order to examine the relationship between the consciousness of love and the foundations of moral thought, a discussion of Max Scheler’s ethics is in order.3 The task is to clarify Scheler’s moral phenomenology, which is founded on the principle of love. Specifically for Scheler, it is the

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presence of the Divine that enables and actualizes the consciousness of love and serves as the basis for a moral and humane existence. Scheler’s book on Nietzschean resentment represents a critical first step toward grasping his understanding of the relationship between morality and love.4 Throughout the book, he makes clear what he considers love to be and how it affords the individual both existential significance and an ethical framework. Scheler offers a historical, anthropological, and psychological analysis of resentment in the classical Greek and European traditions. Nietzsche, of course, presents resentment as the fundamental principle upon which Christian morality rests. Resentment characterizes the weak, and they transform it into the foundational power of morality—the contemptuous morality of slaves.5 Resentment, Nietzsche writes as a result of his genealogical investigation, is born of fear and is the very root of the denial of life. Nietzsche derives the desired, and to his mind exalted, morality from this critique of the morality of slaves. He argues that the Will to Power is the deepest principle of being, which in turn establishes the principle of desiring power—the sign of the supreme man.6 It is the supreme man who reveals the world and thus the experience of the self as a Will to Power. This seeking of power is the desired experience and must be seen as the source of ethical life. It stands in direct opposition to the morality of slaves that Nietzsche identifies in Christianity. While Scheler contends that Nietzsche’s pinpointing of resentment as the source of moral judgment constitutes a shining accomplishment in the field of modern moral philosophy, the characterization of Christian love as the source of resentment is completely wrong. The thrust of Scheler’s book, then, is a refutation of the Nietzschean notion of the parallel between a morality of slaves rooted in resentment and the morality of Christianity; more precisely, it reverses the role of love in Christian morality. Scheler contends that the ethics of resentment are not rooted in Christian morality but rather are a product of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This resentment was further strengthened by the intellectual climate that held sway during the French Revolution. In other words, he argues that from a historical perspective, what developed and consolidated the ethics of resentment was modernity, or perhaps humanitarianism. True Christianity is opposed to such ideas. For Scheler the industrial world and the rise of democracy actualized the ethics of resentment, and these stand in stark opposition to the morality of Christianity, based as it is on love as a positive force and the source of exalted moral values.7 For Scheler, Christian morality stands in opposition to the Greek and Roman traditions8 wherein the phenomenon of love is categorized as sensual (and passionate). For the Greeks and Romans, love was the struggle of the

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sensual to rise to higher planes. The structure of ancient love is such that the lowly strive for something more exalted, while the cosmos is a chain of beings in which each is linked to the one above it. In other words, the beloved is the model that is the object of the lover’s passion. Christian tradition, however, does not define love as passion but as a spiritual intentionality that rises above the psychological mechanism of humanity’s baser natural instincts. Scheler argues that love as such is an act of man’s consciousness and the cornerstone of a moral life.9 Thus, in contradistinction to more ancient conceptions of love, Christian love is the love of the noble for the vulgar, with the paradigm being Jesus’s love for the earthly human sinner. The difference in the essence of Christian love is not the reason for, but rather the result of, the reversal of the direction of love. God is not the eternal and separate goal, like a “distant star”; God is the love of all things that move the world. Christian morality is not based on a supreme benevolence that is external to love—love itself is the realization of this supreme benevolence. Love is a value in and of itself, and it is revealed by its expression: the presence of love in a person is the realization of a being created in the likeness of God. This attitude opposes the neo-Platonic notion of love as a need that identifies an absence and a lack of perfection. It is crucial to apprehend that from a Christian perspective love is a spiritual rather than a sensual act—that it is not the emotional condition conceived by modernity. Love is not a passion or a need that is focused on a certain goal. It is an expression that flowers from the actions of the person. This model of love rejects all the ethical and rational criteria of law and justice. The ethical question “What is proper?” is exchanged for the determination, the moral imperative, that all are worthy of love: friends and enemies, good and evil. Love is in and of itself an immanent value. It needs no emotional, rational, or exterior justification. The act of giving is the most direct and clear expression of love. It is not the end or goal of the act in terms of result but rather the consciousness of love that is significant because it illuminates the soul. The act of giving is a moral one, and it both reveals and realizes man’s spiritual freedom. The wholeness of divine Creation is the realization of love. The Greek logos as a permanent framework that is based on rationality and reflexivity is replaced by a deity whose actions in the world are the realization and empowerment of love—the world is a current of love that expresses the Divine. The consciousness of love is an expression of the voice of the Divine as saturated in our being. The command to “turn the other cheek” is not a call for passivity born of incapacity and the fear of seeking and actualizing revenge, as Nietzsche believed. Rather, turning the other cheek is an example of “being the lover” who acts against his or her natural instincts. This type of action springs from a selflessness that refuses to allow

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mankind’s actions to be dictated by natural, vindictive feelings toward the offender. This also pertains to the Christian asceticism that is the focus of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. According to Nietzsche, asceticism is an expression of degenerate life. Scheler, however, argues the opposite—namely, that asceticism is rooted in the noble and in the vital rejection of the psychological mechanism. This nobility is expressed by the forgoing of the self’s desires and the search for a moral act that is not separate from the love of the Divine. The ascetic is the truly free person who absents himself or herself from the realm of material needs and desires and instead focuses on spiritual intentionality. Love is thereby sanctified and intertwined with the self, while emotions and passions are forgone. Like Nietzsche, Scheler rejects the Kantian notion of “good will” and the rational methods associated with the moral imperative model of morality. But as opposed to Nietzsche, who offers Will to Power as the essence of being and as a principle of activity in the world, Scheler focuses on the existence of the world and of humanity as part of the constant motion of love. It is important to note that as opposed to romantic love as passion or familial love as intimacy, the love he believes to be at the heart of Christian ethics is the product of acts of consciousness, characterized by giving and not by normative rules. Moral understanding springs from the spiritual intentionality of man. Love is not only a form of activity in the world but also of the sensory and conscious acts that characterize humanity. Scheler’s moral understanding is different from Kant’s rational subject or Nietzsche’s willing subject; it is a subject that loves—not the subject that loves one thing or another, but the subject embodied by the realization of love as an immanent force. The subject participates in the continual creation of the world as someone who loves, as someone who neither tramples nor inflicts injury on the Other, neither on body nor on soul, but instead as someone who extends unlimited openness toward giving. The being of the Other is part of what is sensed—that is, the being of the Other exposes the cornerstone of the sensitivity on which morality is based. The next step in an investigation of the relationship between love and morality is to examine the basic assertions of Scheler’s moral phenomenology. Scheler’s ethics are based on the following premise: the meaning of good and evil can be explicated via analysis of how the intentional structure of man’s consciousness operates. The assertions in his book revolve around a discourse on values and the manner in which they are perceived and a rephrasing of the concept of objectivity in the moral sense.10 Scheler considered himself a revolutionary in the field of ethics, indeed a challenger of the underpinnings of Western ethics, particularly as defined by Kant.11

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Central to his refutation of Kantian rationality is a repositioning of “felt intentionality” and the existence of the emotive a priori as the base of moral thought. The founding principle of Kant’s structure of moral knowledge, the rationality of man, is replaced by a definition of human existence as similar to the existence of the Divine-as-love. One of Scheler’s fundamental principles is that moral values cannot be unequivocally defined any more than “Being” can in the philosophical tradition. Values are not characteristics of objects and are consequently not formal realities, nor are they reducible to logic. Scheler argues that a value must be interwoven with something else in order to exist—that is, with the understanding that the imperative to “be moral” is based on feelings. The moral value exists in a complex symbiotic relationship with the other components of the world. For Scheler moral value has a “functional existence” that is not part of the object’s character or its essence but is rather the object’s being as being-felt. A value is exposed by the first intentional act that defines consciousness as a whole: the act of feeling. Feelings that expose the content of values are thus the primordial acts of consciousness. Therefore, man’s emotional field of experience is not in a state of internal and lawless chaos (in need of the a priori skills of logic and rationality, as Kant contends). Rather, it maintains a moral-ethical order that is based on feelings and emotions. This represents a call for a new foundation of rationality that is based on the order of love, which Scheler terms “the logic of the heart” or “the order of love” (ordo amoris). Scheler thus maintains that values are acquired when, and only when, we have felt them. Values are phenomenological experiences that are immediately revealed by man’s consciousness, which is first and foremost an intentionality that is either tangible or emotional. The initial relationship between Self and World occurs via the feeling of values—in other words, via the feeling of something. Consciousness, in its first configuration, is the consciousness of something emotionally felt and not the consciousness of “something thought”; its fundamental actions are sensed. The Kantian a priori is “too empirical” for Scheler in its insistence on an orderly structure that emerges from the relationship between sensuality and pure concepts of experience. The true a priori, for Scheler, is constituted exclusively by “feeling of value” (the emotive a priori). The basic meaning of the phrase “emotive a priori” in Scheler’s thought is explained by his unique understanding of the structure of intentionality. Intentionality is a sensed procedure through which values are revealed and is not a synthesis that the “I” performs regarding the structure of the world. The emotive a priori is content that is already present “there,” in consciousness, before any description or definition that determines the manner in which it is absorbed or

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understood as something meaningful. According to Scheler, this initial input, revealed as defined feeling, consists of facts that establish the immediacy of experience. In the immediacy of experience, “what is given” and “what is meant” are one and the same, wholly inseparable. The emotive a priori exposes the moral aspect of the object or the situation directly, through an immediate feeling and without the need for abstract thought or any other logical skill. It follows from this assertion that the criterion of truth, and as it pertains to us, “value-truth,” does not fall under the aegis of the laws of significance of relations between a word and an object or an exact description of the relationships between objects. Instead, moral truth is what is felt, and it is personally determined and irreducible to other consciousness-related validities, to a formative structure of consciousness, or indeed to any type of relationship between objects in reality. The self-evidence of a value is to be found in the act of emotional preference, with preference here meaning not a choice between two understood options but the immediacy of feeling that represents an understanding of the value content. Throughout his career Scheler employed the tools of philosophy, psychology, and sociology to investigate the significance of love as a way of revealing the internal grammar of morality. This is what he termed “the logic of the heart.”12 The experience of a person as loving and loved is tested as the cornerstone of morality. The deciphering of the theological and phenomenological aspects of love led him to the development of his ethics. Thus, love constitutes the formative power of feeling; it is determinative of morality’s coordinates. Taken as such, love creates the possibility from which moral experience blossoms. The question then arises: What does Scheler believe love to be? Scheler offers an original synthesis between the love that defines the Christian God and moral phenomenology. Therefore, understanding the essence of Scheler’s thought requires an understanding of the meaning of love. We must consider Scheler’s view on the meaning of the being of love and the individual as lover of being and as being loved. This leads to an inquiry into the manner of being of love as a unique selflessness characterized by sensitivity that rises from love and links with God. The subject was created in the image of the Divine-as-love. The configuration of our humanity does not consist of the shape of the body or the power of the intellect but in the biblical sense of “in our image, in our likeness.” According to Scheler, therefore, Divine love constitutes the foundation of human experience. Scheler contends that the subject as self is based on our existence as loving beings. A central issue here is the question of the correlation between the field of

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emotions, which Scheler has marked as the moral spectrum, and its connection to love as intentionality. Scheler posits that values are understood via our senses in an a priori manner, just as colors are understood in a person’s field of vision. Intellect allows us to categorize values but only on condition that they have been experienced. Love as an intentional act does not reveal existing values but rather is, in its essence, the revelation of values that are new to the subject. In this sense love is the formative force of the infrastructure of moral thought; upon its foundations, humanity’s moral world was founded. Love widens and enhances moral knowledge. Scheler rejects the historical dualism in ethics that differentiates between rational and absolute ethics and the ethics of the emotions, which were always defined as empirical and subjective. Human beings are equipped with cognitive abilities that reveal values by way of the different emotional situations that serve as our conduit to experiencing the world. Feelings are the tool we use to create moral knowledge. The act of cognition is experiential, not reflective. In this manner the spectrum of our emotions is what shapes the nature of our values. The values are not given meaning through definition. For example, “responsibility” is not revealed to me by observation of the world that then yields a clear understanding of the term. When I say “I am responsible for my friend’s condition,” it is not so because I have a learned and well-defined understanding of responsibility but because I feel my friend’s distress with my own emotions, and that feeling is, in and of itself, a revelation of the value of responsibility. However, love is not just another emotional bandwidth on the spectrum of feelings. Love has another role as the founder and guide of the emotional field. Love is the intentional principle that grants the person moral consciousness. Love directs the emotions in order to create moral knowledge. These assertions point toward a new and original depiction of the subject. For all intents and purposes, the essence of subjectivity lies not in the “rational being of the subject” or in the “willing subject” but in the man or woman who is defined by a conscious state of love that is identical for all— all are loved through the eyes of the moral lover. Scheler’s ethics is not based on the creation of terms—there is a non-dependency between moral understanding and the learned knowledge of the precise boundaries of a moral concept. For example, I do not need to know what the good is in order for my consciousness to be able to comprehend something as such.13 Ethical qualities are “objective ideals,” much like the qualities of color and tone. The ethical preference is not a choice between different options. The spectrum of emotional preferences is ever changing and dependent on personal narrative and culture, while the spectrum of values is only marginally dependent on the emotional and cultural composition, and the higher the value—holiness for

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example—the smaller the dependency on the emotive and cultural circumstances. The higher the experienced value, the tighter are its ties to the essence of the intentionality of love, while its dependency on the feelings that reveal it diminishes. The higher values are characterized by the inability to divide them or to logically analyze them. A person’s emotional subjectivity does not bar the revelation of values; rather, it enables it, as opposed to the rational ethical methods that negate the importance of emotions in their analysis of the principles of morality. Love adds meaning and significance to the world of emotions. Love is neither an emotion nor a mental state of any kind. It is the principle of being whose expression comes via the spectrum of emotions and through the human capacity for contemplation. Love acts neither as a metaphysical force nor as a conscious mental state but as the intentional basis presupposed in all conscious mentality. Love constructs the manner of operation of consciousness as a sensory procedure that creates emotional significance. To return to the story of Cain and Abel: according to Scheler, the voice echoing in Cain’s consciousness is made present to him by the sight of his brother soaked in his own blood; it is the consciousness of the evil of his actions as revealed by his emotions. Cain butchers his brother, but revelation of evil as a real and objective crime is first and foremost reflected in his consciousness of himself as a murderer. The damage to the perfection of the body of the Other and the slaying of that body signal the disfiguring of the likeness of the Divine. God’s marking of Cain is an external reflection of the internal marking that is etched into the consciousness of the killer. The pain he experiences over the death of his brother leads to the moral revelation “Thou shalt not murder.” The doctrine of moral significance rests on what we are given by the cognitive structure of feelings that are orchestrated by acts of love. The reason behind the prohibition of murder is a principle drawn from the emotional revelation experienced by the killer. The slaying of Abel is the disfigurement of the killer’s likeness to God. Cain, in the act of murder, turns against the voice of moral consciousness that he shares with all humanity. Thus, feelings are not the deceptive screen of the day-to-day but, rather, represent the full spectrum of conscious sensitivity from which moral insight originates. I find it difficult to comprehend what Scheler means and to disconnect myself from the notion of love as a passion—something that springs forth from my own emotional being. Love as the being of humanity, which springs from our conscious experiences in the world, is a slippery concept to grasp. We must expose Scheler’s basic idea of the inner structure of love as intentionality in order to understand how and in what sense love constitutes the moral cornerstone of consciousness.

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A discussion of Scheler’s ideas on the meaning of love requires mapping the systemic phenomenological ties he constructs between moral knowledge and the belief in God. As mentioned above, a parallel is evident between Scheler’s understanding of morality and his presentation of the foundations of the philosophy of religion. The two disciplines, the ethical and the theological, are based upon a set of common understandings. The theological discussion, particularly as concerns the Christian understanding of love, reveals consciousness to be a deep structure of apprehensive acts, directed by love, that form a cognitive mechanism revealing the foundations of moral understanding, thereby enabling the establishment of ethics. We have already noted that knowledge of God develops in a complementary and dialectical manner alongside the development of the intentionality of love. The intentional act, which is consciousness’s primary apprehension and its content (that is, “what is felt”), is a tool with which our emotional world can be erected, and subsequently it constitutes the grounds for moral understanding. The essential point of resemblance between religious praxis and ethical thought lies in the fact that theoretical knowledge cannot, on its own, reveal ethical content; this is only possible within the matrix of religious praxis. The intentional acts of a person’s sensual apprehension are present at every stage of the development of religious knowledge, and therefore theology finds its basis in the intentional situations of moral understanding. Scheler gives clear expression to this position in the following contention: Morally good volition and conduct, conforming to whatever image of divinity hovers before the mind, necessarily govern as a sine qua non the possibility of cognitive advance into the full breadth and depth of deity. For, of all kinds of cognition, knowledge of God is the most inseparable from moral progress.14

Consciousness, which is a continuum of sensual-apprehensive acts, forms the basis for a theory of meaning used as an operator in the creation of knowledge concerning God. Scheler offers an original, innovative approach according to which phenomenology not only constitutes the foundation of all possible sciences and a primary, rigorous methodology of the sciences but also forms the ultimate basis of the science of religion. The intentional act, in which the dynamics link what one feels to what one understands, as well as conscious and sensual openness, constitutes the foundations of religious consciousness. A fascinating derivative of this interpretation is the innovative character of the development of religious consciousness. The discovery of faith in and the divinity of God is not based on a set of rational arguments. Nor is it based on metaphysical assumptions concerning the transcendence of Divinity. Instead, the dynamics of religious consciousness are directed by the epistemological process of active experimentation and, as such, on some level

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these dynamics are identical with the experimental dynamics that characterize the work of the artist. In Part Three of his book The Nature of Sympathy, Scheler creates a novel typology, linking religious experience to the creative process. The observation process, which expresses the artist’s understanding, is derived from the creative act, in this case from painting. The creation of a composition, the expression of the paintbrush, and the focus on certain details are processes that occur within the framework of the painting process. On the face of it, scenery about to be painted is observed by the artist from the very first moment. In reality, however, true observation is constructed and developed within the creative process. Only through work does there emerge a deeper insight into the scenery. The act of painting is the act of creation of perspective—that is, the anchoring of experienced sensations and meanings within the painting process itself. In fact, the active part of painting (sketching, choosing a particular color palette, working in layers of paint, erasing, and so on) is a mirror image of the development of the painter’s selfconsciousness vis-à-vis the content of a painting.15 In parallel, religious consciousness is established through the experienced praxis of prayer and the observance of the law. Meaning emerges from a conscious experience of religious praxis and its significance. A conscious openness, therefore, is common to both the creative process and religious consciousness. Meaning is procedural, since it is the product of a process of the experiences of one’s consciousness. Experience is active, since it involves active work in an experimental format that is dictated by a set of norms and rules yet is directed by the investigation of the emotional meaning one faces, be it a painted landscape or the work of God. Thus, the human consciousness of God comprises a historical dimension of developed meanings obtained through religious praxis. Religious praxis is analogous to the artist’s active consciousness in that it reworks, completes, and adds a set of meanings that crystallize into a set frame only to be continually reworked until the final work of art is formed. In the artist’s work, the painter’s cognitive skills unite and complete each other. The artistic depiction is made possible through the action of painting, just as the consciousness of God is made possible through religious praxis in its entirety, comprising ceremonies, observance of the law, and religious customs and norms. It is important to note that the question at hand does not refer to religious practice in its dogmatic sense—that is, the blind observance of religious commandments and rituals, devoid of inquiry into their meaning. Scheler’s latent argument, rather, is that the essence of artistic activity is the creation of meanings by means of perpetual emotional and experiential inquiry, which are facilitated by religious praxis. This is, in fact, the deep point of similarity

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between the believer and the artist: the act of observing and the practical work process involving emotions and the anchoring of a set of meanings are common to both and define their essence. The artist’s cognitive activities, such as the inspection of the painted object, the act of mixing the paints on the palette, and repeatedly creating various sketches, mirror religious praxis. As a result an understanding of the work of art, or of religious praxis, is conceived by means of that same work or practice. Reflection—that is, the ability to find the proper perspective—is a direct result of one’s action and of one’s emotional participation in the process of creating a religious identity. The conscious acts, which in a parallel manner establish both the artistic process and faith in God, are directed by love as an openness that enables a rich associative context, emotional innovation, and a novel discovery of the unknown. The unknown as the mystical can be apprehended and experienced through the intentional window of love. It bears reiterating that love, for Scheler, is not a feeling but a conscious mode that enables the discovery of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Love enables the human emotional coordinates that are a necessary stage in the exposure of values through the act of feeling and sensing objects and situations in the world. Therefore, just as religious praxis establishes the believer’s identity, one’s moral actions in the world establish one’s moral being. One’s lifelong actions and experiences expose the moral values that constitute a unique identity. The story of Cain and Abel may again serve as an example. Cain’s field of experience exposes him to the evil nature of his action. The shocking visual experience of his brother lying dead in a pool of blood is retained in his consciousness as an inescapable image, a feeling of conscience-scarring guilt. The imprinted scar and the divine punishment are direct expressions of his retrospective understanding of his crime. The divine punishment, “a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth” (Gen. 4:12), expresses the procedure of Cain’s creation of a self-consciousness in relation to his action. In fact the existence of this situation and Cain’s experiences render present to his own consciousness, through his feelings and sensations, the state of his own existence and the moral atrocity he commits. Divine punishment symbolizes this inner awareness. Morality is what appears within the reality of one who experiences and acts in the world. Moral knowledge is acquired in parallel to the development of the emotional and sensual processes. Only through the immediacy of one’s experiences and their emotional processing is moral knowledge created and developed. Intentionality, which appears through the frame of that individual’s subjective and unique experiences, reveals to us the objective hierarchy of values and the value of each individual. The term “the order of love” encapsulates Scheler’s complete notion of

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the function of love as a real and conscious act. In fact “the order of love” is the organizing principle of Scheler’s moral phenomenology, and understanding it in all its different aspects provides a deep insight into the central question regarding the connection between Scheler’s understanding of love and the establishment of morality. This term has two complementary meanings, one normative and the other descriptive. The normative meaning points to a framework of values and to their hierarchy as reflected in one’s moral framework. In this sense love lies at the base of the order of values on which Scheler founds his ethics. The descriptive meaning relates to the realistic order of preferences and moral evaluations executed by individuals in their experiences in the world. In fact in its two expressions, the normative and the descriptive, the order of love enables the existence of the moral plane in a person’s life. In a way the deciphering of the meaning of the order of love is the deciphering of humanity’s moral, spiritual, and social existence. In fact the discovery of this order, according to Scheler, is the discovery of human authenticity beyond the empirical facts of this or that individual’s characteristics and circumstances. The subject is founded on love as the primary condition of existence. Scheler’s description of love is ambivalent in the following sense. At times it is described as consciousness’s reaction to the appearance of values within a person’s field of experience; at other times it is described as a dynamic and creative aspect of the act of consciousness vis-à-vis itself—that is, as a mode of openness that establishes sensations and feelings. In its second sense one can view love not as reactionary but rather as an active, spontaneous act that expresses the modality of one’s intention toward the world. It seems the problem starts exactly with this duality. The use of the term love is partly phenomenological, but it is also based on metaphysical assumptions. The act of love is similar to the process of self-consciousness in the sense of its being the discovery of the values and positions that lie at the basis of experience. Here there is a unique dynamic of a discovery of meanings that are based on an order of experiences that establish feelings and sensations. One notices a duality in the role of love here, which establishes the order of value but simultaneously reveals existence and the manner of experience. The point is that love enables the objective field of value, with its given objective hierarchical structure, while also functioning as a spontaneous activity of consciousness toward the world. Love is also taken here to be a founding principle of being. That is why the human heart is considered a microcosm of the object world of values. To return to Scheler, the subject is defined by the intentional act of love as an innovative openness toward the Other’s entire spectrum of options. The

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subject is like a bridge or a passage. The dynamic and renewing element within the subject is the conscious openness toward sensible data. Lived experience is rendered fully palpable through the innovative dynamics of an active consciousness that regards the Other as a revelation and a true mirror image of God’s existence: “Man” in this new sense is the intention and gesture of “transcendence” itself; he is the being that prays and seeks God. . . . God is the sea and man is the rivers. And from their original gushing forth from their very origin, the rivers are aware of the sea towards which they are flowing.16

The subject is motivated by the power of love—that is to say, the activity in which the subject comes to his or her realization is powered by the order of love. In fact human activity is powered by love, which acts as part of the active establishment of the Godly. Love enables us to see beyond, to see beauty in the physically ugly and nobility in the base. In so doing love simultaneously enables the existence of both spirituality and rationality and is in fact a condition for their existence. Scheler claims that the spectrum of values is infinite and that everyone unveils in the course of life a limited number of values. To the question of how love functions as a tool that individuals can use to discover these new values, Scheler answers in the following manner: cognitive apprehension is a function of the possibility of love. The more one acts, reacts, and creates out of love, the wider and deeper the moral stance becomes. From this I would conclude that moral sensitivity is basic to all moral development. Experienced sensations—and at a more developed stage, feelings—establish the theory of meaning common to all. The essence of the subject is expressed as a lover. That is why love precedes all forms of knowledge: religious, scientific, and moral. The principle offered by Scheler is that love is the necessary condition and the sole basis for the development of knowledge. The dialogue between the individual and God is thus a dialogue of lovers. The Godhead is like a mysterious wheel that creates love within the subject, and it is only through this creation that the subject develops cognitive and accumulative knowledge. A disposition of love is established by God and is directed toward us, enabling the love of the Other as well. In other words the loving person cannot harm other people. The notion of God’s image was impressed upon human consciousness by God so as to enable the emergence of individuality. The harming of one’s fellow is a reference to the harm done to one’s spirituality. Thus, love functions as a criterion that shapes one’s moral attitude toward others. The moral attitude that is derived from love is characterized by its openness to alterity and to the unknown. Love is neither an appropriative act nor an act that consists in controlling or fashioning

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another. On the contrary its true essence regards the Other as a dynamic presence possessing a wealth of meanings and possibilities. Love enables an experiential observation, which in turn facilitates an understanding of what lies beyond empirical and factual reality, and in that sense it unveils totality as a mode of divine revelation in the Other. Through the motion of love toward the Other, I identify that person as being of value. From this double use of “the order of love” (ordo amoris), problematic issues arise. Scheler’s approach to the concept of love as a basis for any act of intentionality is interesting but at the same time misleading: love sometimes represents itself as the primordial act of consciousness but, as we found when we examined the term the “order of love,” Scheler’s ideas are also guided by a wider framework—namely, the metaphysics of love. This means that the notion of Love in Scheler’s philosophy is like Nietzsche’s Will to Power: the primordial and only principle of being. The inner metaphysical structure of being as love has to shape the morality of the individual by exposing the self as a lover of being. If this is so, two interesting questions have to be answered. First, can the search for a model of a moral being be established without any metaphysical background? Second, is there a way to use Scheler’s conception of love as an act of intentionality in order to structure ethics without presuming the presence of God as a metaphysical force? Another problem is the position according to which love is the inner structure that forms rationality. This position is held by Scheler but is not demonstrated by him. The idea that any rationality is based on what is sensed and that sensuality is based on love as a primordial structure of the consciousness does not seem to explain how love actually forms the rational being of a person. This same point holds true for Scheler’s position regarding the dependency of all knowledge on love. If, like Scheler, we consider knowledge as connected to rationality and, as we have seen, the connection between love and rationality is not systematically explained by him, then we must provide a better explanation of this connection. On the other hand, powerful insight can be derived from the resemblance that Scheler suggests between artistic and religious processes, using the creative role of love in both. This leads to an interesting final point. Can we investigate love as a conceptual key for the creation of a new and detailed moral language that is based on the richness of sensitivity as a starting point for morality?

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Notes 1

See Ludwig Wittgenstein, entry for July 8, 1916, in Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 75e. 2 Gen. 4:1–8, King James Bible, “Authorized Version,” Cambridge Edition. All quotations from the Bible are from this source. 3 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 4 Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1913), 10. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), 1067. 7 Scheler, Ressentiment, 29–49. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 This is the overall theme of Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. 11 Immanuel Kant, General Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 12 Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 98–135. 13 Scheler, Formalism, 85–111. 14 Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man (London: SCM Press, 1960), 265. 15 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 251–253. 16 Max Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Press, 1919), 186 (my translation from the original).

NEOSEXUALITIES AND SELF-SEX: ON CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF SEXUALITY AND GENDER IN WESTERN SOCIETIES1 VOLKMAR SIGUSCH

Introduction The generalized form of sexuality—our sexuality, that is—became possible only because human suffering was no longer predominantly a matter of hunger and because all human wealth was isolated and socialized as such. As time passed, it gradually became impossible to limit discussion of the “sexual question,” which is only one aspect of the “social question,” to the institution of sexual dimorphism and approaches to encouraging or discouraging reproduction. At the close of the nineteenth century, the sexual question became one with the question of the meaning of life, of happiness and passion, of harmony in ecstasy, of the human aspects of relationships between human beings. That, in turn, was possible only because the bourgeois had established the idea of free, egalitarian, individual love as a moral standard: love as [a] fundamental human right extended to both man and woman, love as a voluntary compact between autonomous subjects based upon the premise of reciprocal love, love affairs as lasting and intense relationships of conscience. Attentive to such developments, Hegel wrote back then that the image of a better, a more just era has enlivened people’s souls, and a longing, a sigh of yearning for a state of greater purity and freedom has touched the minds of all and estranged them from reality.2

The present appeared as “zeitgeist,” as temporary, as “a gradual process of deterioration.”3 Mentalities and concepts of change emerged: mobility, crisis, development, progress, emancipation, revolution, et cetera. Yet because the autonomous citizen, involved in a process of decline from the very moment of birth, remained estranged from reality—not least of all because he had degraded the female gender to the status of a sexus sequior, a derivative

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gender—the “sighing” went on, suffering remained a part of life, people retained a sense of discomfort within their culture. And thus they plodded on from one sexual revolution to the next.

The banalization of sexuality It is during intervals between significant and unmistakable transformations of sexuality as a cultural form that most people most firmly believe that sexuality is something unified and unalterable. In truth, however, it is a composite, an associated phenomenon that is subject to continuous change and recoding. Accordingly, all modern theories of sex and sexuality since Ramdohr (1798), Kaan (1844), Ulrichs (1868), Krafft-Ebing (1886), and Freud (1905) address the question of which aspects of sexus—what we now refer to as sex and gender—are natural/healthy/essential and which are unnatural/pathological/ constructed.4 For several decades, theorists have also reflected upon the way in which people in our culture consistently attach new meanings to things that appear unalterable. Thus, for example, sexual practices such as cunnilingus and fellatio, long regarded as abnormal, are “suddenly” experienced as entirely normal. Whereas Freud and others labeled these practices as “perverse” in the early years of the twentieth century, Kinsey et al. (1953) made it quite clear at mid-century that they had become widespread amongst the normal population—a scientific shock from which moral America took many years to recover.5 Today we eat, see, hear, live, work, love, suffer, and die differently than did our parents or grandparents. Yet, unlike people in other cultures, we have remained primarily concerned for two centuries with the material and manifest rather than the non-material and spiritual satisfaction of greed and curiosity. Physical needs and urges are not controlled in reflected moderation as in European antiquity or in ancient China, much less artfully suppressed as in ancient India. In our society they are satisfied without constraints and without art, and generally at a very low level of ritual and reflective consciousness. Fed on such a diet, greed and curiosity remain present and ready to be rekindled with ease at the next opportunity. But that is precisely the point in the empirical, economic society of exchange and knowledge in which we live. This mechanism of self-centered, short-term satisfaction appears to be the secret behind the durability of this particular societal formation. The supposedly whole and complete sexual form is fragmented again and again in order to ascribe new desires and meanings to it, to implant new urges and new fields of experience, to market new practices and services. In some cases, change takes place rapidly over a period of just a few decades.

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Somewhat older readers will remember the hullabaloo referred to in the late 1960s as the “sexual revolution.” Those years witnessed the enthronement of King Sex and the denunciation of all previously existing sexual relationships as pathological or, to be more precise, normopathic and the “happy family” as totally destructive. Sexuality was attributed such power that some became convinced that its release from bondage could bring the whole society to its knees, as Wilhelm Reich (1936) once promised.6 Others held up sexuality as the source of human happiness par excellence. Generally speaking, it was to be practiced as early, as often, as diversely, and as intensely as possible. Reproduction, monogamy, fidelity, virginity, and abstinence were regarded as the products and the essence of repression, the enemy that had to be vanquished. The propagandists refused to see that “emancipation” would also be accompanied by new forms of inhibition, internal and external, new problems, and old anxieties. They even advocated sexual intercourse in schools. No such talk is heard today. The heights of ecstasy and transgression for which the generations caught up in the sexual revolution yearned are now viewed through critical eyes conditioned by concern with such issues as gender difference, sexual violence, the experience of sexual abuse, and the risk of HIV infection. For nearly twenty years, these matters have dominated scholarly discussion. Empirical studies reveal that they represent the greatest concerns of youth and young adults today. Clearly, sexuality is no longer discussed and mystified in positive terms as the great metaphor for desire and happiness. Instead, it is seen in a negative light as the source and breeding ground of suppression, inequality, and aggression. The strong symbolic meaning associated with sexuality at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, during the 1920s, and in the late 1960s seems to have waned, as the promises of the most recent revolt would suggest. Sexuality is no longer an issue of prominence; it has been largely banalized. Like egotism and mobility, it is simply taken for granted by many people today. The Vatican is the only cultural institution that still strives to blow sexual appetite and desire out of all proportion by subjecting them to sanctions—an interesting observation at a time in which the exaggerated and ceaseless cultural display of desire quite obviously fragments desire more effectively, casting it literally to the four winds, than any repressive measure could do. I refer to the combined processes of dissociation and association of the old sphere of sexuality, the dispersion of sexual fragments and the diversification of sexual relationships that took place during the 1980s and the 1990s as the “neosexual revolution.”7 This quiet reevaluation and rearticulation of sexuality as a cultural form is probably much more consequential than the changes wrought during the “sexual revolution.”

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From gender difference to self-gender The seeming unity of sexuality was taken apart and reassembled once again through the neosexual revolution. Whereas the old sexuality, which I refer to as “paleosexuality,” revolved primarily around sex drive, orgasm, and the heterosexual couple, “neosexualities” consist for the most part of gender difference, self-love, thrills, and prosthetic substitution. Following the separation of what is now quite naturally referred to as the “sexual” sphere from what was left as the non-sexual (which took place above several centuries ago and grandly coincided with the cultural birth of our sexuality), the sexual sphere was dissociated from the reproductive sphere, not least of all as the consequence of such medical-technical achievements as oral contraception. So complete was this separation that there were times in which people assumed the two had nothing whatsoever to do with one another. The removal of reproduction from the sexual sphere represents something like a “second cultural birth” of sexuality—the dawn of a seemingly autonomous, “pure” form of sexuality. Gradually, of course, the now isolated sphere of reproduction itself was fragmented—with earth-shaking consequences. The fetus, once considered a mere appendage to the female body, is now attributed a life of its own. In principle, at least, the processes of conception and embryonic development have been shifted out of the female body. Methods used to transfer stem cells and embryos break through the once supposedly insurmountable barriers of germ plasma, blood ties, and generational succession, violating the old rules of nature. Thus “life” and “death” are subject [to] continual recoding and metamorphosis—a generalized process that strikes me as characteristic of Western societies.8 Thanks to the technique of cloning, we can now imagine the possibility of human “parthenogenesis,” a process of self-creation the theorists of autopoiesis would have loudly applauded.9 The significance of this technological quantum leap is that it means reproduction can take place not only asexually but independent of gender. Thus the genders are separated categorically in an entirely new way: men and women are no longer inevitably bound together in an existential sense nor irreversibly dependent upon one another in biotic terms. While human cloning remains a largely abstract matter, despite the fact that human embryos were cloned as early as 1993, new reproductive technologies now in widespread use produce completely new germ-plasma and familial relationships when, for example, embryonic eggs or ovaries are transplanted, enabling the egg recipient to bear a child whose genetic mother was never born; or when a grandmother carries an egg transplanted from her daughter and fertilized by her son-in-law and ultimately brings her own

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grandchild into the world; or when a woman declared clinically dead in accordance with prevailing medical wisdom carries a living child in her womb; or when women bear children long after menopause from “young” eggs of their own that have previously been frozen. We should note that, thanks to much higher life expectancies in the affluent countries, these “old” mothers have a greater chance of living longer to care for children created in this way than the average twenty-year-old mother one hundred years ago. Should this development continue, in which a sperm donor, and egg donor, a surrogate mother, and the future “social parents” enter into a dissociative relationship, social parents, rather than biological parents, will become the center of focus. The separation of reproduction from sexuality, the historical roots of which can be traced far into the past, was followed in the 1970s, and particularly in the 1980s, by the dissociation of the sexual sphere from the sphere of gender relations—a characteristic feature of the neosexual revolution. Female (and thus also male) sexuality was redefined and linked, categorically and paradigmatically, to gender. The man-woman dichotomy was questioned, and all things andromorphic, including views and concepts, were deconstructed in a process that intruded even into the realms of logic and mathematics.10 In response to the demands of political and academic feminism, the old sexual relationships were increasingly redefined, even in sexual science, as gender relationships. For many the crux was no longer the sex drive and its vicissitudes (in the sense of consequences for the subject originating in early childhood, a concept introduced by Freud) but was now gender and gender difference. Accordingly, many people were able to conceive of sexuality without drives but not without gender. “Gender studies,” popped up like mushrooms from the fertile soil of discourse, forcing psychoanalytical drive theory into the background. Even perversion, once regarded as the epitome of compulsive sexual behavior, was desexualized and redefined as a gender identity disorder. This trend became evident in the work of Stoller in the mid-1970s.11 Today we have finally come to recognize “female perversions” in a variety of forms, as Louise J. Kaplan contends— albeit without sexual manifestations, in the absence of which a veteran sexual scientist, one who by no means underestimates the power of discourse, would hardly speak of “perversions.”12 Interestingly enough, the—previously unexposed—roots of feminist gender discourse lie in a tendency toward sexological differentiation that was for the most part clinically motivated and pursued as early as the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by scholars involved in research on intersexualism.13 This debate revolved around the distinction between “sex” and “gender role” and between the latter and “gender identity,” dimensions previously accepted

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without question as indistinct from one another. One of the outcomes for which modern medicine is largely responsible is that a former man, known in insider jargon as a “bio-man,” can, as a woman, known in the scene as a “neo-woman,” marry a former woman as a man—and that with the full blessing of the law in a number of Western countries. Thus we recognize an attempt to cancel the distinction legally and socially through a process of inversion due to its cultural impact on fundamental matters of existence. Accordingly, natural scientists and medical researchers have stepped up efforts to link not only sexual orientation but also gender identity to genes and gene products, brain structures, and hormone balances.14 However, the transsexuals who ratified the painstakingly constructed system of two major genders by deliberately opting for one or the other find themselves surrounded by groups of people who have joined forces beyond the pale of medicine and psychotherapy in an effort to escape the old order. Alongside transgenderists and gender blenders, who pick and choose from the gender repertoire, choosing what most pleases them or most irritates others, we are now hearing for the first time from a group of people who refer to themselves as “intersexuals.” The group has even established an Internet presence (for example, Intersex Society of North America: http://www.isna.org). These intersexuals issue pamphlets, found organizations, attend conferences, formulate appeals to lawmakers, and publicize tortures assigned by the medical community, often throughout childhood and adolescence. While only relatively few people are concerned, fascinated, or tormented by these changes, the contemporary gap between the spheres of gender and sexuality has itself generated a new kind of dissociation, regarded as long overdue in historical terms, that affects the two main genders as a whole. For instead of a single sexuality, we now have male sexuality and a female form of sexuality that is no longer measured against the male model, no longer represents the negative of male sexuality but, thanks above all to the women’s movement and feminism, is viewed as an autonomous phenomenon among increasingly large circles of society and can also be experienced by young women, not least of all because young men no longer set the tone in sexual matters within these circles. But let us return to sex and gender. In the eyes of the theorists who set the tone for this discourse in the course of the neosexual revolution, both sex and gender were culturally constructed, devoid of natural foundations and thus subject to subversion and change. The debate took on fundamentalist overtones where gender was given precedence over sex. And the development of theory was complicated by the fact that women who were neither middle-class nor white nor openly nonheterosexual insistently laid claim to the different realities of their lives. For such general categories as

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gender and femininity are indeed rendered both epistemologically and politically questionable by fundamental differences in ethnic background, social class, or sexual preference. The current state of gender discourse would suggest that gender itself has now been overcome, as cultural dichotomy and physical dimorphism—the binary aspect—are (to be) negated theoretically through deconstruction and politically through subversion in the interest of self-empowerment.15 “Sapere aude! Have the courage to exploit your own difference subversively!” Such a variation on Kant’s famous formula for enlightenment (1784) could serve as a slogan for this most recent meta-physical form of feminism.16 The outcome is supposed to be something akin to “self-sex” and “self-gender,” produced autonomously and regulated independently. The goals of classical, physical-political feminism—respect and equality—and the insights that emerged from difference-theory feminism, that is, the concept of genders as transsubjective effects of discourse, are left far behind by the idealism and the breathtaking optimism of the feminism that is causing such furor today. The subversive will to achieve self-empowerment appears capable of neutralizing the material character of both social formations and discourses.

The desire for self-stimulation To the certain delight and horror of producers within the sex industry, potency researchers have, during the past decade, extracted a number of items from the dusky light of sex shops, masturbation cabins, and the fetishist, sadomasochist scene and placed them under the glaring light of postmodern medicine, thus finally bringing them across the threshold to the realm of acceptability and utility. To their own astonishment, a great many urologists and other erection specialists suddenly found themselves focusing on vacuum constriction devices in their efforts to treat erection disorders during the 1980s. What is new today is that the numerous items found in sex shops occupy the gray area between self-therapy and medical treatment. The old wall that once separated sex articles and healing aids has been torn down. Accordingly, the producers of Viagra, the new sex pill, insist that the substance is a medication which only a physician can prescribe on the basis of a conscientious medical assessment. At the same time, however, the public is being whipped into a frenzy in a carefully planned advertising campaign, while investors speculate on the shudder of renewed pleasure expected to overtake the male gender: the prospect of potency, at any time, whenever the urge arises! The “stronger sex” has dreamed of just that for thousands of years and employed virtually every conceivable means to achieve it: amber

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and civet, musk and strychnine, Mimosa pudica and Phallus impudicus, Panax quinquefolium and Atropa mandragora, that is, Chinese ginseng and Germanic mandrake, the Crown of Aphrodite, the tongue of the isop bird, Spanish fly, Cydonian apples, pulverized rhinoceros horn, and so on and so forth. But all of these so-called potency-enhancing substances either have failed to show any appreciable effect or, once medicine entered the picture, have been associated with substantial risks and side effects. It remains to be seen whether any of the alleged potency enhancers sold prior to the market launch of Viagra, such as Yohimbin, for example, will play a role in the future. It is highly likely, however, while two of the most frequently-used approaches to the treatment of impotence during the past several decades seem certain to decline in popularity: the surgical implantation of prosthetic elements and the injection of vasoactive substances directly into the penis. The fact that these two methods now face competition from a non-invasive technique is a development to be welcomed. The practice of stiffening the penis with surgically inserted materials causes irreversible impairment of its swelling capacity, thus exacerbating in the long run what it was meant to combat: impotence. In imitation of the penis bones of certain animals, segments of bone and cartilage were used for this purpose as long ago as the 1930s. During the 1970s and 1980s, before the triumphal march of vasoactive substances, prosthetic devices were developed to increasing degrees of perfection with the aim of making erections at the press of a button a reality: rigid, semirigid, and flexible elements, prostheses that could be inflated with a pump in the scrotum and even devices that could be filled from a built-in fluid reservoir. Such devices were implanted in tens of thousands of patients in the span of a single decade, in many cases, as we now know, following a ten-minute consultation with a urologist, at best. This rude advance was not halted by criticism from the scientific community but by the appearance of other potency-enhancing substances on the market. I am referring here to such vasoactive substances as papaverine, an opium alkaloid, and phentolamine, an alpha-receptor blocker that could be injected by the patient into his own penis to make it stiffen. This by no means risk-free treatment technique is called autoinjection therapy. During the 1980s, it became by far the most frequently employed approach to the treatment of erection disorders, overtaking even psychotherapy in popularity. This story began in a somewhat unusual way in the early 1980s, when a researcher speaking at an annual conference of the American Urological Association in Las Vegas presented an unforgettable demonstration of the effect of vasoactive substances. At the end of his address he pulled down his pants and showed the audience an erection induced by just such a substance. The horrified response triggered by this demonstration among the attending

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urologists has been attributed by some to the fact that many of them had never seen another man’s penis in that state. If that is true, things have changed considerably thanks to autoinjection therapy. The treatment enjoyed overwhelming success. Before the era of Viagra, hundreds of thousands of patients all over the world were treated in this manner. Within only a few years, hundreds of publications appeared, and patients lined the streets along the triumphal parade route by the thousands. Apart from the fact that it caused massive “venous leaks” in the penile blood circulation system, autoinjection therapy appeared to work under any given circumstances. Well-known sexologists voiced high praise for the “new injection treatment”: “After millennia of searching in vain for the Holy Grail, we are finally reaching the age of true aphrodisiacs.”17 Knowledgeable observers spoke of “turning points” and “unforgettable milestones,” that would change “forever the old, erroneous way of thinking of impotence.”18 Yet, as has been the case with all of the techniques and preparations welcomed as remedies for impotence with such enthusiastic clamor in the modern era, these dreams faded as well. The new verdict on autoinjection therapy, that “marvelous new technology,”19 was already coming in even before Viagra arrived on the market. The range of symptoms for which it could be used grew increasingly small, claims of positive effects for certain groups of patients were clearly refuted, significant complications could no longer be overlooked, and an increasing number of disappointed patients discontinued treatment, having realized that physicians could not deliver what they had expected. It will be a wonder indeed if the miracle drug Viagra does not suffer a similar fate within the next ten years, despite its discoverers’ claims that sildenafil, the active ingredient marketed under the Viagra name, demonstrably intervenes in the local penile engorgement process. Perhaps that is why Emile Laënnec recommended using a medication only as long as it is new. For in ten years it will no longer be researchers, lavishly supplied with funds by manufacturers, who set the tone but rather those who (still) refuse to allow firms devoted to profit-making to dictate how they conduct their research. Most impotent men will have turned away in disappointment once again, their maniacal faith in a method, in a pill that promises sexual pleasure and satisfaction, dashed on the hard ground of reality. As “pure” somatical therapy and as autotherapy, treatment with medication ignores existing personal and interpersonal conflicts, intervening mechanically into the psycho-social structures within which functional sexual disorders (and even artificially generated “chemical potency”) become meaningful at all— such as the delicate balance of a couple’s relationship, which, however “neurotic” it may be, is disturbed by such a procedure.

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Erectiologists will continue to come up with new triumphs in the form of new substances. Today insiders suggest that practically all of the major pharmaceutical companies are keeping allegedly sex-enhancing substances under wraps. When the next such preparation hits the market, the world press, led by Newsweek, will loudly hail a new “sex drug,” while the Wall Street Journal electrifies stockholders with the prospect that a “genuine aphrodisiac” has finally been discovered. And it goes without saying that the medical community will respond as it has so many times in the past: with experiments on animals, tests on human subjects, publications by the thousands, conferences by the hundreds, fifty new jobs for super-scientists, ten special departments at universities, five new manuals, for which the title of titles has already been reserved by Hashmat and Das: The Penis.20

Prosthetics and e-sex In the light of what I have just described above, we recognize, during the 1980s and 1990s, another aspect of dissociation in the separation of sexual experience from the sphere of physical response. By triggering an erection mechanically, surgically, or through medication, medical specialists artificially isolate sexual appetence, erection, and potency from one another. As a result, a man can, without sensing a sexual urge and often without experiencing any of the psycho-physical sensations that have traditionally been associated with sexual experience, “function sexually” and practice the sex act as that which it has always tended to be in our culture: performance. The medical specialist’s dream of the perfect prosthetization of sexual functions, the embodiments of which make a corpse of the body and are thus disembodiments themselves, corresponds to the more generalized dream of prevention of the physical, of the disembodiment of sexuality and gender. The current media-induced climax and extension of this dream is the prospect of outwitting the old duo of sexuality and anxiety that causes impotence, by taking a drug called Viagra. Beyond the realm of medicine, the dissociative processes that separate emotional-social experience and physical response are either readily recognizable or impossible to predict at this time. One immediately thinks of the structures of telephone sex, so-called TV partner encounters, sexually tinged faking, and what might be called e-sex: electronic sexual activity on the Internet. At the moment it still appears as if there were nothing else at work here than the familiar attempt to sexualize a new technology to the extent possible, as has happened with photography, the cinema, the telephone, records, radio, Super-8 film, television, the copier, the video recorder, the telefax machine, CDs, the scanner, et cetera. At the moment,

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everything is more or less thrown together on the web: genders, attractions, capabilities, preferences, et cetera. Everything is both concrete and abstract, real and virtual. Everyone knows the score, and no one has any idea at all what is going on. Inhibiting and demeaning distinctions are erased; old boundaries, such as the dividing line between producers and consumers, are blurred. The Internet seems to encourage producing consumers to engage in self-design; more and more so-called amateurs are displaying their godless bodies to the world, as if to show advertising what the real world really thinks. And of course the web enables people with rare perversions to contact one another on a global scale. Otherwise, however, e-sexers remain as lonesome as they have always been, still unable to form alliances that would afford them comfort and peace of mind. They gather anachronistically at websites offering pornographic pictures for viewing and downloading free of charge. What remains is the erotic-sexual chat offering unprecedented opportunities for arousal and encounter and, of course, cybersex in the narrower sense of the term, which is still more fiction than reality, however. Presently as safe from harm as the pilot training on a flight simulator, the cybersexer seeks to leave body-oriented paleosexuality behind, although he is as yet unaware of the dangers of electronic copulation inevitably posed by a productive reification of this dimension as long as the actors can still be regarded as having bodies and souls of the old variety. Cybersex equipment of the body still offers no satisfaction at all, because an old-fashioned question still cuts through the noise of the new virtuality: How can I gain control of the (paleo) body? At the same time, however, cybersex reveals a generalized process in which sensual and perceptual structures are redefined, a trend that is part of a transition to a different culture. At any rate, the old myths are already shrinking, leaving behind mere points and lines. Whether it will ever be possible to create a new association of flesh and electronics on a mass scale (and not merely in laboratory experiments) is a question that will be decided by a science like bionics, which is already uniting biology and engineering, living body cells and computerized machines, living and dead material, with increasing efficiency. The digitization of the analog world, the copying of natural things and processes, and the extreme miniaturization of technology have paved the way for achievements that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Thanks to nanotechnology, cyberstick surgery, and the simulated patient, the old bioprosthetics, pumps, shunts, valves, pacemakers, et cetera, now belong to the age of rudimentary technology. Today, eyes and ears, arms and legs, retinas, bladders, and sphincters are being replaced, and thoughts are transferred without physical form to computers. The phantasmagorias of bionics have been populating the globe with tremendous

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commercial success as androids, high-tech zombies, or clones in such films as Terminator, Robocop, Blade Runner, and Universal Soldier for years. If this process is transposed into mass culture, sexual actions could well consist of immediate digital interaction and the association of fantasies of an unlimited number of people in the near future.

From libido to destrudo I would like to mention another form of dissociation at least briefly: the separation of the old sphere of the libido from that of destrudo in the course of the 1980s. As a result of this process, set in motion by the women’s movement and political feminism, the aggressive, divisive aspects of sexuality were so completely divorced from the tender and unifying aspects that the former uniformly overshadowed the latter. What was imagined for a brief moment in history as “pure” sexuality became manifestly “impure.” The shadows cast by feelings of fear, repulsion, shame, and guilt grew so dark and wide that many women, and consequently men as well, were unable to see any ray of light at all. Feelings of closeness, joy, tenderness, excitement, and pride, of pleasure, affection, and comfort seemed doomed to suffocate in a discursive storm of emotions dominated by fear, hate, anger, envy, bitterness, and revenge. Pornography and sexography demeaning to women, sexual harassment in the workplace, everyday sexism, incest, rape, sexual abuse of children, and sexual violence committed against women—these are watchwords we all know well. Once regarded as isolated and mentally ill, the compulsive offender became a ubiquitous, ordinary sex criminal, abuser, and rapist. Men were seen categorically as horny, violent, and impotent. In its political form, this dissociation emerged in new penal sanctions that revoked the distinctions between morality and law (and thus the state’s right to punish) achieved (in part) during the 1960s and 1970s. Initially, the focus of the dissociation of the aggressive-divisive from the tender-unifying aspects of sexuality was the male. Soon, however, its effects touched every individual in society. We now find not only women in heterosexual relationships classified as offenders, and thus assigned roles as subjects rather than victims only, but also men recognized as victims.21 Moreover, incidents of violence have come to light in both male-male and female-female relationships, which were previously tabooed as subcultural phenomena and overlooked by sexual research. The most recent attempt to expose destruction and violence is focused upon women who have sexually abused children. And it comes as no surprise to learn that homes for men who have fled their homes, allegedly battered by their wives, have recently been established in Scandinavia.

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Because we are concerned here with “discours” as defined in discourse theory,22 and not merely with discussions and debates, nothing and no one can escape this process of exposure and scrutiny. Yet the classical image of the offender is still that of “the man,” which is not at all surprising in view of the fact that the structures of patriarchism have endured despite all progress toward modernization and that the scandalous discrimination against the female gender increases at times of economic crisis. Viewed optimistically, the current discourse on violence and abuse appears as an emphatically civilizing process. After all, it alone has made us aware of how firmly our sexuality is grounded in overpowering and asymmetry. Regarded more pessimistically, it can be understood as a metaphor for a generally false life in which there can be neither harmony nor sound use.

Sexual dispersion and shop-sex Structural change in forms of sexuality and gender is also characterized by a second major process, which I refer to as “sexual dispersion.” On the one hand, this process uproots people and makes them anonymous; on the other, it links them together within a network and provides entertaining distraction. When emerging new constructs relieve old tensions, doubts, and fears, new ones appear to fill the void. We now witness a trend toward sexual and gender dispersion of which past generations could hardly have dreamed. It is evident not least of all in the tormented and tormenting actors of discourse who currently populate the stage of Eros and Anteros. The cast of fragmentary characters that concern us today as figures of discourse are the mother who loves too much or too little and therefore always inappropriately; the physically or mentally absent father; the sexually abused child; the sexist man; the iron-willed, masculine man; the woman plagued by sexological inappetence; the woman with an erotic continuum and without clear, fixed preferences; the sex tourist; the electronically dispersed pervert; the single; the surgically pacified sexual doubter; the gender-blender just this side of surgery; the gay man who conscientiously practices safe sex; the same-sex couple given the blessing of the church; the self-lover; the sex faker; the futurist cybersexer; and above all, the historically and socially asymmetrical, culturally dissociated, emotionally distrustful, philosophically aporetic heterosexual couple—truly a post-Hegelian Enlightenment corps of modernized representatives of Anteros. The dispersion of sexual fragments, segments, and lifestyles is largely a by-product of commercialization. The key phrases in this context are “recruitment of the erotic into the service of merchandising aesthetics” and “sex industry.” Hoping to refute the thesis that our sexuality has become a

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commodity, a position that emerged in the course of the Marx renaissance that accompanied the student movement, I attempted to expose the fundamental flaw in the argument years ago in “The Mystification of the Sexual.”23 If that were true, I contended, the human being and the commercial good would be identical; people would be living not only under the influence of illusion, not only with and in illusion but indeed for the sake of illusion only. At the time, however, I could not have imagined the degree of commercialization we now experience today. Self-awareness, regarded as a specifically human attribute, has increasingly become a correlative of human products; it becomes one with them, just as human sensuality has been linked with commercial goods for generations. Thanks to the increasing commercialization of sexuality and love, currently observable phenomena of dissociation and dispersion in the sexual sphere become physical, in a certain sense, and thus palpable. To a certain extent, at least, they represent an attempt to package as many different fragments and segments as possible in the form of goods and to subject them to the exchange principle: from media self-exposure to sexography on television to brown prostitution; from flirt schools, partner brokering, the production of chastity belts or penis coverings à la Apple-of-Eden condoms to sex tourism and the sadistic torture of children. There can be no question: packageable and therefore salable sex, which I refer to as “shop-sex,” is the dream vision of this societal process. At the same time, the sex industry in the narrower sense of the term is still regarded by the naive as an anomaly in our culture. In fact, however, it is an entirely logical and essential part of that culture. It fits the prevailing pattern, the principle that everything can be purchased, consumed, and thus destroyed. And so we respond with anachronistic or false horror when we realize just how many things have been turned to commercial use and now have their price on the free market: sperm and egg cells, embryos and children, love parades and gay games, the consciences of presiding judges and social workers, the fascist remarks of an alcoholic entertainer, the disease of AIDS and the world’s misery as an entertainment spectacle, the adulterous affair as service, science and art as factors in assessing business locations, sympathy, empathy, and impotence, the security concerns of the rich and the athletic achievements of the poor, and so on, and so on. In Germany the only thing that is “not for sale at this time,” as his manager recently commented, is a star soccer player. The testing stations of the sex industry are called sex shops in this country. Sex shops are but one of the products of our culture’s failure to develop an art of loving, an ars erotica. Instead we have created marital hygiene and “ethnic hygiene,” sexual reform and sex education, pornography and sexual science, which are distinguishable often only in nuances. The

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purpose of these testing stations is to establish what can be sold, face to face, to men and lately, though only very gradually, to women as well: leather, patent leather, latex, rubber or PVC, penis rings and vagina balls, artificial vaginas and penises, erotic undergarments, sweet boobs or high heels, discipline equipment, corsages or clisters, erotic photographs, “malefic” or comics, body visions, fetish images or erotic CDs, sex dolls or sexy robots.

From political pornography to cliché copulation Despite all of these transformations and liberalizing trends, the question of whether sexography is dangerous will continue to concern us because sex remains alloyed with anxiety. Subjectively speaking, what makes “hard” sexualia so dangerous is the fact that they evoke fantasies of power and submission, that they remind us that destruction and aggression are essential ingredients of our sexuality, that the most secret and fervent wish associated with sexually arousing material is to be rid of what binds and controls us: conscience, shame, the ego. The fear of transgression is so widespread because destruction is a real fact of our civilization, because the destructive urge is not only subjectively imaginable but heteronomously produced by such societal mechanisms as social death.24 Even today, the sexual remains a reminder of the counterimage of all-leveling reification and “hylomatia,” of subjective immediacy, and of the fact that there is no life and no desire without the promise of something that transcends them. True desire, however, would cross the boundaries of social conformity within which individual violence and individual death follow in the path of progressive social death through reification and hylomatia, in which individual arousal and desire follow in the path of a social arousal and desire that derides subjects subjected to fetishized (or not at all fetishized) things. Were desire really expressed in things, they would begin to breathe. Were things to express themselves in desire, they would die. Herein lies perhaps the philosophical explanation for the fact that today’s sexography, unlike its predecessors, cannot be political or philosophical. Several centuries ago, when modern European sexography was just emerging as a genre in its own right in Italy, France, and England, things were different. Beginning with Pietro Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi in 1527,25 if not even earlier, obscene publications assumed a political character and were indeed often primarily political. They criticized social conditions, undermining the prestige of the ruling classes by describing their moral depravity in vivid detail. They portrayed courtesans as whores and clerics as sodomites. Their obscenity was antifeudal and anticlerical, an outgrowth of the spirit of Humanism and the scientific revolution. Renaissance Italy (and prerevolutionary

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France) produced an academic, philosophical form of pornography. The great thinkers of the era—Diderot is one example—wrote obscene works. A number of revolutionaries were pornographers as well, Mirabeau among them. The heroine of the equally intellectual and pornographic book Thérèse philosophe (1748) was unable to make up her mind whether she found more pleasure in relating her sexual adventures or writing as a philosopher.26 Even after the French Revolution, moralists and censors continued to throw texts of all kinds into the same pot—the radical and subversive along with the political, the philosophical, and the obscene. And thus we find both Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s L’homme machine [Man a Machine] and Nicolas Chorier’s L’académie des dames [The school of women] listed in the Dictionnaire critique, littéraire et bibliographique des principaux livres condamnés au feu, supprimés ou censurés published by Etienne-Gabriel Peignot in Paris in 1806.27 Thus the precursors of our modern pornographers pursued political and philosophical objectives. Thanks to their mass dissemination and “democratization,” made possible by the transition from the culture of handwritten manuscripts to that of the printed book, they may well have had a greater subversive impact than political and philosophical pamphlets that contained no obscenities. After all, people enjoyed reading them and learning what hypocritical pigs their rulers were. These recently published findings28 may surprise those who have forgotten that sexography was a cultural battleground of the highest order in Western civilization for centuries. Until about two decades ago, no one was ambivalent about it. As Susan Sontag wrote in the early days of the sexual revolt, one was either for it or against it.29 Today we recognize in the character of pornography as a mass commodity just how blunt and stupid, how devoid of subversive power the standard products of the sex industry appear, how antiquated the service with which the sex industry caters to sexual misery truly is. The best-selling pornography, at least, is essentially an orgy of male platitudes. What it displays is the copulation of clichés: men as huge cocks, always erect; women as deep gorges demanding to be stuffed; the sex act is a success when the cocks shoot their load onto a female face.

New intimate relationships Yet the neosexual revolution produced more than antierotic fragments and prosthetics, more than hypocrisy, fear, and overestimation. It also led to diversification in intimate relationships and to new forms of sex and gender that opened the way to unexpected freedoms. These new developments are all

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too easily overlooked in the light of the commercialization and banalization of sexuality. Some sex researchers have even predicted the disappearance of the sex drive and the “death of desire,” citing national surveys conducted in wealthy Western countries during the 1990s.30 According to these findings, 80 percent of the men and nearly 90 percent of the women surveyed had no more than one sexual partner, if any, in the year preceding the respective study, and roughly half of those questioned had sexual intercourse less often than once a week. Even more interesting, however, are the ways in which appetence and desire are being recoded and the directions in which they are shifting: toward sexual self-centeredness, for example, toward acts of aggression, toward nonsexual thrills, toward public sexual displays and clandestine forms of addictive behavior, thanks to the Internet. Observers of culture are not concerned primarily with changing partners and coital frequencies in the Kinseyian sense but instead with transformations of general forms of sexuality that are amenable to social and sociological interpretation and truly point to something new. Lest this be misunderstood, I should point out that, even where such structural changes appear to be fundamental and even irreversible from a human point of view, they do not justify the conclusion that everyone is now “neosexually” configured or responds accordingly. There are two good reasons for denying such an implication. First, quite apart from theoretical considerations, the reference group in question is not that of fifty- to seventy-year-olds but of contemporary youth; and it is not composed of the unemployed and members of the rural population but instead of the socially and economically affluent, upwardly mobile people of the big cities. Second, very different strata of time and structure exist concurrently in sexuality. Today we recognize three significant temporal or structural strata in the general form of sexuality, which may combine with or overlap one another: (1) the stratum associated with the first sexual revolution preceding the Second World War; (2) the stratum that typifies the second, or socialliberal, revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; and (3) the stratum embodied by the third, or neosexual, revolution observable since the 1980s. Although it is possible to correlate these temporal or structural strata with specific generations in a general sense, the correlation cannot be applied to individuals. Thus a woman, for instance, who was influenced by the effects of the first sexual revolution, is most likely to have behaved like a woman living during the transition between the second and third sexual revolutions. And a young man who grew up during the neosexual revolution can (almost) feel and act as if the third revolution had never taken place. And because that is so, those psychoanalysts who believe in universal and eternal truths,

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unbothered by the tremendous changes that have occurred, conclude on the basis of individual cases that nothing has really changed at all. Yet let us return to the pluralization of forms of relationships and lifestyles. It is a generally accepted fact that the so-called core family has diminished in size in the course of the past few centuries. Where the “whole house” once comprised ten, twenty, or even a hundred persons, we have been moving closer and closer to a microfamily in the past several decades. The cultural significance of the father-mother-child triad, regarded just two generations ago as the very definition of the core family, has decreased to an extent hardly imaginable back then. The diminution of the traditional family was preceded by a fundamental separation of marriage and the family, meaning that one could have an entirely natural family without being married. This process of deregulation and devaluation can be observed with reference to an empirically observable process of change that has progressed at a rapid pace, in many ways, since the late 1960s: decreasing nuptiality; rising divorce rates; decreasing average numbers of children per marriage or consensual union; increasing numbers of children born to unmarried parents (formerly referred to as illegitimate births); a rise in the numbers of one- and two-person households; a growing proportion of single mothers and—more recently—fathers, an indication of a shift from the small family to the microfamily; the appearance of more households with three or more persons unrelated to each other, characterized by differing patterns of motivations and interest. As these changes progressed, the social and emotional significance of the family of origin diminished considerably as subcultural bonds and ties of friendship assumed greater importance in people’s lives from youth to old age, at least among the upper middle class. These voluntary and deliberately preserved bonds overshadowed the obsolete ties of blood. Today many people are closer to their male and female friends than to their own siblings. Single parents and people in couple relationships in which everything is subordinated to the relationship itself—what one might call relationshiprelationships—seek to escape loneliness through a kind of forced intimacy. At first glance this tendency has the appearance of a countermovement, but can hardly be, as it merely serves to strengthen the prevailing trend. Where two adults live together without others or a mother (or father) lives with a child, the exclusive relationship inevitably becomes emotionalized. This enhancement of intimacy is perhaps the continuation of what Elias (1969) described as a process of civilization.31 Incidentally, in his farewell to sexuality, Van Ussel postulated the retreat of sexuality into intimacy as long ago as the mid-1970s.32 Yet he, like Elias, underemphasized the dark side of emotionalization and the trend toward intimacy—the side that is characterized by dependence, constraint, aggression, and destruction.

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While the diminution, deregulation, and devaluation of the traditional family and the pluralization of traditional forms of relationships and lifestyles paved the way for the transformations and dissociative phenomena under discussion here, these processes have themselves been triggered by, or have at least concurred with, tendencies and transformations that I would summarize under the terms diversification and deregulation. In my view the impact of the economic strategy of perpetual flexibilization quite obviously extends into the spheres of sexuality and gender as well. The advocates of the experimental, market, knowledge, communication, and thrill society have distilled this strategy into the simple post-Fordian formula “openness must be our guiding principle.” In order to ensure success in that endeavor, it was necessary to establish connections across all boundaries as quickly as possible. Incompatible, for the most part, with such an economic strategy and its concomitant social requirements are rigid social roles, stabile psychic identifications and impermeable psychosocial identities. Highly promising and network-capable, on the other hand, are transitory, partial or fragmentary behavior patterns, identifications, and identities—ultimately a modular self that functions like a tool box full of parts that can be removed, supplemented, and joined together. According to Bauman, the crucial aspect of the postmodern life-strategy is not the creation of identity but the total avoidance of a commitment to identity.33 And thus, viewed together, the casual stroller, the vagabond, the tourist, and the gambler are metaphors for the postmodern strategy and its fear of commitment and restricting ties, while the pilgrim represents the most fitting allegorical symbol of the modern life-strategy and its discouraging goal of creating identity.

Neosexualities and self-sex The diversification of socially accepted lifestyles and forms of sexuality necessarily led the way to differentiation within the old categories of heteroand homosexuality, the previously monolithic character of which was shown in practical terms to be theoretical, in the sense that it was a product of culture. Modes of sexual and gender-based response once categorized as typically heterosexual, homosexual, or perverse for lack of a more differentiated matrix have since drifted away from these prescribed orbits, defining and diversifying themselves as lifestyles. Old pathological entities such as sadomasochism or transsexualism have disintegrated and reappeared as neosexualities. The process of diversification was clearly triggered by the major movements in support of self-determination and civil rights of the past three decades. In political terms, the diversification of the old forms of sexuality and gender correlate to a colorful ensemble of rudimentarily

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organized single-issue movements operating alongside one another—from singles to transsexual self-help groups, which in turn are flanked in the general political context by partial movements, some of them quite virulent, such as climate watchers, vegetarians, and children’s rights advocates. New types of self-staging associated with bisexuality, transgenderism, sadomasochism, and fetishism, to name only a few example[s], are typical neosexualities to the extent that they are not primarily drive-oriented in the old sense. They are both sexual and non-sexual at the same time, for selfrespect, satisfaction, and homeostasis are derived not only from the mystification of lust-driven love and the phantasm of orgasmic oneness in sexual intercourse but to an equal, often greater degree, from the thrill that accompanies non-sexual self-exposure and narcissistic self-invention. Ultimately, they oscillate between the solid and the fluid, the identical and the non-identical, and are often much more transitory than their obsessively fixed predecessors. All of this becomes empirically evident and palpable at love parades and raver parties, where neosexuals advertise themselves as seductive sexual subjects and lascivious sexual objects, yet ordinarily go out of their way to avoid actual sexual encounters of any kind. Apparently, what is staged at such events and invention-happenings is a collective desire, in keeping with the zeitgeist, for sexuality without conflict. The ostensible goal is an altruistic community, but everyone involved seeks to stand apart from that community, by virtue of outfit or behavior, keeping narcissistically or egotistically to themselves. Everyone is at odds with convention, and that is precisely what brings everyone together. The discipline desired in intimate relationships is obviously made more bearable today by a variety of different kicks and ruses. At any rate, the undramatic love of intimate relationships is often flanked by the drama of events devoted to self-exhibition and self-love. And thus love parades and raver parties have come to epitomize neosexuality. People accept the rule of order and functional efficiency five days a week, only to “let it all hang out” on the weekends with the aid of designer drugs that disassociate the body from the soul and permit out-of-body experiences. Accordingly, the sexual life of adolescents and young adults, as generalized on the basis of empirical studies, oscillates between the undisciplined, individualized thrill of late-modern mass events and the disciplined, collective self-concern of earlymodern personal loyalty. And the souls of the healthy and happy swing “back and forth between extreme activity and mindless apathy.”34 Yet the object is always self-optimization, which apparently derives the seemingly selfdetermined rules for which it is supposedly accountable itself from within itself.

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Transsexualism involving surgical sex reassignment differs from the neosexualities described above in a number of ways—primarily, however, in that it is a self-fixing neogender rather than a flexible neosexuality. As the only identifiable neocreation, transsexualism has meanwhile been awarded the highest honors a culture can bestow. What other form of sexuality or gender has been given a special law of its own or access, guaranteed by the highest courts, to the benefits of public health-insurance schemes? The genuinely novel aspect of transsexualism is that it casts what I have referred to as “cissexualism,”35 actually its logical counterpart, in a highly ambiguous light. For if there is a trans, a beyond (physical gender), there must be a cis, a this-side-of, as well. By proving that sex/gender is a culturally determined phenomenon transmitted by psychosocial mechanisms, transsexuality shows that physical gender and emotional gender identity no longer (supposedly) naturally and unquestionably go together among cissexuals, who up to now have been regarded as the only healthy, normal people. But that cuts to the cultural core of things. Rationalization, dispersion, deregulation, commercialization, and the compulsion to diversify have combined to create a new form of sexuality. The outcome of the neosexual revolution that conforms most closely to the social objectives could (with reference to the post-Fordian strategies of lean management and lean production) be called “lean sexuality.” Since selfdiscipline and self-optimization in the sense of a relationship with the self, with or without a partner, are fundamental aspects of this form of sexuality, one might also refer to it (alluding to the prevailing current of selfcenteredness) as “self-sex,” a word that calls to mind such terms as selfservice, self-control, or self-help. For two decades this form of sexuality, the product of two centuries of precultivation, has been in the process of replacing, evidently at an increasingly rapid pace, the imaginary revolutionary Eros of the Fordian era, and thus also the second sexual revolution, as a model of sexuality. The neosexual self-staging practices now taken so completely for granted are in perfect accord with the concepts of self-sex and self-love. And equally fitting is the discursive brouhaha surrounding the potency pill Viagra, which promises the long-awaited separation of fear and sexuality, making it possible to perform self-regulated designer- or techno-sex in peace. The results of the most recent empirical studies strike me as even more revealing, however. According to these findings, self-gratification and heterosexual activity coexist openly and quite peacefully in many stable relationships involving young couples. Particularly remarkable is the fact that self-gratification in sexual relationships described as “satisfying” has become a form of sexuality in its own right. All signs suggest that the timeless practice of masturbation is already divesting itself of

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its character as an emergency relief measure and a surrogate for sex as it assumes a position of equality alongside good old sexual intercourse.

Autodestruction and autopoiesis The terms dissociation, dispersion, and diversification denote processes of disassembly and reassembly, of autodestruction and autopoiesis that are highly characteristic of our society.36 They are products of the powerful, generalized dynamics of change that are generated, required, or permitted by our form of economy. No previous societal formation was so adaptable, so flexible and, for that very reason, so stable. Because objectives that compel every individual to occupy an eccentric position are fundamental to the constitution of the system, the meanings and the consciousness, individuals are both burdened and relieved of burdens in a general sense. Because what individuals think and do has less and less impact on the progress of society as time goes by, sexual orientations, behavior patterns, and lifestyles continue to diversify as long as discursive relics of past eras and recalcitrant objectives or dispositives (such as sexism, in the present context) do not get in the way. And this also means that our goal cannot be to explain our world on the basis of one “objective” idea alone, whether it be autopoiesis, gender difference, or the principle of exchange. We ought to have left this fallacy behind by now. For we have learned that every self-enclosed body of theory leads to terror. Totalitarian theories are also intellectual responses to conditions of totality, that is, to the very inertia they criticize, and dispersive theories are intellectual responses to conditions of fragmentation, thus the limitless diversity that is generally dispersed. And our capitalist society is much too complex, much too crisis-driven and non-linear, much too susceptible to social and political change to be comprehended from a onedimensional perspective. My thesis, however, is that the generalized transformations of forms of sexuality and gender cannot be understood through semiological, textual, difference, or discursive analysis alone. If the dynamics of change in capitalist society are an essential driving force behind these transformations, we must analyze not only the impact of discourse and textualization on sexuality but the mechanisms of commercialization (including mediatization), mystification, and hylomatia as well. In any case, it is impossible to imagine what I refer to as the “objective of sexuality” in the absence of the objectives of exchange and hylomatia, sexism and racism, just as it is impossible to conceive of Foucault’s “dispositif de sexualité” without his dispositives of power.37 Lyotard, who familiarized the term “postmodern,” proclaimed the death of the metanarrative.38 Overly concerned with Enlightenment discourse and

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Hegel’s philosophy of history, he overlooked the new, perhaps indeed the last great narrative, the key concept of which is change: change in and for itself, change in meanings, in modes of production, in working conditions and gender relationships, in life and death, and thus change in the human being, encompassing even the disappearance of the body, the soul, morality, gender, sexuality, history, et cetera, that entirely earnest people on both the right and the left have been prophesying for decades. Strangely enough, however, the leading theories of change and (de)construction, in which difference plays a crucial role, either ignore or underestimate the differences that exist between social forms and individual consciousness, between system-oriented communication and individual behavior. These theories would lead us to believe that everything changes at the same speed and to the same degree. But that does not seem to be the case, provided the difference between discursive sexuality, on the one hand, and sexuality that is experienced physically and emotionally, on the other, is not sacrificed to a megatheory but instead accepted as a difference. Many theorists also overlook the fact that, in spite of the dynamics of capitalism and its tendency to subject one aspect of life after the other to “real subsumation,” the sexual system actually changes very slowly—at a snail’s pace, in fact, where love is concerned. It seems to me that there are many reasons for this relative autonomy. One essential factor is surely the presence, in both capitalism and sexuality, of a solid (which is not to say “inert”) core that has survived since their emergence as historical formations, despite all shifts and turns. In the case of capitalism, this increasingly crucial realabstract basic structure is comprised of value, exchange, and capital, to describe it as briefly as possible. The underlying structure of sexuality is composed of the gender dimorphism, which engenders a psychic duality including “gender tension,” of sexual reproduction, of the enigmas of sexual attraction and feelings of arousal and love, and of the palpable physical quality of sensations.39 Some feminists are as reluctant to recognize this solid core of gender and sexuality as are those neosexuals who advertise themselves as modular multi-inventers. Yet this core remains solid because no “bio-man,” for instance, will ever truly know what the onset of menstruation, what pregnancy or abortion, birth or breast-feeding, or the natural loss of fertility at an age that is hardly regarded as advanced today really mean. Inalterably linked with physical gender, these events have tremendous effects on the body and the soul. And it is not least of all these effects, in which gender and sexuality are indivisibly united, that produce what we have looked upon for some time as sexuality and gender identity. Though it is certainly true that socialized society controls and manipulates even people’s bodies, and continues to do so to the grave, it is also still true

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that incisions must be made where the joints are, provided they are not entirely destroyed. By the same token, gender dimorphism is not wholly and invisibly subsumed within the societal and social schemes used to construct and install it. That, however, is a materialistic approach, one that is rejected as an essentialist view in the era of (de)construction and enoncés. If we were actually to take gender difference seriously in an epistemological sense, it would reveal itself as eminently dialectical—for it is neither merely a precipitate in the unconscious nor a fact of consciousness but instead the producer of both. This leads to the conclusion that what we have said thus far with regard to the dissociative phenomena generated by the neosexual reformation reflects only one view of reality. For no matter how dissociated gender and sexuality may be in epistemology and discourse, they are indeed associated in a different dimension. And that is one of the reasons why the neosexual revolution, the greatest leap toward banalization in the history of western sexuality, has not eliminated the conflicts associated with desire, arousal, and love. We shall continue to speculate on the cunning ways of homo sexualis and his differentia specifica, because the fetishes and the scenes that trigger excitement in us enclose an unknown secret, making it utterly impossible to produce or purchase them.

Notes 1

Translated from the German by John S. Southard. First version: Volkmar Sigusch, “On Cultural Transformations of Sexuality and Gender in Recent Decades,” German Medical Science, vol. 2 (2004). [Editor’s note: This chapter has been edited for consistency in style.] 2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Daß die Magistrate von den Bürgern gewählt werden müssen [Local government officials must be elected by the citizens] (1798), in Werke in Zwanzig Bänden [Work in twenty volumes], ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 1:268f. 3 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [The phenomenology of mind] (1807), in Werke, ed. Moldenhauer and Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970), 3:18. 4 Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, Venus Urania (Leipzig: Göschen, 1798); Heinrich Kaan, Psychopathia sexualis (Leipzig: Voss, 1844); Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Memnon (Schleiz: Hübscher, 1868); Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886); Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie [Three essays on the theory of sexuality] (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1905). 5 Alfred C. Kinsey et al., eds., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953). 6 Wilhelm Reich, Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf [Sexuality on the battlefield of culture] (Copenhagen: Sexpol, 1936).

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Volkmar Sigusch, “Die Zerstreuung des Eros: Über die ‘Neosexuelle Revolution’” [The dispersion of Eros: On the “neosexual revolution”] Der Spiegel June 3, 1996, 126–130; Sigusch, “Lean Sexuality,” Sexuality & Culture 5, no. 2 (2001): 23–56; Sigusch, “The Neosexual Revolution,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 27, no. 4 (1998): 331–359; Sigusch, Neosexualitäten [Neosexualities] (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2005). 8 Volkmar Sigusch, “Metamorphosen von Leben und Tod: Ausblick auf eine Theorie der Hylomatie” [Metamorphoses of life and death: Prospects for a theory of hylomatia], Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 51, no. 9/10 (1997): 835–874. 9 Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [The society society], 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 10 Luce Irigaray, Éthique de la différence sexuelle [An ethics of sexual difference] (Paris: Minuit, 1984). 11 Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1975). 12 Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 13 John Money, “Hermaphroditism, Gender and Precocity in Hyperadreno-Corticism: Psychologic Findings,” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 96, no. 6 (1955): 253– 264. 14 See for example, Simon LeVay, “A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men,” Science 253, no. 5023 (1991): 1034–1037; Dean H. Hamer et al., “A Linkage between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and the Male Sexual Orientation,” Science 261, no. 5119 (1993): 321–327; Jiang-Ning Zhou et al., “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and Its Relation to Transsexuality,” Nature 378, no. 6552 (1995): 68–70. 15 Cf. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 16 Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [An answer to the question: “What is enlightenment?”] (1784), in Kant: Werke in sechs Bänden [Works in six volumes], ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 6:53–61. 17 Gorn Wagner and Helen Singer Kaplan, The New Injection Treatment for Impotence (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1993), 17. 18 Ibid., 22. 19 Ibid., 97. 20 Aizid I. Hashmat and Sakti Das, eds., The Penis (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1993). 21 cf. Adrian Coxell et al., “Lifetime Prevalence, Characteristics, and Associated Problems of Non-Consensual Sex in Men: Cross Sectional Survey,” British Medical Journal 318, no. 7187 (1999): 846–850. 22 cf. Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours [The order of discourse; also translated as The discourse on language] (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

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23 Volkmar Sigusch, Die Mystifikation des Sexuellen [The mystification of the sexual] (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1984). 24 Sigusch, “Metamorphosen von Leben und Tod.” 25 Pietro Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi [Lust sonnets] (1527). 26 Jean-Baptiste de Boyer Argens, Thérèse philosophe [Thérèse, the philosopher] (1748). 27 Etienne-Gabriel Peignot, Dictionnaire critique, littéraire et bibliographique des principaux livres condamnés au feu, supprimés ou censurés [Critical, literary and bibliographical dictionary of the principal books condemned to the fire, removed or censured] (Paris: Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1806). 28 cf. Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993); Robert Darnton, “Sex for Thought,” New York Review of Books, December 22, 1994, 65–74. 29 Susan Sontag, “Die pornographische Phantasie” [The pornographic imagination] (1967), in Kunst und Antikunst: 24 literarische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 48–87. 30 cf. Edward O. Laumann et al., eds., The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 31 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation [On the process of civilization], 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1969). 32 Jozef Maria Willem van Ussel, Intimiteit [Intimacy] (Deventer: van Loghum Slaterus, 1975). 33 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 34 Max Horkheimer, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung: Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” [Egoism and the liberation movement: On anthropology of the bourgeois epoch], Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5, no. 2 (1936): 172. 35 Volkmar Sigusch, “Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick” [Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view], Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 4 (1991): 225–256, 309–343; Sigusch, “Transsexueller Wunsch und zissexuelle Abwehr” [Transsexual desire and cissexual defense], Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 49, no. 9/10 (1995): 811–837. 36 Sigusch, “Metamorphosen von Leben und Tod.” 37 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, Tome 1: La volonté de savoir [History of sexuality, volume 1: The will to knowledge] (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 201. 38 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne [The postmodern condition] (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979). 39 Reimut Reiche, Geschlechterspannung: Eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung [Gender tension: A psychoanalytical examination] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990).

FREEDOM AND SUBJECTIVITY: PLATONIC REFLECTIONS ON A HEGELIAN THEME ANDY R. GERMAN

What follows is an attempt to understand one of the essential elements of modernity by way of antiquity. In fact, I wish to argue that such a return is indispensable to understanding the present philosophical moment with greater clarity and perspicacity. This surely requires some justification. Although much, perhaps even too much, has been made of the chasm that supposedly divides Greek philosophical spirit from our own, modernity is clearly distinguished by the constitutive status it gives to the self-conscious subject, a status that arguably received its fullest account in Hegel, for whom subjectivity (understood from the properly comprehensive standpoint) is the Absolute—that is, the fully articulate unity of thought and being. And yet, after the peak of high philosophical modernism in Hegel, the overwhelming impact of Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought has relentlessly, and almost completely, reversed the direction of the process. As has already been noted by many others, late modernity, or what is fashionably referred to as “post” modernity, is colored by a whole complex of doubts about the very coherence and explicability of subjectivity. Our self-understanding has been aptly characterized by Robert Pippin as one in which the subject has been “decentered,” in which it is no longer understood as an origin, source, or first principle at all. Rather, it is “itself a result” of the historical, linguistic, political (or perhaps neurological) matrix in which it is embedded and from which it cannot hope to withdraw into a kind of sovereign self-reflection.1 We have not expelled the subject—or first-person, self-conscious interiority—from our philosophical discourse (and indeed it is hard to see how this could ever be possible), but neither do we seem able to explicate it using the conceptual categories of that discourse. We are therefore caught in a peculiarly modern aporia. I want to focus here on one step, in my view a crucial one, that has brought us to this point. One of the central conundrums of modern philosophy, certainly since Kant, is the question of how to understand the spontaneous, or self-constituting, character of mind—whether in its

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theoretical or its practical aspect; how, to put it plainly, to account for freedom. And surely it is Hegel, more than anyone else, who sought to give the most complete account of how Spontaneität can be combined with intelligible, rule-governed structure without making an appeal to some natural standard that is external, or “given,” to the thinking subject.2 However, when we make a detailed study of the role of freedom in Hegel, it becomes immediately evident that his teaching is incomprehensible without reference to Plato. In fact, Hegel’s definition and justification of freedom is the result of a critical assimilation and transformation of Platonic thought on two points: first, the doctrine of eros and second, the role played, in the acquisition of knowledge, by the passive and active elements of cognition. Accordingly, we will occupy ourselves with an elaboration of Hegel’s critique of Plato and then turn to some resources for a Platonic “response.” By this I do not intend to maintain that Hegel’s account of freedom is directly addressed in the dialogues. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that the study of the Platonic treatment of closely related questions sheds light upon a substantial difficulty in the Hegelian account of freedom. It is of course a quite simple matter to see that Hegel could address himself to Platonic texts he had read and to Platonic philosophical themes that persisted throughout the history of philosophy down to his own day. By contrast, that there could be a Platonic reflection on Hegelian themes must seem, at first, to be nothing short of perverse. Such an assessment, however, rests upon the now almost universal assumption of the absolute priority of historia over nature (phusis), which entails a denial of the possibility that fundamental philosophical problems might be accessible to thinkers of the first rank in every epoch. This assumption is itself in need of reexamination. Stated differently, I hope to demonstrate that Plato offers us a vantage point from which to see how the central difficulty of freedom in Hegel’s system leads to the very aporia that characterizes our present philosophical condition. Such a vantage point, if we could attain it, would itself constitute a kind of freedom. We begin with a crucial similarity: for both Hegel and Plato, desire, whether carnal or intellectual, reveals the deepest truths about man’s nature. Furthermore, for both thinkers wisdom, or comprehensive knowledge, is the definitive satisfaction of desire, and therefore human life is understood by both to point to an intellectual summum bonum. At the same time it is quite clear that Hegel is the most comprehensive modern critic of antiquity, and of Plato, on one central point: for Hegel, Plato failed to achieve an adequate conceptualization of the theoretical and practical possibilities inherent in the self-relation that is the essential characteristic of human consciousness. Roughly speaking, these possibilities

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were the achievement of comprehensive and articulate self-knowledge, on the one hand, and the free, rational self-legislation of norms, on the other. When looked at from the point of view of the philosophical argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the root of the problem is Plato’s articulation of the relationship of desire to the desired object. For Plato, all manifestations of eros are ultimately intimations of the rational desire for knowledge of the total structure of intelligibility. The man who is correctly called a “desirer” (epithumêtikon) of something is a desirer of the whole form of that thing (pantos tou eidous), and the philosopher is the lover of the sight of the truth (tous tês alêtheias philotheamonas)—that is, of the sight of the form by which each thing becomes determinate but also of the whole truth, the total interrelation, or structure, of all those forms.3 There is, no doubt, a paradoxical element to this portrayal. On the one hand, eros is a fundamental characteristic of all genesis and of the human soul in particular. In the Symposium it is the “bond” (sundesmos) of the whole, which unites the human and the divine.4 But the object of eros, say, the Good or the Beautiful, is understood to be separate from, and higher than, the desire that strives toward it.5 To kalon, “the Beautiful,” in the Symposium is entirely at rest. To use Plato’s language, the divine is not erotic but stable, not temporal but eternal.6 But this seems to mean that the desire for knowledge, the highest manifestation of human nature, is ultimately satisfied by the contemplation of a natural order that is neither produced nor affected by that desire but rather constitutes the terminus of all its activities. That is, eros is extinguished in the attainment of its object. The satisfaction of desire is simultaneously its disappearance. At the top of the “ascent passage” in the Symposium we appear to leave behind all motion, change, and desire to behold the Beautiful Itself, in which there is neither coming to be nor passing away, growth nor decay, but only pure, self-same, eternal unity.7 We enter what Kierkegaard calls the “pure ether of the abstract, where all breathing stops.”8 One might argue that this is merely the mythical language that Plato deploys rather than a serious phenomenological study of desire. I do not believe this is the case, however. The same situation obtains in the Phaedrus, for example. When the soul “looks (idousa) at Being” there is mention of agape but not eros.9 The subordination of desire, or psychic motion, in the mythical portrayals of wisdom is of a piece with the absence of an element of self-consciousness in Plato’s description of the intellectual intuition of form (noêsis) more generally. Noêsis is never described as discursively aware of or relating to itself. It is related or receptive exclusively to the noêton eidos, the intelligible form. This is quite clear in the Sun image of the Republic where nous is subordinate to the Idea of the Good that gives both “truth” to the

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things known and “the power” (dunamin) of knowledge to the knower. The soul knows only when it “fixes” or comes to rest upon that which is illumined by the Good.10 In attaining its highest perfection, then, the soul does not constitute its object; it is constituted by it. It is perfected by becoming “notitself.” As we shall see presently, in Hegelian terms this conclusion constitutes a form of alienation infecting Platonic philosophy: With Plato, philosophy offers the path which the individual must follow in order to attain any knowledge; but generally speaking, Plato places absolute and explicit happiness, the blessed life itself, in the contemplation, during life, of the divine objects. . . . This contemplative life seems aimless, for the reason that all its interests have disappeared. 11 (emphasis is mine)

If this is the case, then Plato unites the objective and the subjective only by subordinating subjectivity to objectivity, understood in this case as the “divine” separateness of intelligibility. The telos of philosophy, in wisdom, cannot incorporate the element of subjectivity that is the origin of philosophic activity in the first place. It is, after all, human beings who desire to know, as Plato surely knew. But this aspect of the phenomena is not satisfactorily preserved by him. In Plato, the “human-all-too-human” is negated in favor of the divine, as evidenced by Socrates’s description of philosophy in the Phaedo as the practice of “dying and be dead.”12 But life as a preparation for being dead, and motion that annihilates itself in complete rest, is for Hegel radically unsatisfactory. It is not a human life in any meaningful sense. To see why this is the case, let us turn to Hegel’s transformed conceptualization of desire in the Phenomenology, an account that cannot be correctly understood except with reference to Plato, although his name is never mentioned there. I wish to concentrate here on the crucial fourth chapter, in which Spirit (Geist) first manifests itself as self-consciousness, which is in essence the theme of the whole rest of the work. This is not to say that Spirit was absent in Section A (Bewußtsein), of course. There, however, the object was the dominant pole, or “moment,” in the subject-object relation. All truth is assumed to be in the known object, not within the activity of the knower. “In the previous modes of certainty,” Hegel writes, “what is true for consciousness is something other than itself.”13 Whether we experience the object through the immediacy of perception or by positing some essence or law “beyond” or “behind” it, we think that it is possible to understand the object an sich, as it really is. Consciousness operates on the assumption that truth is simple objectivity that is there, awaiting discovery by an activity of thinking that reaches out for it. That is, Section A is characterized by the identification of objectivity and essence with intelligible structure, or what the Greeks would have understood as phusis. The transition from Section A

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to B is the collapse, or “going to ground” (zugrunde gegangen) of this kind of objectivity. In the dialectic of the “inverted world,” Spirit learns that the distinctions between ground and grounded, essence and appearance, law of nature and flux, are in fact not distinctions at all. The more one tries to penetrate into the essence of things, the more one finds appearance implicated in essence. Consciousness comes to realize that in viewing the absolute unrest of essence and appearance—the way that the determinations of thoughtobjects are transformed as we think them—it is in fact viewing the movement of thinking itself. Objects as such do not have truth in themselves; truth is within the activity of thought. With self-consciousness, as one scholar writes, “the certainty that ‘Truth is there’ gives place to the certainty that ‘Truth is here’”—that is, here in thinking.14 This recoil of consciousness upon itself is the emergence of Selbstbewußtsein, which is coeval with the loss of the previously assumed separate “essentiality” of the object, and a realization of the radically more fundamental, more essential character of living subjectivity. In the collapse of objectivity as something “in-itself,” consciousness comes to discover that it is the in-itself for which, and only for which, objects have being. The presence of subjectivity to itself is mediated through the collapse of the “objectivity” that we usually attribute to the objects that are “outside” ourselves.15 In the transition from Section A to B, the world is still “there,” of course. We have withdrawn neither into Pyrrhonism nor Berkeleyan idealism. The point is that the world is no longer experienced primarily as an object of cognition but rather of practical desire—a desire not merely to know the world but to remake it in our image. Self-consciousness now wants to actualize its discovery that it is that thing for which the other is “in itself.” Hence Hegel’s famous statement that selfconsciousness is “desire in general” (PdG, 167). It must be emphasized that for Hegel, desire, properly understood, makes its appearance only once the merely “given” intelligibility of phusis—as something independent of and standing over against thinking—has collapsed. This entails that the transition away from the essentiality of the object not only emphasizes subjectivity as the ground of objects as “there” to be known but is necessarily also a rejection of Platonic intellectual intuition understood as a receptivity to the self-standing essentiality of intelligible form.16 At the beginning of Chapter 4, self-consciousness discovers that it is immediately related to an object that is both other than it and yet bound up with it—namely, the living body (PdG, 168). The chapter accordingly begins with a philosophical analysis of the significance of life, from which I wish to isolate only one element. Hegel distinguishes two moments in the life process. The first is the subsistence, or maintenance, of the individual organism qua “self-standing [or independent] shape” (PdG, 171), in which

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the organism as such strives to preserve itself over against the second moment, the indeterminate flux of organic life from which it emerges and to which it must return. How does it maintain its independence? Quite obviously, the organism separates itself from and “suppresses” nature by eating it, by using it up. For the individual living thing, nature is but raw material for its continued existence. At first, desire wishes to destroy the independence of the object, to assert that “nothingness” is the truth of this other, the world of objects that are at the disposal of the organism (PdG, 174). However, when, for example, I eat the apple to assuage my hunger, the end result is that my hunger and the apple both disappear. Neither is grasped by me conceptually, since the satisfaction of desire leads to the obliteration, the absence of the object, thus setting the stage for the renewal of desire (hunger). This has been correctly identified (by H. S. Harris) as a critique of Hobbesian desire, that “perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death.”17 But this criticism would apply with equal force to Plato because satisfaction of the desire to know through noêsis is also coeval with an absence, in this case, the absence of the subject. To assume that thinking is satisfied in the reception of the merely “given” object of intellection (das Gefundene) is to make thinking invisible. At each moment in which nous is actualized, what is present to us is the form of the object of thought but not the activity of thinking itself, since that activity is formless and hence inaccessible to conceptual discourse. An unusually succinct Hegelian presentation of this problem can be found in the Preface to the Phenomenology: Nous, simplicity, is substance. On account of its simplicity or self-identity it appears fixed and enduring. But this self-identity is no less negativity; therefore its fixed existence passes over into its dissolution. The determinateness seems at first to be due entirely to the fact that it is related to an other and its movement is imposed upon it by an alien power. (PdG, 55)

For Hegel, this account of cognitive activity makes self-knowledge impossible because we can never become present to ourselves as a unity. Plato’s conception of desire results in a kind of infinite regress as surely as does Hobbes’s. We are simply on the reverse side of the same coin. Desire, then, cannot be satisfied in merely superseding, or negating, either the object or itself. This vacillation can only be stabilized if the desiring subject finds itself in the object. This Hegel achieves in two famous steps. Initially, self-consciousness learns that its satisfaction requires recognition by another self-consciousness (PdG, 175). Since each such individual instantiation of self-consciousness demands recognition of its own individuality and this very individuality, as my unique possession, is threatened by also being an

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essential characteristic of the other self-consciousness who must recognize me (but can withhold such recognition), this leads to mortal combat and hence to the subordination of one to the other (the master-slave dialectic) and to the discovery of the centrality of self-assertion in the development of rationality. To see the link to Platonic psychology, let us remember that in the Republic, thumos (spiritedness) is the middle part of the soul, different from both the calculating (logistikon) and the desiring part (ephithumetikon), but able to be an “ally” of logos against the desires.18 It is associated with war, anger, conquest, and philonikia, the love of victory. It is the assertive faculty and not intrinsically rational, since it is shared by beasts and children, although it may “hearken to reason.”19 Thumos makes possible the work of reason in two ways: first, through mastery of the lower desires, and second, through being the source of high personal ambition that often attends the most developed philosophical natures.20 A man who, however, does not transcend his “thumotic” concern with himself and his reputation, and hence with the recognition he receives from others, cannot become a philosopher. Most crucially for Plato, thumos, while a necessary helpmeet to the work of reason, is not itself rational work. Thumos is not a faculty for the positing of ends, goals for action, what we might call “values.” Ends, as such, whether practical or theoretical, are not posited at all, are not volitional in origin. They are grasped by means of rational apprehension. Once transformed by Hegel, thumos provides the assertive, creative element that Hegel feels was inadequately developed by Plato. It becomes, in other words, internal to the structure of rational activity. This is encapsulated in a summary fashion in Hegel’s explanation of why violence and mortal struggle for honor are necessary moments in the life of Spirit: “It is only through staking one’s life (Daransetzen des Lebens) that freedom is won” (PdG, 148, 187). This is to be interpreted as follows: the struggle for recognition that Hegel describes in the master-slave dialectic is not, when fully comprehended, a mere expression of idiosyncratic self-assertion and urge for mastery. The truth, in fact, is the reverse. Idiosyncratic self-assertion is the merely “immediate” or “everyday” manifestation of how subjectivity externalizes or actualizes itself—namely, by imposing its forms on the objective world and thereby transforming it. And in this sense self-assertion, or the will to transform one’s environment according to one’s projects, is a precursor of the externalization of the Absolute Idea within nature, which completes the circle of Hegel’s science of wisdom. Self-consciousness, then, splits into a master, who is purely for himself and passive, and a slave, who is purely for another but active. As is well known, the crucial moment of the dialectic is the slave, not the master. The

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master’s desire to become “real” in the world is accomplished by his thumotic assertion of power over the slave. But the master, in achieving this recognition, immediately slips into a passive receptivity to the fruits of the slave’s labor. Thumos has negated itself in reaching its goal, since the original desire for recognition was, we said, inseparable from assertive activity, but we now find that the slave is the source of all activity, all Arbeit. The master no longer has anything to do. The slave, by contrast, reaches a higher level through his experience of fear (Furcht), service (Dienst), and work (Arbeit). Through the fear of death, which leads the slave to submit to the master, the slave comes to experience how “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations” in the “pure universal movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable” (PdG, 194). But this universal liquefying motion, this negativity, is precisely the essence of self-conscious thinking that is, for Hegel, a negating-creating activity—the production, rather than the grasp, of form. In the Republic, the eye of the soul, the omma tês psuchês, is opened by the five mathematical sciences and the dialectical study of form.21 In Hegel, the fear of death opens one’s eyes to the true nature of selfhood: a “nothingness working itself out in nothingness.” We are now prepared for the final step to freedom. The fear of death drives the slave into the service of the master and thus into the necessity of work. Through working for the master in order to survive, the slave awakens to the deeper truth of the thumotic desire for recognition: only when selfconsciousness negates the mere immediacy of the object by impressing its own form upon that object does it truly recognize itself. Through sublimating his fear in work, which “shapes (gebildet) and forms the thing,” the slave consciousness finally acquires an element of stability and permanence: it sees “itself in the form of the object it has fashioned” (PdG, 197). Nature is destroyed through the negating and transforming labor of the slave, yet also preserved in its new form. Its essentiality, however, now comes to it from creative work of Spirit and not vice versa; it is not “there” to be received passively by the subject. Spirit now finds that when it considers or engages with the object, it is neither subordinated to it nor alienated from itself; rather it finds itself in the object. Spirit, in contemplating the shaped and reformed object, is “at home with itself in another,” as Hegel says; that is, self and other are now united within a whole that is both their original separation from one another, qua subject and object, and the overcoming of that separation by Spirit’s identification of the object as its own qua fully comprehended. And this being with oneself-in-another is precisely the structure of Hegelian freedom that means having oneself for one’s own object while not being an object of anything more comprehensive:

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In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity with my being-for-myself, and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself. (PdG, 197)

Man’s relationship to nature is therefore free to the extent that he understands nature to be a “product” of his own “spirit as thinking subject.” And this is what Spirit achieves when it remakes its world, whether social or natural. Being at home in the world, as Harris pointed out, “is a matter of making it a home.”22 This helps us understand Hegel’s statement in the Science of Logic, that when thinking grasps the Concept (Begriff) we have entered “the realm of freedom.”23 The slave’s labor in the field or in the workshop of the master is not the mere application of this or that technê, it is the practical precursor of the theoretical realization that negative activity is what thinking itself is: truly “free” Arbeit. In speculative thought, the process of conceptual development proves to be identical in structure to the negative activity of Spirit in general. The formal structure of thought objects is penetrated by the same internal restlessness, or movement, as consciousness is.24 Once we have fully understood this unity (which occurs in the “Subjective Logic,” third division of the Science of Logic), we are prepared for the ascent to the Absolute Idea in which the modern chasm between self-knowledge and knowledge of nature, or between subject and object, is overcome. The Begriff is nature and spirit, necessity and freedom. In fact, as we have seen, qua the totality of conceptuality, it is identical with freedom: it grasps all determinations within itself, but is not grasped by anything else, since there is nothing else. The same situation holds true in Hegel’s practical philosophy. Freedom is possible in its fullest sense only in the modern state, where man can recognize his own will within the fully rational and therefore truly universal institutions of that state, the completely self-conscious embodiment of Rousseau’s volonté général. This, then, is the great advance of modernity, toward which the whole striving of human history has tended: “the principle of the modern world at large is freedom of subjectivity.”25 Let the preceding suffice as a cursory review of the extremely intricate Hegelian negation of the Platonic position. I turn now to the Platonic situation by way of noting an important element in Hegel’s account that we must keep in mind in what follows. The Phenomenology, as we have seen, is an account of Spirit as a project, working itself out within nature, society, art, religion, and finally, Absolute knowing. On Hegel’s own terms, however, the project is justified, and the history of Spirit can only be understood for what it is, if it is completed. The same holds for the Logic, which is the articulation in pure conceptuality of the structure of spiritual history studied in the

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Phenomenology. The conceptual process is impelled by determinate negation—that is, by Hegel’s insistence that each determinate theoretical or practical position or conceptualization self-negates in a way that calls forth, in a rigorously necessary manner, a succeeding position of greater complexity, and it must do this in a way that ultimately calls forth the whole structure of intelligibility itself. But this means that the final and definitive justification of freedom, which is essentially coeval with the comprehension of all shapes of Geist, is possible exclusively at the Absolute standpoint achieved at the end of the development. As we mentioned earlier, for Plato both noêsis and the noêton eidos are, in a decisive sense, separate from the erotic motions of the soul. This underlies the description of the “sudden” (exaiphnês) visions of the Ideas, the emergence out of the heavens toward the vision of the “hyper-uranian place” and the language of “jumping off” into the realm of pure, formal discourse at the top of the Divided Line passage.26 To head off a common misunderstanding, I should emphasize that these passages do not describe the separation of the soul from the body or its departure to some other realm. A careful reading of each such passage reveals that the soul remains in some way bound to temporality and genesis. This is obvious in the Phaedrus, for example. Although the head of the charioteer pops out above the vault of the cosmos to view the Forms “beyond the heaven,” this beholding is still conditioned by temporality: “The revolution [of the heavens] carries them (periagei hê periphora) and they behold the things beyond heaven.”27 That is to say, for the soul, even at the moment of its supreme accomplishment, there is no escape from temporality, life, or desire. Quite the contrary—the very dialogue form itself serves as a way for Plato to dramatically portray the necessary Zeitlichkeit that affects not only our bodily nature and the idiosyncratic elements of personality (memory, emotion, character, etc.), but even knowledge, as Diotima notes in the Symposium: And stranger still than all of these, is that even our sciences, not only are some coming to be and some passing away for us, and we are never the same with regard to the sciences, but each one of the sciences undergoes the same thing. For what is called study (meletan), is done because there is a departing of sciences from us. For forgetting is the exiting of science and study, by producing a new memory, in place of that which has departed, preserves science, so that it appears (dokein) to be the same. (Smp. 207e5-a7)

It is because of this inescapable temporality that Socrates is always portrayed in conversations that continually return to their beginning and that almost universally end inconclusively.

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However, the dialogues are concerned not only with portraying our temporality (something of which every wakeful human being has an immediate experience without needing to be told about it by a philosopher) but also with explaining the presence of stable intelligibility within the temporal flux—a presence that is inescapable, since without it human life could not be temporally experienced at all. Indeed, there would be no experience per se, since we would be unable to identify the moments, existing within the flux, from which “experience” as such is accumulated. Everything would become a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” For all that such a view might afford by way of poetic frisson, I do not believe that much time needs to be spent in pointing out that it suffers instant and devastating refutation as soon as we follow Hume out of the seclusion of the philosopher’s room and into ordinary life. Human experience is a web of motion and rest, contingency and necessity, presence and absence. As the dialogues show, we never leave the temporal but rather are guided within it by means of the illumination of atemporal intelligible forms, natures, or powers that allow us to differentiate the elements of flux and therefore to live, both theoretically and practically. The question that divides Plato from Hegel, however, is how the stability within genesis is given to us, and also when it is given to us. The heart of the issue can ultimately be traced to their differing assessments of the status of intellectual intuition. To make this point I require some extended comments on the relationship between intuition and conception (or discursive intelligence) in Platonic paideia. We begin with the Divided Line image, which identifies each segment of the line with one of the four separate affections (pathêmata), or capacities of the soul (R. 511d7). According to the image, the purification of our grasp of the world is described as a procession upward, from the capacity for imagemaking to the highest realm of the intelligible, in such a way that each level is distinguished by its relative clarity (saphêneia) compared to what is below and above it.28 And the same holds true for the two more general divisions of the line. The visible section (to horaton) is relatively less clear than the intelligible one (to noêton) (R. 509d9)—just as, for example, the segment of the line that concerns images (eikones) is less clear than the section containing those things of which the images are images, that is to say, the visible things themselves. However, the critical element here is that the Line necessarily entails that each lower level depend for whatever clarity it does have on the clarity present in the levels above it. For example, in the very lowest section of the line, the exercise of eikasia, the capacity for making an image (and consequently also the capacity to see an image of something as an image)

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already implicates the ability to distinguish between the image and the visible original, and that is obviously impossible without a certain grasp of the original. This grasp, in the second section of the visible realm, is called pistis, or trust in the stability of those things of which the images are images. Jacob Klein renders pistis quite felicitously as “familiarity.”29 And clearly it is our familiarity with the visible things that allows our imaginative capacity to function in the way it ordinarily does. A person lacking completely in this immediate familiarity with things, a familiarity that allows him to make images and recognize them as images of the familiar original, would not be imaginative, but insane. But how could this trust, or familiarity, be possible if there were not actually an element of stability within things that allows us to identify them each time as what they are, as “this thing here”? And this, of course, means that the visible realm, and the activities of the soul in trying to know that realm, are already intimations (albeit incomplete) of the intelligible realm. The same relational structure holds in the two intelligible sections. The discursive faculty of dianoia, present in all mathematical and technical sciences, must use as the elements of its hypotheses those intelligible elements (noêmata) of which it is not capable of giving a clear account, and which it therefore assumes. Nonetheless, discursive intelligence could not perform even its intermediate function of illuminating, making more precise, or deducing demonstratively the structure of visible things from intelligible hypotheses without the access to intelligibility that is attributed to nous as the highest capacity of the soul. Noetic intuition is thus our access to the stability or unity of each item within the realm of genesis. But this means that it must always be present in some form in the exercise of each of the soul’s capacities. While the Divided Line gives no account of the essence, form, or Idea of the soul (if indeed there even is such a form), the soul’s activities are unified in a sense by the fact that noêsis is an immanent telos—it is the goal of all the soul’s capacities, but it is also already present in each one of them. Stated differently, the presence of the intelligible to the intellect makes possible the exercise of the highest capacity of the soul and also makes human life understandable as a whole, in all its manifestations. The same holds true of the Cave allegory. It is worth carefully noting that while the release of the prisoner from his chains is said to happen “by nature,” the exit from the cave requires a guide, someone (tis) who leads the released prisoner out into the sunlight.30 It is this guide who tells the released prisoner that, having turned around and faced the firelight (rather than the shadows) he is now “somewhat nearer to what is” (ti enguterô tou ontos). The implication here is clear. The education of the released cave dweller and his transformation into a philosopher require work and effort. But it also

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presumably requires that the guide already know where he is going, at least to some degree. This must mean that he, or someone else who taught him, completed the ascent out to the sunlight, since one can hardly expect to learn that there even is an “outside” from the prisoners who have never turned their heads around. At each, incomplete, stage along the ascent, nature itself qua kosmos noêtos makes the soul, both of the prisoner and the guide, able to see. Without this the work of the guide who leads the prisoner out would be impossible. In the “ascent” passage of the Symposium, too, we see how the presence of the final stage—the Beautiful “alone by itself and with itself, always of the self-same form” (Smp. 211b1–2) makes the earlier stages of the erotic initiation comprehensible. At each stage the soul of the initiate must achieve, from within his necessarily temporal existence, a continuous (and in the case of most of us, asymptotic) approximation to the eternal; but this eternal is already present to eros, in an inarticulate manner, within the “beauty of looks” (to ep’ eidei kalon) (Smp. 210b2).31 The ascent toward the Beautiful Itself, which is aei on, is made by means of directing the lover’s gaze to manifestations of beauty that are of ever-increasing temporal duration, since duration is the closest approximation to eternity that is possible within time, the “moving image of eternity” (eikô kinêton tina aiônos).32 The neophyte learns, therefore, to move from the transient beauty of bodies to the more durable beauty of the well-formed soul, which can maintain itself long after bodily bloom has faded. From there he continues to the beauty present in practice and law, which endures even beyond the fullness of years of a whole human life, and then on to the sciences (tas epistêmas), the content of which, though necessarily grasped discursively and in time, is a stable web of intelligible relations. Each one of these stages, then, is both a preparation for and an imperfect copy of the sudden vision (exaiphnês katopsetai) of the Beautiful Itself (Smp. 211e8). And Diotima, like the Socrates of the Republic, makes mention of a philosophical guide (hegoumenos) who leads the neophyte through ever more comprehensive visions of the Beautiful. This guide, however, must “guide correctly” (orthôs hêgêtai).33 In other words, the blind cannot lead the blind. Pace Kant in his statement about “the leading strings” from which Enlightenment man must free himself, for Plato the independent, or “objective,” intelligibility of nature is the ground not of our subjection but of our freedom: our eleutheria understood as perfection rather than liberty from restraint, or spontaneity. Given all this, however, do we not find ourselves again face to face with Hegel’s charge that eleutheria simply means liberation from our humanity, the extinction of the merely human in light of the intelligible divine, rather than liberation of our humanity from its merely natural carapace?

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There is undeniably an element of truth here, since the balance of evidence in the Platonic corpus would not allow for an identification of freedom with spontaneity, as one finds in Kant or the German Idealist tradition that proceeds from him. There is, as we have seen, no constructivism in Plato, at least as regards ontôs ôn. Plato does, however, share with Hegel the insight that the soul, as encountered immediately (or an sich) does not have a stable structure. As we have already remarked, there is no “idea of the soul” in Plato, though the soul may indeed have a nature or dunamis more or less accessible to philosophical discourse. The soul an sich is not a perfection, as is evidenced by the imperfect fit of the rational capacity (to logistikon) with the passions and the fact that eros is itself subject to selfdeception and potentially to madness. As Diotima says, eros is both a philosopher and a fearful/skilled (deinos) magician, druggist, and sophist (Smp. 203d8). Theoretical perfection in Plato is also coeval with the practical effort, or work, of giving order to the soul, or bringing it under the rule of reason, which implies that while such rule is possible, it is by no means actual without Arbeit in precisely the sense that Hegel means. I take this to mean that for Plato the work of perfection is in a certain sense a mark of man’s freedom—since, all other considerations aside, man must ultimately decide to perfect himself. By nature, man is only partly determined. There is, then, in Plato a kinship, or at least a distant cousin, to Nietzsche’s statement that the one thing most needful is to “give style to one’s character.”34 From the “Platonic” standpoint described in this section, however, the following difficulty in Hegel becomes clear: for Hegel there is no intuitive, or pre-discursive, presence of intelligibility in Geist (this is the whole thrust of Section A of the Phenomenology), yet he persistently distinguishes between the developing consciousness that undergoes the journey of the Phenomenology and “us,” who observe this process from the standpoint of the Absolute. In Hegel, each shape of Geist (natural consciousness, master, slave, Stoic, skeptic, unhappy consciousness, etc.) is visible qua what it is only for us, for “observing” consciousness, not to the consciousness that undergoes it. But “we” are where we are only because Hegel has already achieved wisdom by thinking the Absolute Idea and recollecting the whole history of Geist in the works we study. That this is the case emerges from nearly every paragraph of the Phenomenology. As Fackenheim writes: The Absolute [even if] present with us from the start is known as Absolute and present only to the true philosophy. As for all other forms of human consciousness, the self-examination in which they are engaged goes on, as it were, behind their backs.35

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Phenomenological consciousness, or Geist, as it experiences its pilgrim’s progress through history, takes on a form without being able to know if this new Geistesgestalt is a further development along the road to Absolute knowledge and reconciliation. The Absolute must, of course, be present in each moment of spiritual history, just as the intelligible is present in all other sections of the Line, since the Absolute becomes itself only through the temporal development that is being chronicled and interpreted by Hegel. However, that Absolute is not accessible to phenomenological consciousness at any stage prior to the last one: “Short of it [the Absolute] there is no satisfaction to be found at any of the stations on the way” (PdG, 80). What there is at each stage is only a further discursive articulation whose place in the whole can only be seen once the total discourse has been spoken.36 But if this is the case, the distinction between phenomenological and observing consciousness necessarily entails that the nature of freedom, as described above, is not in fact visible to Spirit within history. Freedom, practical or theoretical, is distinguished from arbitrary spontaneity, or randomness, by being the actualization of some moment of the Absolute, a moment along the progression in wisdom. The self-conscious subject of history, however, has no way of seeing its activity as a progress. Unlike the released prisoner in the Cave, there is no way that anyone prior to the completely wise sage who has discursively thought the whole (i.e., Hegel) could tell us that we are any “nearer to what is” and also no way for Spirit, prior to the final stage, to know, even implicitly, the “is” that it is approaching. I believe this is the ineluctable conclusion to which one is led by thinking rigorously along with Hegel. The states, nations, and individuals who do the work of Weltgeist are, he insists, “bewußtlose Werkzeuge,” unconscious tools of History.37 Unlike in Plato, the telos by which we are able to see whether we are going up, down, or just spinning in circles is not visible to us, since we, qua the individual moments of historical spirit, are in fact in the process of becoming, or discursively producing, this telos (the Absolute), only we cannot yet know this. Freedom, as Hegel defines it, becomes effectively invisible to the empirical subject. If, however, the reconciliation of Spirit and nature, of Concept and existence, is not convincingly achieved at the end of the Phenomenology and the Logic, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the necessary conceptual emergence of all moments of the Logic and mere willful imposition or artifice. Hegelian thought is then directly exposed to Derrida’s charge that the Hegelian system (or “text”) interprets itself: each proposition is an interpretation, submitted to an interpretative decision. The necessity of logical continuity is the decision [emphasis is mine] or interpretative milieu of all Hegelian interpretations.38

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But, of course, we can easily decide to replace the Hegelian decision with other, quite different decisions. Philosophical thinking becomes neither the grasping nor the producing of intelligible order but only the continuous process of differentiation, while experience is a text that is erasing itself as it is being written. In short, for Derrida, thinking is still Hegel’s “labor of the negative,” only it produces no Absolute.39 It would be utterly laughable to call the preceding a definitive refutation of Hegel. If it were even possible, such a refutation would first require taking Hegel with the absolute seriousness required in order to make a complete study of the Science of Logic and of his claims about the nature of consciousness, conceptual judgment, and the relationship between them. This obviously could not be done in the present context, and no one refutes a spiritual power of Hegel’s magnitude with obiter dicta. But I do believe we have said enough to point to the main consequence regarding modernity as a whole. If, in Hegel, freedom is identified with the completed structure of the Concept that historical spirit must actualize, everything now turns on our ability to justify, to “see” for ourselves, that the Concept is complete, that the circle of the Absolute in fact has closed. To the degree that post-Hegelian thought has lost Hegel’s confidence that this was the case, freedom effectively has become Willkür, and then, very quickly, Wille zur Macht. But modern subjectivity for Hegel (and not only for Hegel) is distinguished from all previous forms of self-understanding by the primacy of freedom. Once freedom loses any comprehensible nature, so too must the subject that was to be defined by it. In this way, the crisis within Hegelian thought prepares the ground for the various characteristics that have defined philosophy in our “postmodern,” that is to say, post-Hegelian, age. Plato attempts to avoid this fate, I argue, but not by giving a different, more successful theoretical defense of the actuality of freedom or the selfconstitutive autonomy of the subject. Instead he distinguishes between eros and the objective structure of nature by which we are able to satisfy, educate, and perfect that eros. Man may or may not be free, but human activity, and indeed human nature as a whole, is intelligible only if we—the incomplete human beings existing within the Via Dolorosa of uncompleted history, rather than at the end of history or on the vault of heaven—already have some kind of access to the elements of intelligibility. These elements and the access to them cannot themselves be derived from freedom and hence from subjectivity, however understood. Nor can they be produced by the very process of living our history. They must be elements already “given” within that history. Plato might very well agree that man is what Nietzsche calls the “not-yet-determined-animal” (das noch nicht festgestellte Thier).40 He might further agree with Hegel that the life of Spirit is Arbeit, the pedagogical

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project in which we remake ourselves. What we do not make, however—and for Plato, what we could not make without reducing human life to senselessness—are the standards according to which we are remade.

Notes 1

Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 157. On Hegel as a Vollendung (completion) of European spirit, see Karl Löwith, “The Historical Background to European Nihilism,” in “Nature, History and Existentialism” and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. Arnold Levison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 10: “Hegel marks the end of the history of the old European spirit. Being on the road of ‘progress in the consciousness of freedom,’ the spirit finally attains in Hegel its perfect knowing and being.” 2 In this regard, in addition to the work of Robert Pippin and Dieter Henrich, the studies of Karl Löwith are absolutely indispensable. See his Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Die Revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts [From Hegel to Nietzsche: The revolution in nineteenth century thought] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964) for the definitive study of the collapse of Hegel’s system. 3 Plato, Republic 475b4 and 475e4. Translations are my own. Further references to the Republic, in the text or notes, shall be marked by R. followed by Stephanus pagination. All abbreviations of dialogue titles follow the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon. All Plato references come from Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900–1907). 4 Plato, Symposium 202e7: eros is en mesôi de on amphoterôn sumplêroi, hôste to pan auto sundedesthai. 5 Plato, R. 505a3 and 505d11–e1: “For this is what every soul pursues and for the sake of this it does all things.” 6 As Diotima maintains, “no one of the gods philosophizes nor desires to become wise since he already is so.” Plato, Smp. 204a1–2: “Theôn oudeis philosophei oud’ epithumei sophos genesthai—esti gar.” One cannot miss the close link here between epithumia and gignesthai, or genesis. Of course this is an unusually complex point in Plato, subject to considerable interpretative controversy, and there are passages in the dialogues that complicate the picture, such as Sophist 248a–249e, or the references in Republic 10 to God as the “gardener” who grows the Forms (which suggests that they are in time). But it cannot be denied that the large majority of Platonic texts point to the eternity of formal structure, separate from temporal eros; and in any case, this is how the matter primarily appeared to Hegel, with whose interpretation we are concerned here. 7 Ibid., 210e4–211d3. And cf. Plato, Phaedrus 247c5 on the ousia ontôs, the Being that truly is. 8 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 41. 9 Plato, Phdr. 247d1–5. 10 Plato, R. 508d4–e3.

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11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie [Lectures on the history of philosophy], Werke in Zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 2:85–86 (my translation). All further references to Hegelian texts in the German shall be to the volumes in this edition. In the HaldaneSimson translation this text appears in 2:71. See Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane and Francis Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 12 Plato, Phaedo 64a6 and cf. 79d1–e1 on wisdom (phronêsis) as the soul’s affinity to Form. 13 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, par. 166 (hereinafter cited as PdG). In the case of the Phenomenology, I use the paragraph numbers of A. V. Miller’s popular English translation, for ease and standardization of reference: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). These shall be noted parenthetically in the text. 14 H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder I: The Pilgrimage of Reason (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 317. And cf. Hegel, PdG, 164: “The necessary advance from the previous shapes of consciousness, for which their truth was a Thing, an other rather than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is a consciousness of Things possible only for Self-Consciousness, but that this alone [that is, self-consciousness] is the truth of each such shape.” 15 The crucial passages in which one can see how, as it were, consciousness opens its eyes to its own independence from objects are at Hegel, PdG, 166 and 167: “The mere being of what is merely ‘meant’, the singleness and universality opposed to it of perception, as also the empty inner being of the Understanding, these are no longer essences, but are moments of self-consciousness, i.e. abstractions or distinctions which at the same time have no reality for consciousness itself, and are purely vanishing essences.” My thanks to the anonymous reviewer of this piece for helping me to see the necessity of emphasizing this point. 16 See Plato, R. 508d4–9 and 518c1–9. 17 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with intro. and notes Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 1.11.2 and cf. 1.6.58: “Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here, because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire.” This is also how Socrates describes the desiring part of the soul in the Gorgias: a leaky jar which can never be filled, cf. Plato, Gorgias 493bff. 18 Plato, R. 439e4. 19 Plato, Timaeus 70a1–b1. 20 That this is true is hinted at, among other places, in the Republic where Socrates mentions the case of a young man of “great soul” (megalê psuchê) born into the straitened provinciality of a small city. Plato, R. 496b4. 21 Plato, R. 533d1. 22 Harris makes this point very well on p. 319 of Hegel’s Ladder I: “The only point of finding out how the world is, is to discover how it can be brought closer to what I want it to be.” Cf. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §23 (hereinafter, EL).

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Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik [Science of logic], 251, (Miller, 582) (hereinafter WdL) and cf. EL, §160. 24 Even the most abstract concepts of the Doctrine of Being, such as Etwas (Something), are already “the beginning of the Subject—being-within-itself, only as yet quite indeterminate.” WdL, 123–124, (Miller, 115). 25 Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts [Philosophy of right], §273A (hereinafter, PR). 26 Plato, Smp. 210e4; Phdr. 247bff; R. 511b6. 27 Plato, Phdr. 247c1. Also, cf. Plato, Smp. 212a3–7: The beholder of the Idea of the Beautiful generates true images. Pace Kierkegaard, there is still generation (and hence there must be quite a bit of breathing), even in the presence of the Beautiful itself. 28 Plato, R. 511e3. 29 Klein’s interpretation of the Line image is excellent. See Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 112–125. 30 The number of references to force and compulsion in the Cave passage is truly striking. See Plato, R. 515c6, 515d5, 515e1, and 515e6. 31 See Gerhard Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft: Das Wesen des Platonischen Denkens [Insight and passion: The essence of Platonic thought] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1948), 230. 32 Plato, Ti. 37d5. 33 Plato, Smp. 210a6–7. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [The gay science], in Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), aph. 290. 35 Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 34. 36 This explains the meaning of Hegel’s statement at PdG, 752 that the “unhappy consciousness is the tragic fate of the certainty of self that aims to be absolute” (emphasis is mine). 37 Hegel, PR, §344 and cf. §348 therein: “Since these individuals are the living expression of the substantial deed of the world spirit and are thus immediately identical with it, they cannot themselves perceive it.” 38 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 260. And cf. page 277 therein: “It [that is, the “we” of the Phenomenology of Spirit] does not see the non-basis of play upon which the history (of meaning) is launched.” 39 Hegel, PdG, 19: “Thus the life of God and divine cognition . . . sinks into mere edification . . . if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.” 40 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse; Zur Genealogie der Moral [Beyond good and evil: On the genealogy of morals], in vol. 5 of Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: De Gruyter, 1999), aph. 62.

THINKING SUBJECTIVITY AFTER HEIDEGGER: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PLATO’S CONCEPT OF THE SOUL ELI SCHONFELD

Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer. —André Gide, Le retour de l’enfant prodigue

I. In his 1973 seminar in Zähringen, Heidegger formulated his critique of subjectivity in these words: When I say: “I am conscious,” there is said along with this: I am conscious of myself [Ich bin mir meiner selbst bewusst]. The being-conscious-of-oneself, this being-character of consciousness, is determined by subjectivity. But subjectivity itself is not questioned in regards to its being; since Descartes, it is the fundamentum inconcussum. In the entirety of modern thought, stemming from Descartes, subjectivity constitutes the barrier to the unfolding of the question of being.1

From Descartes onward, subjectivity determines the “being-character” of consciousness, providing a fundament for thought and science—a fundamentum inconcussum—while leaving the meaning of being unquestioned. It remains unquestioned by virtue of its grounding quality. Subjectivity names the beingcharacter of consciousness without questioning the sense of Being. In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” looking into the “matter of philosophy,” the Sache of thought, Heidegger addresses Husserl’s famous “principle of principles” (§24 of the Ideen) and remarks: “The principle of principles” requires reduction to absolute subjectivity as the matter of philosophy. . . . If one wanted to ask: where does “the principle of all principles” get its unshakable right, the answer would have to be: from transcendental subjectivity which is already presupposed as the matter of philosophy.2

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By reducing the sense of Being to subjectivity while presupposing transcendental subjectivity as being the matter of philosophy, Husserlian phenomenology situates itself in the strict Cartesian tradition. Both think of subjectivity— of the cogito—as the basic presupposition of philosophy, while subjectivity remains unthought in its being. Instead of thinking of Being, instead of unveiling the ontological conditions of subjectivity, Descartes and Husserl ignore the problem and simply affirm the instantaneous correspondence of consciousness to itself as the apodictic moment in which consciousness gains its grounding quality (in the Second Meditation for Descartes, or in Idees §33, §42, and §44 for Husserl). In Heidegger’s terms, thinking of Being in terms of subjectivity is thinking of Being in terms of presence: consciousness conscious of itself in the full presence of itself. In its more concise formulation, Heidegger enunciates his thesis in terms of substance. To think of subjectivity as presence to oneself means to think of subjectivity as substance.3 In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger writes: If the fundamentum absolutum is attained with the ego cogito as the distinctive subiectum, this means: the subject is hypokeimenon which is transferred to consciousness, what is truly present, what is unclearly enough called ‘substance’ in traditional language.4

And Heidegger concludes: However, what the matter of philosophy should be is presumed to be decided from the outset. The matter of philosophy as metaphysics is the Being of beings, their presence in the form of substantiality and subjectivity.5

Heidegger’s critique is well known: the understanding of Being as subjectivity and substantiality determines the “errancy” (die Irre) of Western philosophy. Understanding Being as subjectivity, as substantiality, presupposes that the meaning of Being is already known, without actually interrogating it as such. This reasoning leads Heidegger to the following conclusion: owing to a lack of interrogation of subjectivity in its being— apprehended not as Da-sein, but as Bewusst-sein—philosophy is in decline; that is, it cannot devote itself to the genuine task of thinking—namely, the thought of Being. In “My Way to Phenomenology,” Heidegger declares: The more decisively the insight became clear to me, the more pressing the question became: Whence and how is it determined what must be experienced as “the things themselves” [die Sache selbst] in accordance with the principle of phenomenology? Is it consciousness and its objectivity or is it the Being of beings in its unconcealedness and concealment?6

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Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is a long effort to recover the original task of thinking by rethinking the ultimate ground other than in terms of subjectivity or substantiality—by rethinking the sense of Being. The project of thinking of the subject beyond the subject, after the subject—the project of a philosophy of post-subjectivity—will be understood here precisely as an attempt to challenge Heidegger’s understanding of subjectivity. Is it possible to read the philosophical tradition otherwise than Heidegger, and perhaps to track another understanding of subjectivity in it? Could there be a thinking of subjectivity that does not fall under Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity as substantiality? Thinking of post-subjectivity here means taking the Heideggerian challenge seriously, trying to hear again the meaning of subjectivity after and despite Heidegger’s radical critique of subjectivity as an onto-theological operator (substance) preventing the access to a genuine hearing of Being. To open a path in this direction, I will address the following question: While criticizing the metaphysics of subjectivity and of substance for being at the origin of the philosophical forgetting of Being, does Heidegger himself not forget another definition of subjectivity that does not fall under his critique and that opens another way for philosophy, another tradition of thought? Is not Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity possible only at the price of a basic occultation of another thought of subjectivity and of a different metaphysics present in Greek thinking since its very dawn? In what follows, I will try to understand the Socratic-Platonic thought of the soul precisely in this way: as an original thought of subjectivity that defies Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity as substantiality and presence. To show this, I will more closely examine the relation between subjectivity and substantiality and, more precisely, the determination of subjectivity as substantiality. This relationship has a history, the initial moment of which is the transition from Plato to Aristotle, which I will try to reconstruct here. Actualizing the debate between Plato and Aristotle on the nature of the soul while recognizing the non-substantial quality of the Platonic soul will contribute to the recollection, from within Western metaphysics, of a different tradition of thought than the one criticized by Heidegger and perhaps will also contribute to the renewal of this other, forgotten tradition of subjectivity.7

II. The determination of Being as substance (ousia) goes back to Aristotle. It would be pointless to quote the Metaphysics in this context: one would have to quote all of it and interpret it at length, which surpasses the scope of the present study.8 For reasons that will be made clear later, I will also avoid the

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question of the translation of the Greek ousia to the Latin substantia, a translation widely commented upon and criticized throughout all of Heidegger’s work. What will concern me here is the determination of substantia as subiectum in Aristotle, and the debate between Plato and Aristotle about the definition of the self, or the soul (psuchê); both terms will be used as synonyms for the modern notion of subjectivity. Before entering upon our investigation, a preliminary remark concerning the use of the term subjectivity in the context of ancient thought is required. Subjectivity (as well as the terms “subject” or “subjective”) is a modern term. It was first used in a political context: in the fourteenth century the term “subject” designated the fact of being under the domination of a sovereign. Subjectivity in the sense of the individual, of belonging to the conscious mind, appears only in the eighteenth century in Joshua Oldfield’s An Essay towards the Improvement of Reason (1707).9 In order to investigate what could be considered the ancient notion of subjectivity, one has to find the adequate translation that renders, in Plato and Aristotle’s thinking, the modern term “subjectivity.” Etymologically, subject comes from subicere, to throw under, to lie under. As such, the Greek hupokeimenon (the underlying thing or substrate) would be the immediate, more literal, translation of the term “subject.” It is in this sense that Aristotle proposes, in Metaphysics Z.3, to understand ousia as hupokeimenon. According to L. A. Kosman: Ousia is not a mode of being said of a hupokeimenon, but the hupokeimenon itself of which accidental being is predicated and in which modes of dependent being are present.10

In Metaphysics Z.3 Aristotle questions whether ousia should be understood as hupokeimenon or as eidos (essence). This alternative will ultimately be rejected in Metaphysics Z.17, where the doctrine of ousia as a compound of matter and form will be put forth. Nevertheless, our question is whether the Greek hupokeimenon adequately renders what we moderns understand as subjectivity. While etymologically and literally adequate, hupokeimenon as understood by Aristotle cannot serve as a proper translation of our concept of subjectivity. The concept of hupokeimenon designates the general idea of substrate, of lying-under, of standing-under; therefore, for Aristotle, matter in general (hulê) is synonymous with hupokeimenon, while form, or the idea (eidos), corresponds to essence.11 The modern discourse of subjectivity— expressed in Heidegger’s critique of Descartes’s ego cogito and of Husserlian consciousness—is one that clearly identifies subjectivity with human subjectivity or, better, subjectivity as expressing the essence of the human. Hupokeimenon would clearly not be a good translation for this concept.

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For Aristotle a human being occupies a very precise place in the general economy of substances. The human, in Aristotle’s ontology, is a particular substance. In Metaphysics ȁ, Aristotle teaches the following: There are three kinds of substance [ousiai]: (1) matter [hule tode ti], which exists individually in virtue of being apparent; (2) the “nature” (existing individually) [phusis tode ti]—i.e. a kind of positive state which is the terminus of motion; and (3) the particular combination of these, e.g. Socrates or Callias.12

Socrates or Callias are particular substances: they are a compound of matter and nature, nature being here understood as the terminus of motion. In On the Soul, Aristotle repeats this distinction, being more specific about the nature of the different terms composing particular substances: We describe one class of existing things as substance [ousian]: and this we subdivide into three: (1) matter [hule], which itself is not an individual thing, (2) shape [morphên] or form [eidos], in virtue of which individuality is directly attributed, and (3) the compound of the two.13

Combining Aristotle’s account of particular substances in Metaphysics and his account of substance in On the Soul, we can be more precise about what should be considered, for us, as Aristotle’s notion of subjectivity. The human (Socrates or Callias) is a particular substance, a compound of matter and form, the soul being the form of the human (the essence that defines a human being), and the body being its matter. In other words, soul, psuchê, is subjectivity as that which expresses the essence of the human.14 To think subjectivity through in Aristotle does not mean to think the concept of hupokeimenon—which designates body, the material substratum of the human—but substance as eidos, as the soul that forms the essence of the human. In other words, to consider the ancient understanding of subjectivity, the idea of the soul must be considered. Aristotle, as we know, devoted an entire work to this question: Peri Psuchês. What is Aristotle’s definition of the soul? In On the Soul Aristotle writes: “The soul may therefore be defined as the first actuality [entelecheia hê protê] of a natural body potentially possessing life.”15 The soul is the entelecheia—the form or the essence, as will be made clear further on in the text16—of a determined body. Soul—compared here to science—is the final form of a body. After having given this definition of the soul, Aristotle distinguishes two possible states of the soul: soul can be either “sleeping” (soul as potentiality, that is, possessing science without exercising it) or “awake” (soul as activity, that is, exercising science). Stated differently, soul is the principle—active or potential—that moves (a body). In Aristotle’s

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words, essence and form are the soul of “a certain kind of natural body which has in itself a principle of movement and rest.”17 The soul moves a body that in itself has the capacity to move and to rest (a living body). To understand this passage better, let us pay attention to the intimate movement of Aristotle’s logos in On the Soul. It is a movement of substitution: Aristotle’s definition of man as “individual substance” whose eidos or morphê is the soul, and his understanding of the soul as moving a body that in itself has “a principle of movement and rest,” replaces other definitions of the soul. Among others, it replaces the Platonic definition of the soul. Understanding what is at stake in Aristotle’s thesis means understanding his rejection of the Platonic definition. This substitution, in which one finds the core debate between Aristotle and Plato on the true definition of the soul, is of great importance for the understanding of the alternative conceptualizations of the idea of subjectivity as they emerged at the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Moreover, this alternative, which shaped in its singular way the destiny of the history of subjectivity, remains absent from Heidegger’s reading of this same history. This is what I will try to demonstrate in what follows.

III. In On the Soul, Aristotle mentions the only strict definition of the soul to be found in Plato’s dialogues. In the Laws, the soul is defined as “movement which moves itself.” In the tenth book of the Laws (896a), the Athenian says: What is the definition of that object which has for its name “soul”? Can we give it another definition than that stated just now—“the motion able to move itself” [tên dunamenên autên hautên kinein kinêsin]?18

Let us turn immediately to Aristotle’s objection to Plato. It is to be found in the third chapter of the first book of On the Soul. Here Aristotle touches the core of Plato’s definition: the soul moves (itself), says Plato, and it is itself in movement. For Aristotle, such a definition is impossible: movement and mover should be strictly distinguished. The principle of movement (the mover) cannot be confused with movement itself. For Aristotle the soul is a principle of movement, while being itself immobile. The soul moves a body—but in itself is neither moved (by another), nor moves (itself). One should distinguish between the principle itself (the form, the soul) and what is moved (matter, or the body). Particular substances are a composite of the two, where the soul is a principle of movement, and the body, moved matter. As stated in Metaphysics ȁ. 3 (1070a), form is the term of motion. In other words, soul itself is unmoved, it is at rest. Or perhaps it is beyond movement

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and rest. Kinetic categories do not apply to the soul. Here is how Aristotle states his objection: In the first place we must investigate the question of movement. For perhaps it is not merely untrue that the essence of the soul is such as those describe it to be who say that the soul moves or can move itself, but it may be quite impossible that movement should be characteristic of the soul at all. We have said before (Physics VIII, 5) that it is not necessary that that which produces movement should itself move.19

Aristotle’s argument against understanding the soul as movement is manifold. First, movement cannot be an attribute of the soul. Anticipating the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rationalistic tradition of thought (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz), Aristotle separates between the attributes of the body (or extension), such as movement, rest, heat, color, and so forth, and attributes of the soul (or thought), such as doubt, volition, reasoning, and so on. It would be a contradictio in adjecto to attribute movement to the soul. Thus, Plato’s account is unintelligible for Aristotle. In order to understand the profound stakes of the difference between Aristotle and Plato on the definition of the soul, one should look more deeply into the alluded text in Physics 8.5. Aristotle proves there how what originates movement is not necessarily itself in motion. To give a reasonable account of movement, Aristotle shows how one should rigorously distinguish between the moved and the mover. Evoking Anaxagoras, Aristotle writes: So, too, Anaxagoras is right when he says that Mind is impassive and unmixed, since he makes it the principle of motion: for it could cause motion in this sense only by being itself unmoved, and have supreme control only by being unmixed.20

And further, he concludes: From what has been said, then, it is evident that that which primarily imparts motion is unmoved: for, whether the series is closed at once by that which is in motion but moved by something else deriving its motion directly from the first unmoved, or whether the motion is derived from what is in motion but moves itself and stops its own motion, on both suppositions we have the result that in all cases of things being in motion that which primarily imparts motion is unmoved.21

There must be an origin for movement, a first mover, which is in itself unmoved. If that were not the case, we would have a regression ad infinitum of the causes of movement and the effects, which is an absurdity, since we experience movement and time. There must therefore be an origin for motion.

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This unmoved mover, Aristotle calls, in Metaphysics 12, God. God moves while being unmoved; he is the ultimate principle of movement. God is that substance which brings an end to the regression: anankê dê stênai, says Aristotle.22 God is the unmoved mover, a substance (ousia) different from all other substances, insofar as it is “eternal, unmovable and separate from sensible things.”23 Let us now return to our passage in On the Soul and try to understand it better. When Aristotle rejects Plato’s definition of the soul as movement moving itself, he in fact rejects the definition of the soul as dependent, as non-autarkical, at least concerning movement.24 Soul is a principle, it moves without being moved, it is the origin of movement. Aristotle rejects the definition of soul as movement (and not as principle). In order to move, we learn from Physics 8.5, the mover should not move. Yet while thinking of the soul in terms of Physics 8.5, Aristotle implicitly suggests an identity between the essence of the soul and the essence of God. The soul, and not only God, is the principle of itself. As opposed to Plato, Aristotle brings an end to the movement of the soul.25 In this sense, the soul is, in its intimate nature, identical to God: it is a form—eidos—originating movement. The subject, here, is absolutely autarkic: nothing withholds him from behind, nothing precedes him. The soul is an origin, a principle, just like God: ens causa sui—subject as substance.

IV. We can now try to approach Plato’s logos of the soul. What should be understood by the definition of soul as movement, as opposed to the definition of the soul as principle? What does it mean that the soul is movement? Beyond the logical objections of Aristotle, what is the sense of the Platonic thesis of the soul as “movement moving itself”? An existential hermeneutics of Plato’s passages on the soul is required in order to grasp what is at stake in the debate between Plato and Aristotle. In Platon et l’Europe, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patoþka proposes a phenomenological analysis of the Platonic logos of the soul as movement. In Appendix 4, entitled “L’origine et le sens de l’idée d’immortalité chez Platon” [The origin and sense of the idea of immortality in Plato], Patoþka writes: However, no one, to my knowledge, has tried to give to the explanation of the soul as “moving itself” an anthropological meaning grounded in phenomena. This is what we propose in this study.26

And here is how Patoþka understands Plato’s definition:

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The fundamental intuition is not a simple observation; it is something that exercises an operating action in the soul, which transforms the soul’s action itself. . . . Yet a transformation that takes place between two extremities, which conduct from one point to the other, is a movement. The movement here happened by virtue of an event relating to the soul, and it has exercised an operating action in the soul, it has made it [the soul] move itself. This is something only a soul is capable of: to transform itself, to realize a life project, to exercise an action “in return” such as that it becomes other than it was before, while at the same time remaining one in itself.27

Movement is metabolê: a transformation. The soul moves; that means man is capable of operating a return, of engaging in the world as a soul searching for itself, returning to its self. In this return to its self, one discovers the very object of one’s care: the soul. Or, in more traditional terms, a moving soul is precisely a soul that, in search of its self, cares for itself. Thus, for Patoþka, the theme of the care of the soul (epimeleia tês psuchês) is intimately related to the (formal) definition of the soul in the Laws. In other words, the understanding of soul as “being in movement” is an immediate consequence of the basic Socratic-Platonic project of the care of the soul.28 What is exceptional in the human is its being a soul—that is, being capable of a return to itself while remaining itself. In order to grasp the full extent of the Platonic definition of the soul as movement, one has to add another dimension to the analysis: the theological dimension. The Platonic thesis about soul as movement is, strictly speaking, theological; this movement implicates in its most intimate structure the order of the theos. Patoþka stresses this point while turning to Plato’s master, Socrates. In the Apology, Socrates tells his judges his “way to philosophy,” which is not the story of how he came to philosophy but, in fact, how philosophy came to him. The origins of Socrates’s philosophical adventure are described in the Apology in terms of a divine intervention: the famous Delphic oracle, inciting Socrates to go and philosophize, thus unveiling Socrates’s wisdom to himself. This is the primordial scene for Patoþka—the model of the soul as movement is Socrates, a soul being moved by the divine so that, in contact with it, the soul transforms itself. Thinking movement phenomenologically means thinking this transformation: Socrates is revealed as the one recognized by the god as such, he becomes sophos ten antropeian sophian insofar as he discovers that the human Sophia, sufficient and presumptuous, is nothing; he becomes the auxiliary of the god, the one who accomplishes a divine mission.29

The perplexities (aporias) that the Delphic logos originates in him are at the origin of Socratic thinking, of his astonishment (thaumazein). It is the true

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saying of the oracle that sets Socrates in motion: “And for a long time I was at a loss as to what he [the oracle] meant.”30 Socrates is put into aporia—and as such he is moved—by virtue of a divine word. While Patoþka’s phenomenology of soul as movement leads him to an original interpretation of the idea of the immortality of the soul, I propose to look further into the theological consequences of this phenomenology. In order to stress the theological dimension inherent in the Platonic definition of soul as movement, the Alcibiades—whose main theme is the care of the self, and which in the neo-Platonic tradition served as initiation to philosophy— can be of great help. The opening of this dialogue—its pro-logos—deploys a metaphysical choreography in which three existential positions are staged: Alcibiades, Socrates, and Socrates’s daemon. The following comes from the opening scene of the First Alcibiades: I have not spoken one word to you for so many years. The cause of this has been nothing human, but a certain spiritual opposition [daimonion] of whose power you shall be informed at some later time. However, it now opposes me no longer, so I have come to you, as you see. And I am in good hopes that it will not oppose me again in the future.31

What interests me in this prologue is the relation between movement and the principle of movement. Socrates is about to engage in a dialogue with Alcibiades; he is about to attempt a conversion of Alcibiades’s soul, to move it toward itself. Yet the beginning of Socrates’s operation does not depend upon Socrates. Socrates is the principle of movement of Alcibiades, but he himself is conditioned by a higher instance: the daemon. The daemon is an instance of transcendence. It is the agency by which the gods communicate with the mortals (and mortals with gods). Thus, in the Symposium, Diotima describes Eros as follows: What then, I asked, can Love be? A mortal? Anything but that. Well what? As I previously suggested, between a mortal and an immortal. And what is that, Diotima? A great spirit [daemon megas], Socrates: for the whole of the spiritual [daemonion] is between divine and mortal. Possessing what power? I asked. Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men. . . . God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep.32

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The daemon is the medium between the divine and the mortal, between the finite and the infinite. As such, the daemon plays a crucial role in the philosophical adventure. In the opening phrases of the Alcibiades, Socrates describes the proper activity of his daemon: up till now, the daemon always stops Socrates from approaching Alcibiades and forbids him from speaking to the young man. Now the time is ripe for Socrates to address Alcibiades. The soul-Socrates can approach the soul-Alcibiades, in order to cause a movement in it, in order to move it toward itself. Socrates wants to provoke in Alcibiades this very movement of return to the self that the oracle once provoked in Socrates’s own soul. In other words, Socrates, oriented by his daemon, functions as a daemon for Alcibiades. Later in the dialogue, we learn why Socrates is stopped by the daemon, why he cannot approach Alcibiades earlier. But what interests me here is first of all the daemonic function itself, its nature. The daemon never says something—he is a pure force of withholding and of letting go. In his commentary on the First Alcibiades, the fifth-century neo-Platonist Proclus designates three features of the daemon: he is not only a daemon, but also a god; he is a voice that addresses Socrates; and the daemon never initiates, he always withholds. The withholding power of the daemon is explained by Proclus as follows: We say that the well-shaped character of Socrates’ life, his sociable and philanthropic character, his willingness to communicate the good abundantly, all of this didn’t require an incitation from the part of his daemon, because he himself initiated those relationships presenting himself to everyone, ready to share with them the best sort of life. But as many of those who he approached weren’t made for having part in virtue and in universal science, the good daemon who guided him stopped him from exercising his providence on such people.33

Socrates’s nature is to address everyone: his inclination to share wisdom is universal. Yet, for a reason we will understand soon, this inclination is dangerous, or at least unfruitful. Socrates’s inclination should be supervised by the daemon. The daemon, by withholding Socrates, regulates the intimate movement of his logos: the daemon determines at which moment the soul of Socrates can enter into a dialogue with the soul of Alcibiades. Thus, the daemon, which is a transcendent instance, conditions the dialogue itself, thought itself. The dialogue—relation of a soul to a soul through veridical logos—presupposes the authorization of the daemon. In other words, there is a theological condition for philosophy that corresponds to the moment of the awakening of the soul to itself. Why does the daemon not allow Socrates to approach Alcibiades until now? Why does the daemon not allow Socrates to approach everybody?

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Proclus, in his commentary, answers: one does not speak to just anyone at any time, in the Platonic regime. The god is the one who determines when a soul is ready to be moved and, in our case, when a moving soul may try to move another soul—when the time is ripe to provoke, in Patoþka’s terms, a conversion of the soul. This happens when the other (Alcibiades in our case) is capable of listening: In your younger days, to be sure, before you had built such high hopes, the god, as I believe, prevented me from talking with you, in order that I might not waste my words: but now he has set me on; for now you will listen to me.34

The Socratic daemon does not say anything; he allows or forbids Socrates to engage in dialogue. As such, the daemon possesses a very particular knowledge: the knowledge of the right moment, the science of kairos (the right or opportune moment). The daemon, and only he, knows when logos can be effective—when it can affect one’s soul, move one’s soul. And only an effective speech, one that provokes a metabolê of the soul, is a speech worthy of being promulgated. The Socratic logos will either be fruitful, or it will not be. It will provoke a movement, a conversion of the soul, or it will not be.35 The daemonical, transcendent injunction is at the origin of the philosophical act itself: it is responsible for the initial movement of the soul. Even if later the care of the self will be linked to the science of Ideas, what orients the care of the self is not, properly speaking, “scientific” but existential and theological.36 The imperative comes from somewhere else, from a beyond. We can now try to reformulate Plato’s thesis on the soul in the terms of our problematic: soul is not autarkic in Plato; its archê is not in itself. Or, in Aristotelian terms, soul is not substance. Rather than speaking about soul as substance, one should speak in terms of “event”—there is an event of subjectification, a becoming of the subject, a deeper and deeper becomingsoul of the self. This event, properly speaking, is theological in the strictest sense of the word: it supposes an invocation coming from the Other, a call from beyond Being.

V. Let us return to our problematic, namely, Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity. We understand now what it means to describe the soul as movement. As such, the soul is not a res, a thing, a substance. Patoþka summarizes this intuition as follows:

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The Platonic soul distinguishes itself from the soul in post-Cartesian thought by not being conceived as a thing. . . . It is not an interiority closed within itself; it is not a receptacle of “ideas,” of “representations” or of “lived experiences.” It is, as Plato says, a movement that gives itself what it is, it moves itself, and not only another thing outside of it that would thus acquire a living formation. In other words: it is not a res cogitans. It is existence.37

The Platonic soul is subjectivity not as essence, but as existence: ex-sistere— a soul in movement, a soul in search of its self. Not a container of ideas, not an “epistemological” subject, but an “event of subjectivity.” Patoþka, in the passage just quoted, remarks on the rupture between the Platonic and the Cartesian theses of the soul (movement versus an interiority closed within itself). But Patoþka also knows where to situate the decisive moment at which the rupture occurred: precisely the Aristotelian moment. It is Aristotle who thought of the soul as a principle in the sense of immobility. The principle of movement, for him, “is, in the common sense of the word, immobile,” writes Patoþka. And he continues: Although the res cogitans does not exist yet in Aristotle (because the distinction between cogitatio and cogitatum is absent there), it is due to him that this determination becomes possible.38

Aristotle is the starting point of the thought of soul as substance, and as such, the whole theme of the care of the self—as well as the metaphysics that accompanies it—is absent from his thought. Nothing remains of the soul as moved individually, or existentially, by the theos.39 The same can be said of Heidegger: he occults the whole horizon opened by the Platonic meditation of the soul as movement in his critique of Western subjectivity, this critique being possible only from within the Aristotelian paradigm of the soul as substance. Textually, Heidegger never studies the strict Platonic definition of the soul (the one found in the Laws) in depth. In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, and in greater detail in his seminar on Plato, The Essence of Truth, it is always the epistemic question of the relation between soul and Idea that is treated. The only place Heidegger recalls Plato’s definition of the soul as movement is in his analysis of the Theaetetus. Heidegger, very briefly, suggests that there is a convergence between the epistemic treatment of the soul and the kinetic definition of it. But he does not comment further or explain where exactly these two analyses converge: This is not the only way in which Plato clarifies the “soul”. A quite different method (albeit one which ultimately agrees with what has just been indicated) is employed in the Laws (Book X, 891 ff.), where the phenomenon of kinêsis (movement), more precisely self-movement, provides the guiding thread for

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Heidegger knows about the passage in the Laws and about the phenomenon of kinêsis by which Plato understands the nature of the soul. But he does not study this major Platonic articulation as such. No phenomenology of the soul as kinêsis—or as the principle of kinêsis—is established by Heidegger.41 In this way, Heidegger eludes another understanding of the soul, as well as another history of subjectivity. Phenomenology has taught us to be sensitive to the existential stakes lying under every theoretical discourse, to the living experience—the Erlebnis—that provides the original sense of concepts, of ideas. As such, phenomenology helps us decipher fundamental intuitions lying at the bottom of the philosophical experience and concealed in some ancient texts. Plato’s understanding of the soul in terms of movement and Aristotle’s objection to this definition can be read this way; they can—or should—be understood and retranslated in terms of existence. This is what I tried to do here. At the starting point of philosophy, two ways are opened: soul as substance and soul as kinêsis. Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity reflects only one of the possible ways of envisaging the sense of subjectivity. Yet a different history of subjectivity unfolds depending on which way one adopts, which resonances one is able to hear. Plato’s logos on the soul as movement is not innocent: it recapitulates, in a dense formulation, the whole intrigue of subjectivity, which is the intrigue of the relation of the self to the divine.42 This intrigue determines a different way of being in the world, and another “way to philosophy.”

Notes 1

Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Zähringen” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 70. 2 Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1972), 63. 3 We will not enter here into Heidegger’s interpretation of substance in Descartes, which would demand a very close reading of §19 to §21 of Being and Time. For a critical interpretation of Heidegger’s reading of Descartes, see Jean Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), (pt. 3, § 13), 150–168. [Editor’s note: Standard references for works are in parentheses and are followed by the page number for the particular edition.] 4 Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy,” 61. 5 Ibid., 62. 6 Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” in On Time and Being, 79.

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Such a critical approach to Heidegger can already be found in Stanley Rosen’s The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002). Rosen demonstrates how Heidegger’s critique of Plato and, through Plato, of Western metaphysics in general results from a confused reading of Plato, a reading deeply influenced by Aristotelian ontology and the question of Being central to it: “There is no scientific understanding, i.e., historiographical return to Plato, without passage through Aristotle,” writes Heidegger in his Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 131. 8 For a reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics from a Heideggerian perspective, see Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote [The problem of being in Aristotle] (Paris: PUF, 2005); see also Werner Marx’s account of the form and meaning of the Aristotelian ousia in Werner Marx, Heidegger and Tradition, trans. Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 17–42; and Jacob Klein’s classical introduction to Aristotle’s key notions: Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, ed. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckermann (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985). 9 According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. The Philological Society (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961), (section Su-Sz), 10:22–24 and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 881. 10 Louis Aryeh Kosman, “Substance, Being, and Energeia,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 2:139. 11 See Aristotle, Metaphysics Z.17. 12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), (12.1070a.10–14), 128–129. 13 Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), (2.412a), 66–67. 14 I propose to consider here Plato’s and Aristotle’s thoughts regarding the soul as discourses on subjectivity. A major objection to this perspective would be that Plato’s or Aristotle’s understanding of the soul is not restricted to humans (as the idea of subjectivity would suggest). In Plato the soul also stands for celestial bodies (stars), for animals, for the world, etc., and in Aristotle the soul is a generic name designating the living as such as a composed substance—while the human soul is distinguished from other organic bodies by possessing a rational capacity (nous), which is the capacity to grasp forms. My ambition here is not to give a full account of Aristotle’s and Plato’s notion of the soul but only to highlight the major displacement from Plato to Aristotle concerning the definition of the soul. I will therefore limit myself to those places where the text clearly refers to the soul as the human soul—the soul as self, the soul as that which one should care for (epimeleia tês psuchês), in Plato’s Alcibiades, or the passages in Aristotle’s On the Soul where Aristotle clearly objects to Plato’s definition of the soul. 15 Aristotle, On the Soul, Hett, (2.412a), 68–69. 16 See Aristotle, On the Soul, Hett, (2.412b), 68–69: “We have, then, given a general definition of what the soul is: it is substance in the sense of formula; i.e., the essence of such-and-such a body.” 17 Ibid., (2.412b), 70–71.

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Plato, Laws, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), (10.896a), 336–337. 19 Aristotle, On the Soul, Hett, (1.405b–406a), 30–31. 20 Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), (8.256b), 322. 21 Ibid., (8.258b), 339. 22 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Tredennick, (7.1070a.4), 129. 23 Ibid., (7.1073a.4), 151. 24 The soul is not absolutely autarkical: for instance, there is no soul that is not the soul of a particular body. Yet, concerning movement, the soul is completely independent: it is a principle. 25 One should not confuse the different states of the soul—potential or actual, “sleeping” or “awake”—and movement. While the distinction between potential and actual always rests on a presupposed accomplished form (which is in fact the soul in actu), the idea of movement—as will be shown further on in this paper—translates a possibility of complete transformation. 26 Jan Patoþka, Platon et l’Europe, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Verdier, 1990), 303 (my translation). 27 Ibid., 303–304 (my translation). 28 This is the central theme in Patoþka’s Plato and Europe. Patoþka’s existential reading of Plato as a philosopher of the care of the self is in this sense close to other contemporary readings of Greek philosophy, especially Pierre Hadot’s reading of Greek philosophy as a way of life. See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Michel Foucault’s later work on the hermeneutics of the subject in Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Macmillan, 2005). 29 Patoþhka, Platon et l’Europe, 303 (my translation). 30 Plato, The Apology, trans. H. N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), (20e–21d), 80–81. 31 Plato, First Alcibiades, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), (103a–b), 98–99. 32 Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), (202e), 178–179. On the daemon in Plato, see Mark Joyal, “To Daimonion and the Socratic Problem,” in Apeiron 38, no. 2 (2005): 97– 112. 33 Proclus, Alcibiades, trans. and commentary William Lawrence O’Neill (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965), (80–82), 146. 34 Plato, First Alcibiades, Lamb, (105e–106a), 104–105. 35 For further reading, see Proclus, “Why Did the Daemon Allow Socrates to Meet Alcibiades,” in Alcibiades, O’Neill, (85–86), 162. 36 In Plato and Europe, Patoþka insists on the difference between Plato and Democritus concerning the scientific ideal. Whereas in Plato the scientific interest emerges from within the topos of the care of the self, as an existential consequence of the imperative of the care of the self, in Democritus the “care of the self” serves the scientific ideal. See Jan Patoþka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 61–80.

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Patoþka, Platon et l’Europe, 311 (my translation). Ibid., 313. 39 While in Aristotle too, ultimately all things are moved by the love of God (the theme of homoiosis theoi, as in The Nicomachean Ethics for instance, book 10, chapter 7), this movement has to be carefully distinguished from the existential movement the daemon provokes in the soul: the movement of the first mover in Aristotle addressed indifferently the whole of Being, without any care for the singularity of the individual soul. Here resides precisely the fundamental difference between a philosophy of the care of the self and ontology—as well as the different sense of the divine, of transcendence, in their respective philosophies. 40 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 128. It is important to remark that contrary to the passage in the Laws that deals directly with the strict definition of the soul, in the Theaetetus the notion of soul is used only as a possible name of what is questioned in this dialogue (the relation between the aestheton and thinking). Heidegger, relying on Theaetetus (184d), notes: “This single pre-given region of possible perceivability, says Plato, one could, if one wishes, call ‘soul’” (The Essence of Truth, 127). 41 This fact is even more surprising given that in his 1931 seminar on Aristotle, and more precisely in §15 of that work, Heidegger explicitly studies the relation between kinêsis and psuchê. See Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 126–130. In this context he does so from within a purely Aristotelian point of view, stressing the Aristotelian definition of the soul as being the archê of kinêsis: commenting on the passage in Metaphysics (1046b.15–22), Heidegger writes that “what is being discussed is the fact that ȥȣȤȒ, soul, has, holds forth in itself that from out of which its self-movement occurs—ȐȡȤȘȞ țȚȞȒıİȦȗ ȑȤİȚ” (ibid, 128). Because of the importance of the relation of kinêsis and psuchê, one might have expected Heidegger to comment more closely on the Platonic definition of soul as kinêsis in the Laws. 42 In order to complete the demonstration, one should question all instances of transcendence in Plato—not only the daemon, but also the Voice of the laws in the Crito, or the function of Eros in the Symposium, and more generally the place of divinity in the general economy of Plato’s dialogues. Such a work was undertaken from a historical perspective by Pierre Bovet at the beginning of the twentieth century. See Pierre Bovet, Le Dieu de Platon d'après l’ordre chronologique des Dialogues [Plato’s God according to the chronological order of the dialogues] (Geneva: Kündig, 1902). 38

FREEDOM, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE STATE IN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT* EMILY HARTZ AND CARSTEN FOGH NIELSEN

Introduction The term “post-subjectivity” points toward, or seems to implicitly suggest, moving beyond a more or less stable, coherent conception of subjectivity and of what it means to be a subject. To do so, however, we first need to know what it is that we are leaving behind and why this particular understanding of subjectivity has failed and needs to be replaced. This paper argues that Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (1821)1 provides an answer to both of these questions. More precisely, the paper argues that the overall structure and purpose of the Philosophy of Right and the particular arguments offered within it represent a conceptually systematic, highly sophisticated attempt to explicate the implicit meaning of our traditional conceptions of subjectivity and to critically examine them. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, we argue, continues to be of relevance for contemporary discussions of (post-)subjectivity because it provides one of the most ambitious attempts to justify and fulfill the post-subjectivist aspiration to move beyond “the philosophy of the subject.” The aim of the Philosophy of Right, however, is not simply to examine, criticize, and reject our traditional conceptions of subjectivity, whatever they might be. For Hegel such an approach would be an example of the kind of dogmatic philosophical arrogance he so eloquently mocks in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit (see, for example, PdG, pp. 2–3, 8–9, and 13– 14). Even if most of what we believe to be true about subjectivity turns out to be wrong, we cannot and should not conclude that all our traditional conceptions of what it means to be a human subject are inherently false in all respects. For Hegel the very fact that an idea or conception exists—that is, has a material, embodied presence in the world in the form of social practices, institutions, or established ways of acting—implies that there is something right, something rational about it. Hegel famously put it this way in the “Preface” to the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (PR, p. 14).

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Freedom, Subjectivity, and the State in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Hegel’s aim in the Philosophy of Right is to reveal both the truth of and the inconsistencies inherent in our traditional conceptions of subjectivity in order to develop a better, more adequate understanding of what it means to be a human subject—an understanding that captures and makes sense of the complexities of life in the modern world. Philosophy, according to Hegel, is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where. (PR, p. 13)

The aim and overall structure of the Philosophy of Right The Philosophy of Right can fruitfully be read as an extended, critical analysis of the conditions for and possibility of genuine human freedom. More specifically, Hegel attempts to show that traditional, individualistic accounts of freedom and will, such as those of Kant or early (pre)liberalist thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, are inadequate and self-defeating, since they can neither justify nor truly explain the sort of individual freedom and autonomy they explicitly set out to defend. There are two sides to Hegel’s analysis. On the one hand, the Philosophy of Right presents a critical examination and justification of the objective social, legal, and political structures and institutions that are necessary for freedom to be realized in the world. Stephen Houlgate puts it this way: The task of Hegel’s philosophy of right . . . is to lay out the various objective—judicial, moral, social, and political—forms that human freedom must take on, if it is to be true freedom. It is to show that genuine human freedom must objectify itself in rights, laws, and institutions, not just in the arbitrariness of self-will.2

On the other hand, and equally important, the Philosophy of Right also analyzes the subjective side of freedom—the question of what it means to be a subject capable of exercising true freedom. Hegel is well aware that freedom cannot be adequately analyzed or understood in abstracto without considering individual human beings: “It is in a subject that freedom can first be realized, since the subjective is the true material for this realization” (PR, §107Z).3 Any adequate conception of freedom thus has to include an account of what it means to be a free human subject, what it means to be free subjectivity, and the Philosophy of Right attempts to provide such an account. As Simon Lumsden puts it, the Philosophy of Right is, at least in parts, the story of “a subject that is transformed through differing and progressive attempts at the realization of freedom.”4 More specifically, Hegel outlines the gradual development of human subjectivity needed for human beings to

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become autonomous, self-determining creatures. In Hegel’s own words: “The system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit brought forth out of itself as a second nature” (PR, §4). Putting together the objective and subjective parts of Hegel’s argument, the Philosophy of Right emerges as an ambitious account of how practical human subjectivity, the capacity to orient oneself within a normative space and to act in and upon the world in meaningful, rationally justifiable ways, presupposes and is made possible by cultural, economic, legal, and political social structures that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world. This account has a normative and critical side insofar as it purports to show the inherent inadequacy of strongly individualist conceptions of freedom and subjectivity. Embedded in the very structure of the Philosophy of Right we find a critical engagement with and an account of traditional conceptions of subjectivity and an attempt to provide a better, more adequate understanding of what it means to be a free, morally competent subject. The Philosophy of Right is divided into three parts: “Abstract Right,” “Morality,” and “The Ethical Life.” In each of these parts, Hegel analyzes a particular conception of freedom and shows how these conceptions necessarily presuppose something that they themselves cannot provide. “Abstract Right” discusses what we might call “personal freedom”—freedom understood as an individual capacity to freely choose among (given) ends. “Morality” discusses “moral freedom”—the moral subject’s capacity to determine him- or herself independently of all particularity. Last, the section on “Ethical Life” discusses “social freedom”—freedom conceived as a particular way of being a part of and identifying with a certain social structure (the family, civil society, and the state).5 The transition from one part of the Philosophy of Right to the next, from one conception of freedom to another, is motivated by contradictions revealed to be inherent in the particular conception of freedom being investigated. And since Hegel, as we have just seen, takes subjectivity and freedom to be necessarily intertwined, each transition also reveals problems and inadequacies of the particular sort of subjectivity associated with these different conceptions.

Abstract right Hegel’s analysis of freedom begins with what Hegel takes to be “the idea which people most commonly have of freedom”—namely, “arbitrariness [Willkür] or freedom of choice” (PR, §15A). The notion of freedom of choice, Hegel explains in the “Introduction,” presupposes two distinct capacities of the will. On the one hand, the will must be capable of

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abstracting from or disregarding any particular desire that I may have. There must be an “absolute possibility of abstraction from every determination in which I may find myself or which I may have set up in myself, my flight from every content as from a restriction” (PR, §5).6 If my will could not abstract from every particular content given to me, it would not be free but would instead be determined by this very content. Freedom of choice thus, Hegel argues, implies an “element of pure indeterminacy” in the will (PR, §5A). On the other hand, freedom of choice also suggests an ability to actually choose something specific: “My willing is not pure willing but the willing of something” (PR, §6Z). A free choice entails more than just the refusal to be determined by anything particular, the ability to abstract from any particular content. Unless I actually choose something, I have not chosen anything. And if I don’t choose anything, then I have not actually made a choice. Freedom of choice therefore implies that a “positing of a determinacy as content and object” is an essential feature of the will (PR, §6). These two capacities correspond to two aspects of what it means to be a person—that is, a particular individual capable of free choice. As this person, I know myself to be free in myself. I can abstract from everything, since nothing confronts me save pure personality, and yet as this person I am something wholly determinate, e.g. I am of a certain age, a certain stature, I occupy this space, and so on through whatever details you like. (PR, §35Z)7

On the one hand, I am this particular person, with these particular characteristics, desires, and wants. On the other hand, I am not simply or solely defined through these particular determinations. I am always something more, something indeterminate, not defined or determined by any of my particular traits or qualities. The indeterminacy is inherent in the very possibility of choice; the particularity is the determinacy inherent in individuality. Persons employ their freedom of choice to freely decide which of their desires to fulfill. What human beings desire, however, are mostly things in the world, so to fulfill these desires human beings must engage with and try to take possession of bits and pieces of the world around them. The notion of property, of being capable of possessing objects distinct from oneself, thus appears to be a necessary precondition for freedom of choice to be practically efficient in the world. “Abstract Right” outlines the basic normative preconditions for and implications of the notion of property becoming a social reality. Starting from the bare notion of being a bearer of rights as such (PR, §36), Hegel develops the basic moral and legal structure that enables

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persons to own property, to exchange property with others, and to engage in contractual relationships with them (PR, §41–81). A breach of the rights embodied in “Abstract Right” constitutes a crime that can only be put right, be “annulled” (PR, §101–102), through the intervention of an impartial judicial system—that is, “a justice freed from subjective interest and a subjective form and no longer contingent on power” (PR, §103). Abstract individual rights, and the abstract notion of individuality on which these rights are based—the notion of a person, an individual capable of free choice—thus necessarily (but implicitly) presuppose that there are objective, impartial, universal norms and requirements that are applicable to and valid for everyone. This, however, reveals an inner tension in the conception of freedom as free choice. On the one hand, objective, universal rules and principles, concretely embodied in the form of an impartial legal system, are needed for the protection and realization of personal freedom on a social level. On the other hand, at the individual level such principles and rules are commonly viewed as externally imposed limitations on the exercise of free choice—that is, a threat to personal freedom. The embodiment and realization of freedom on a social (objective) level, in the form of an impartial legal system, thus seems to directly contradict the effective actualization of freedom on a personal (subjective) level, in so far as it is perceived as something imposed “from the outside”—an external constraint on free choice. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopaedia: “A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the subjective will” (E, §502). Hegel’s discussion of freedom in “Abstract Right” thus reveals that freedom as free choice is inherently unstable and contradictory. It is, however, not merely the particular conception of freedom discussed in “Abstract Right” that is unstable but also the notion of subjectivity that this conception both presupposes and implies. The initial motivation for the establishment of abstract right, we remember, was to enable persons to effectively exercise free choice. In order to satisfy their freely chosen particular wants and desires, persons must be able to take possession of things in the world, and this is what abstract right makes possible. At the outset abstract right is thus based on and motivated by particularity. It is because the legal and moral notions of rights, property, contract, and the like enable me to pursue and satisfy my particular wants and desires in better, more adequate ways that I initially find these notions attractive and agree to abide by them. This “immediate particularity,” however, quickly turns out to be inherently inadequate and contradictory. Once more a formulation from the Encyclopaedia serves to elucidate the problem:

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Freedom, Subjectivity, and the State in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right The “reality” of right, which the personal will in the first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to the instrumentality of the subjective will—whose influence as on one hand it gives existence to the essential right, so may on the other cut itself off from and oppose itself to it. (E, §502)

On the one hand, each particular person (each individual will) immediately wills the satisfaction of his or her own particular desires and wants. On the other hand, each particular person also gradually comes to see that the efficient satisfaction of their own particular desires necessarily implies something that transcends, and to some extent restricts, the unfettered pursuit of individual desires—namely, impartial, universal principles and rules concretely embodied in a legal system. The will is, so to speak, divided against itself in that it simultaneously wills both particularity and universality. Abstract right necessarily leads to a “demand for a will which, though particular and subjective, yet wills the universal as such” (PR, §103).

Morality Though abstract right is concerned with particularity, with the conditions and presuppositions of individual freedom of choice, it inevitably presupposes universality as a precondition for the efficient realization of such freedom. A demand for universality, for a will capable of willing the universal, turns out to be the natural, inevitable consequence of the attempt to actually realize freedom of choice in the world. This demand, however, is not merely something imposed from the outside but is something that “has emerged in the course of this movement itself” (PR, §103). What is needed is therefore an analysis of the meaning and implications of universality. More precisely, what is needed is an analysis of the previously mentioned “will which, though particular and subjective, yet wills the universal as such.” The section on “Morality” presents us with precisely such an analysis. “The standpoint of morality,” Hegel explains in the very first paragraph, “is the standpoint of the will which is infinite not merely in itself but for itself” (PR, §105). What, then, does the notion of a will that “wills the universal as such” imply? Hegel believes that a universal will must be able to free itself of all particularity. As previously explained, freedom of choice implies that the will is capable of abstracting from any particular content. This, however, is not enough for the will to be able to will the universal. As we saw in the previous section, freedom of choice is only truly actualized when the will chooses something determinate, something particular. Freedom of choice is freedom to freely choose among existing desires and wants and decide which of these should be adopted as an end. Ultimately freedom of choice thus presupposes

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and depends upon a given—namely, our always already existing set of particular desires. “Arbitrariness [Willkür] implies that the content is made mine not by the nature of my will but by contingency” (PR, §15Z). But this, according to Hegel, implies that “I am dependent on this content, and this is the contradiction lying in arbitrariness” (PR, §15Z). Although freedom of choice implies the ability to abstract from any particular content, it does not imply abstracting from particularity as such.8 A will capable of willing the universal must, however, be completely undetermined by, completely independent of, all particularity. From the standpoint of morality, freedom must thus be understood in a radically different way from the way it was conceived within abstract right. Moral freedom, as opposed to personal freedom (freedom of choice), implies complete independence of all particularity. Morality, Hegel argues, is built upon an understanding of the free will as a fully self-determining will—that is, a will that contains nothing imposed or brought in from outside the will itself. The content of the moral will must thus be given by and through the subject itself (see, for example, PR, §105 and §106Z). Hegel puts it thus: This subjectivity, qua abstract self-determination and pure certainty of oneself alone . . . [is] the power to judge, to determine from within itself alone, what is good in respect of any content. (PR, §138)9

“Abstract Right” focuses primarily on the question of which “objective” legal and moral structures are needed for individual free choice to become realized in the world. “Morality,” on the other hand, focuses more on the subjective side of the equation, on the internal structure of a will capable of willing the universal and on the moral concepts and notions we use to ascribe praise, blame, guilt, and responsibility (PR, §115–128). This shift of perspective, which is motivated by the contradictions revealed at the end of “Abstract Right,” also provides a solution. The problem here is that immediate particularity views the demand for universality as something alien, something that impedes and restricts its freedom. What Hegel’s analysis reveals is that universality is not a demand that opposes or restricts individual freedom; rather, it constitutes the essence of a more radical, more complete, and more adequate notion of individual freedom than mere freedom of choice. Freedom of choice, we have seen, always depends on something given—namely, our particular desires and wants. Moral freedom, on the other hand, implies complete independence of all particularity. Moral freedom thus represents a far more radical and consistent understanding of freedom than freedom of choice, an understanding that escapes the inner contradiction inherent in the latter concept. Furthermore, moral freedom develops naturally from and is the

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logical culmination of immediate particularity’s struggle to be completely self-determining. The apparent contradiction within the will and between the objective (social) and subjective (individual) points of view is thus dissolved because the moral subject recognizes that the demand for universality represents and makes possible its own freedom. Unfortunately moral freedom does not merely dissolve the contradictions inherent in abstract right; it also simultaneously introduces new questions and problems. The most immediate problem is how the will is supposed to determine itself if, from the very outset, it abstracts from and disregards everything contingent, everything particular, everything that is not of its own making. The problem is that the moral will appears to contain nothing but the abstract notions of universality and moral freedom, and these notions on their own seem too formal, too empty, to be able to yield any concrete determination of duty, of what ought to be done. If this were true the only way in which the will could actually determine itself to act, to do something concrete, would be to bring in particular content from the outside. And the only way this can be done without undermining the complete independence and self-determination constitutive of the moral will is if the will always already possesses the norms and criteria necessary to determine whether or not a particular content, a particular demand imposed from the outside, constitutes a true moral duty. Hegel is very skeptical about this possibility. Commenting on Kant’s principle of universalizability, he states: From this point of view, no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; of course, material may be brought in from outside and particular duties may be arrived at accordingly, but if the definition of duty is taken to be the absence of contradiction, formal correspondence with itself—which is nothing but the establishment of abstract indeterminacy—then no transition is possible to the specification of particular duties nor, if some such particular content for acting comes under consideration, is there any criterion in that principle for deciding whether it is or is not a duty. (PR, §135A)

Moral freedom, freedom as complete independence of particularity, thus turns out to be inherently problematic. Abstracting from all particularity, moral freedom reduces itself to “an empty formalism” (PR, §135) from which no particular duties can be deduced. Without content brought in from “outside,” moral freedom is incapable of determining the will, but when such content is brought in, moral freedom is reduced to dependence and particularity. Hegel’s analysis not only reveals the relevant conception of moral freedom to be incoherent but also shows an inherent contradiction within the moral subject. Adopting the point of view of morality means adopting a

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rational system of objectively valid, universal norms that are completely distinct from and independent of the socially mediated rules, norms, and requirements we always already know, acknowledge, and accept. On the one hand, the moral subject must thus abstract from any and all particular content in order to exercise moral freedom. On the other hand, the moral subject is always already a member of a particular society with specific social norms, rules, and requirements that one is naturally and emotionally disposed to accept and to follow. This creates a motivational dissonance within the subject. The abstract moral norms bear no direct relation to the subject’s own concrete life and particular circumstances and hence might not be immediately appealing or motivating. However, the subject is a rational being capable of moral freedom, one who is both capable of and interested in adopting and being determined by universal principles and norms. The moral subject thus ends up in an urgent, difficult, and apparently unavoidable dilemma: One can disregard the requirements of pure practical reason and instead live life in accordance with socially established norms and rules, thus furthering the (subjective) good. Or one can choose to let one’s actions be determined by the putatively universal, impartial, and objective principles of reason, principles made known through conscience, hence prioritizing abstract reason over the concrete norms and requirements that are always already present in one’s social environment.10 If we confine ourselves to the point of view of morality as described in the second part of PR, we end up with a number of apparently irresolvable dilemmas. Two of these have been discussed above: the empty formalism of a completely self-determining moral will, and the conflict of the particular values and norms embodied in concrete social life with the abstract moral norms proposed by reason.11 These problems bring to light the inherent limitations and deficiencies of the moral point of view caused by the strict separation of particularity and universality. It is these deficiencies and inherent contradictions that necessitate a further move, a further development in the progressive unfolding and realization of freedom—namely, “the integration of these two relative totalities [particularity and universality] into an absolute identity” (PR, §141).

Ethical life: The family and civil society The explicit aim of the third part of the Philosophy of Right, “The Ethical Life,” is to show how this integration of the particular and the universal is accomplished. Or, better put, the aim of the section on ethical life is to explain how this integration is always already in the process of being

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accomplished in and through the social structures that define the modern world.12 In this section Hegel thus explicates the implicit normative structures inherent in and distinctive of the three dominant social institutions of the modern world: the family, civil society (basically the free market and the institutions associated with the production and distribution of goods), and the state. Hegel’s basic idea is that participation in these three social institutions enables subjects to gradually transform and transcend their particular, egocentered desires and wants and instead adopt a more universal point of view while simultaneously allowing individuality to be better, more fully expressed than in any previous social arrangement. “The concrete identity of the good with the subjective will, an identity which is therefore the truth of them, is ethical life” (PR, §141). In the family my individuality, my life, and my happiness are inextricably intertwined with the individuality, life, and happiness of particular others: parents, children, spouse, and so on. The essential bond that unites the members of a family is love, and love implies letting one’s own particularity be defined through and constituted by others. “Love,” Hegel explains, means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in isolation by myself but win my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independence [Fürsichsein] and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. (PR, §158Z)

In love my individuality is necessarily entwined with and defined through my relation to those particular others whom I love—paradigmatically, the members of my family. Hence, in a family, one’s disposition is to have self-consciousness of one’s own individuality within this unity as the essentiality that has being in and for itself, with the result that one is in it not as an independent person but as a member. (PR, §158)

Who I am, the particular individual I take myself to be, is defined by and constituted through my membership in my family. In civil society the satisfaction of my wants and desires also depends on the actions of others—in this case people I do not know and might never meet: the producers and distributors of the goods and necessities I need in order to survive. In the modern world, to earn a wage everyone must participate in the social production and distribution of goods and services. As active participants in this “system of needs” (PR, §188), we all depend upon the active cooperation of countless others. Through our participation in the production and distribution of goods, we gradually come to realize that not only do we depend on others for the satisfaction of our immediate desires but

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others are also dependent on us for these same things. This mutual interdependence of the participants in the system of needs, “the infinitely complex, crisscross, movements of reciprocal production and exchange, and the equally infinite multiplicity of means therein employed” (PR, §201), is further strengthened by the fact that this very process, in and of itself, creates new and different sorts of socially mediated and cultivated desires, what Hegel terms “needs.” These socially developed novel desires can only be satisfied by yet further engagement with civil society (see PR, §190Z and §191Z). Since my needs are (at least partly) created in and mediated through the social process of producing and distributing goods, and since their satisfaction depends upon my active participation in this process, my individuality becomes inextricably bound up with the individuality of others. We are, Hegel claims, necessarily compelled to participate in “the system of needs.” Through our participation in this system, we simultaneously define and become capable of expressing our individuality. This introduces an irreducible social, potentially universal, dimension into this individuality. More generally put, we become individuals—concrete, particular human subjects—by being members of a social order, and through our participation in the general patterns of activity and norm-guided behavior constitutive of this social order, our individuality is simultaneously infused with commonality. Hegel puts it this way: The fact that I must direct my conduct by reference to others introduces here the form of universality. It is from others that I acquire the means of satisfaction and I must accordingly accept their views. At the same time, however, I am compelled to produce means for the satisfaction of others. We play into each other’s hands and so hang together. To this extent everything particular becomes something social. (PR, §193Z)

The family and civil society thus represent different ways in which particularity and individuality are transcended. As a member of a family and as a participant in the system of needs, my individuality, my subjectivity, is always already socially mediated, always already intimately intertwined with the life of others. Reflection on what it means to be a member of a family and to participate in the system of needs reveals that my personal desires and interests are not necessarily in conflict with those of others. It also reveals that the satisfaction of my particular, individual needs actually depends upon and presupposes the active cooperation of other people. Neither the family nor civil society, however, can provide a complete solution to the problems raised by the moral point of view. The family only

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provides a limited transcendence of particularity because my individuality is here inescapably bound up with the interests, happiness, and welfare of particular others—namely, those closest to me: my loved ones, the members of my family. In civil society, on the other hand, my individuality is dependent upon and shaped by the actions and activities of a multitude of unnamed, unknown others: the participants in the social process of producing and distributing goods and services. My participation in this process is, however, primarily motivated by self-interest (PR, §183). Furthermore, the unimpeded activity of civil society tends to concentrate wealth in a few hands while simultaneously creating “a rabble of paupers” (PR, §244)—a destitute class of poor, unemployed people who are “deprived of all the advantages of society” (PR, §241).

Ethical life: The state According to Hegel, neither the family nor civil society provides an adequate integration of particularity and universality. What is needed is a social structure in and through which particular individuals are motivated not merely by concern for their loved ones or by enlightened self-interest but also by impartial, universal concerns. This finally brings us to the state—the pinnacle of the section on ethical life and the linchpin in Hegel’s account of how freedom is realized in the world. The state, Hegel explains, is “objective spirit,” and it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life. Unification [Vereinigung] as such is itself the true content and aim, and the individual’s destiny is to live a universal life. His further particular satisfaction, activity, and mode of conduct have this substantial and universally valid life as their starting point and their result. (PR, §258A)

For Hegel the state is thus the social institution that allows particularity and universality to be fully integrated and the inherent problems and limitations of abstract right, morality, the family, and civil society to finally be sublated. For our purposes, and in the context of the discussion of post-subjectivity, the precise manner in which Hegel envisions the state accomplishing this integration or “unification” is not what is important. More important is the implicit normative critique of previous accounts of freedom and subjectivity to which his analysis gives rise. To expand upon this critical, but often overlooked, point we will focus our discussion on one of the perennial, hotly debated questions regarding Hegel’s philosophy of right: the relation between the individual and the state.

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Hegel obviously believes that the state plays a necessary, indeed crucial, role in the gradual development and realization of human freedom in a human world. In one of the most famous, and notorious, passages in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes the following: The state in and of itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom. . . . In considering freedom, the starting-point must be not individuality, the individual self-consciousness, but only the essence of self-consciousness; for whether people know it or not, this essence realizes itself as a self-subsistent power in which single individuals are only moments. It is God’s way in the world that the state should exist. (PR, §258Z)13

Passages such as this have occasionally been interpreted as stating a controversial and highly suspicious view of the state. The universality of the Hegelian state, it is claimed, implies that the interests of the state completely trump and indeed eliminate the interests of particular individuals. Individuals are mere accidental “moments” in the gradual unfolding of the state and thus can have no rights or interests opposed to those of the state. The state exerts an absolute normative supremacy to which the individual cannot rightfully object.14 Such an interpretation is quite natural if one’s starting point is a strongly individualist conception of freedom. From the point of view of contractual theories of state, for instance, the state has to be thought of as normatively subordinate to the individual freedom of its members. What justifies and legitimizes the state is the extent to which it protects and preserves the freedom of its citizens, where this freedom is presumed to be always already there. Hegel, on the other hand, with his insistence that the proper starting point for any philosophical investigation of freedom is the state, not merely “the individual self-consciousness,” seems to suggest that the opposite should be the case; that is, the state has normative priority over the individual, and individual freedom is subordinate to and dependent upon the will of the state. One problem with such interpretations, as has been pointed out by Houlgate, Pippin, and others,15 is that they overlook the careful critique of traditional individualist conceptions of freedom, moral agency, and subjectivity that Hegel develops in the earlier parts of the Philosophy of Right. This point is supported by the account of the argumentative structure of the Philosophy of Right outlined in the second section above, which clearly indicates that Hegel’s claims concerning the relation between individual and state are the result of a prolonged, critical analysis of freedom and subjectivity. The explicit aim of this analysis is not to eliminate the individual or deny the normative importance of individual freedom but rather to reveal the necessary conditions, both subjective and objective, for realizing freedom

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in the world. Hegel is not a dogmatic totalitarian holist who from the outset denies or rejects particularity and the rights of individuals. Whatever his views on the relation between the individual and the state might turn out to be, they are clearly the result of a painstaking, complex line of argument. This becomes clear if we briefly summarize some of the points made in previous sections. Hegel’s analysis of “Abstract Right” shows how the attempt to realize individual freedom of choice, the pure unhindered satisfaction of whatever arbitrary desire an individual chooses to adopt as an end, leads to contradictions that can only be resolved by going beyond freedom of choice. His analysis of “Morality” shows that the attempt to realize freedom in the form of pure self-determination and complete independence of all particularity ends in empty formalism and motivational dissonance. Ethical life, including Hegel’s account of the state, is an attempt to provide a framework within which these forms of freedom, and the particular forms of subjectivity they imply, can be reconciled and realized. If we look at the passage quoted above with this in mind, it becomes clear that Hegel does not actually reject the normative importance of individuality. Rather, he seems to be making a methodological claim—namely, that “in considering freedom, the starting-point must be not individuality, the individual self-consciousness” (PR, §258Z). This sums up the basic conclusion of the previous parts of Philosophy of Right: strongly individualist conceptions of freedom and subjectivity inevitably turn out to be inherently self-contradictory and self-undermining if viewed simply and solely on their own terms. As Houlgate puts it, Hegel shows that when freedom is conceived in certain ways it turns out to be contradictory or inadequate on its own terms. . . . His criticisms of individualistic conceptions of freedom are not due to any prejudice in favour of state authority on his part, but arise during a prolonged meditation on and determination of the proper meaning of freedom itself.16

Hegel thus does not dismiss the importance of either personal or moral freedom but argues that these forms of freedom depend on ethical life, in particular the state, as both their foundation and the necessary condition for their realization in the world. For Hegel, the state, in so far as it is rational, is not simply an external impediment to human action and behavior but one of the ways that freedom and human subjectivity develop, change, and gradually achieve objective reality in the world: The state is rational in and for itself inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness that has been raised to its universality. (PR, §258)

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More sharply put, Hegel believes that the primary purpose of the state is to secure and enable the freedom, life, and welfare of individuals, and that this is what ultimately legitimizes the state in the eyes of its citizens (PR, §258A). When Hegel argues that ethical life—including, significantly, the state— is a crucial and necessary stage in the gradual unfolding of freedom, he is making a philosophical, one might even say logical, claim, not a psychological or educational one. The ethical is not merely a structure imposed on the individual from the outside but literally an inherent part of what it means to be an individual capable of acting freely. They [the ethical substance and its laws and powers, see PR, §146] are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, his spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence, the essence in which he has a feeling of his selfhood, and in which he lives as in his own element which is not distinguished from himself. The subject is thus directly linked to the ethical order by a relation which is closer to identity than even the relation of faith or trust. (PR, §147)

Hegel also notes the following: In simple identity with the actuality of individuals ethical life [das Sittliche] appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom [Sitte], while the habitual practice of ethical living appears as a second nature which, put in place of the initial, purely natural will, is the soul of custom permeating it through and through, the significance and the actuality of its existence. (PR, §151)

If we take seriously the idea that the Philosophy of Right is a critical account of the conditions of freedom, this passage cannot be understood as an argument for the submission of the individual will to the norms dictated by contingent customs and laws. Instead it must be interpreted as a remark pointing out that without particular customs the individual will would have no real content at all. In the same way, Hegel’s statement that “it is in an ethical order that they [that is, individuals] are actually in possession of their own essence and their own inner universality” (PR, §153) should be taken quite literally to imply that the ethical is part and parcel of what it means to be a truly free subjectivity. This means that on the one hand, individual freedom always already implies social norms and rules. On the other hand, the social structures of a given society can be expressed and become actual only through the conscious, reflective, normative considerations and actions of the individuals that make up that society. Hegel thus writes:

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Freedom, Subjectivity, and the State in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right The state is actual only when its individual members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when the aims of the universal and the particular individuals are identical. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens. That is perfectly true. If all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, if they do not find that the state as such is the means to their satisfaction, then the footing of the state itself is insecure. (PR, §265Z)

This passage could of course be interpreted as simply implying that a state whose inhabitants are unhappy risks a revolt that endangers the state’s existence. While Hegel may have implied such an interpretation, it seems that he must also simultaneously be expressing a more profound philosophical point—namely, that a state has no footing, no actual existence outside the realm of freedom expressed in the subjectivity of the particular individuals that inhabit the state. As Hegel eloquently, almost beautifully, puts it, “The state has a life-giving soul, and the soul which animates it is subjectivity, which creates differences and yet at the same time holds them together in unity” (PR, §271Z). This, of course, is not to say that any whim of any individual must be perceived as part of the rational will of the state. It is rather to claim that the normative framework that forms the basis of individual decision making and action is itself an expression of the state, and if the state is out of sync with its citizens, it is out of sync with itself. The “self-awareness” Hegel speaks of in the passage above may thus be understood as those forms of individual normative reflection that are possible within and made possible by concrete social institutions. To understand Athens simply is to understand the internal motives and reflections of its inhabitants—for example, Antigone and Kreon—and the institutional structures of the society that make these kinds of motivations and reflections possible. A particular state thus cannot be fully understood in isolation from the concrete aims and reflections that actually motivate its citizens, and the aims and ideals of particular citizens cannot be fully grasped without also taking into consideration the social institutions of the state in which they live.

Conclusion For Hegel neither the state nor the subject is ever an ontologically isolated entity; neither the state nor the subject is ever completely determined or fully defined. Understanding subjectivity within Hegel’s philosophy of right thus amounts to understanding how subjectivity develops or, in more Hegelian terms, how spirit gradually achieves a better grasp of the necessary implications of and preconditions for its own cognitive and practical

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capacities and how via this process it becomes aware of itself as spirit. Similarly, understanding freedom within Hegel’s philosophy of right is to understand how freedom develops and becomes actualized in the world. It is to understand how the historical development of certain objective social structures (the legal system, the family, civil society, and the state) gradually enables subjective freedom to be realized in and through human subjectivity. When Hegel, in one of the passages quoted in the previous section, claims that “it is God’s way in the world that the state should exist” (PR §258Z), his claim is not that there is a supernatural, spiritual being somewhere above and beyond the world human beings inhabit and have made their own. His point is rather that freedom, both objectively (as embodied in social practices and institutions) and subjectively (as embodied in the desires, aims, intentions, capacities, and competences of concrete human beings) is not something that is simply given, something that has a certain predetermined form that can be grasped through a priori reasoning. No, freedom, and through freedom human subjectivity itself, is continually evolving; it is something that gradually gains concrete form and content, thus becoming realized in concreto in the world via the continual social and historical development of particular institutions, structures, and practices—in particular the state. Houlgate puts it this way: The authority of the state, for Hegel, is rooted in the fact that the state is immanent in the very idea of the free will. The state must be recognized and respected as having the highest claim to right, because it is only when the state is present that human freedom is rendered objective and universal by becoming a law for all.17

For Hegel the notion of subjectivity is thus necessarily bound up with the notion of freedom, and the notion of freedom turns out to be intimately intertwined with, indeed dependent upon, the characteristic social institutions of modernity: an impartial legal system, nuclear families based on love, a (limited) free market based on enlightened self-interest, and a state that realizes and accommodates both the legal rights and the individual interests of its citizens. Hegel’s discussion of these institutions thus can, indeed must, be read not merely as an extended, critical analysis of the conditions and possibility of genuine human freedom but also as a critical examination of (different forms of) human subjectivity. And, as we hope we have made clear, what motivates such critical engagement with traditional and preliminary conceptions of subjectivity is not the negative ambition of revealing their falsehood and dismissing them but, on the contrary, the positive ambition of finding out what is true about these conceptions by revealing how they are embodied in our social practices, institutions, and established ways of acting.

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The Philosophy of Right, we therefore claim, represents a systematic critical attempt to explicate what is right as well as what is wrong with some of our most cherished and influential conceptions of freedom and subjectivity. Our reading of the Philosophy of Right thus places this work firmly within a post-subjectivist framework. Interpreted in this way the Philosophy of Right should be understood as part of a tradition characterized by constant, vigilant, critical engagement with socially and culturally dominant accounts of subjectivity, a tradition explicitly aimed at revealing and undermining the dogmatic and repressive presuppositions of such accounts.

Notes * The ideas presented in this essay were first articulated during discussions we had with Jacob and Frederik Mortensen, Gry Ardal Printzlau, and Line Felding, with whom we read the Philosophy of Right during the academic year 2009 to 2010. Without their help this essay would never have been written. Thanks. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us focus and clarify our arguments. 1 Henceforth referred to as the Philosophy of Right or PR. All citations and references will be to G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, ed., rev., and intro. Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). References, unless otherwise indicated, are to paragraph numbers in this work. Hegel’s remarks (Anmerkungen) to these paragraphs are indicated by “A” and his additions (Zusätze) by “Z.” We have also consulted the original German text of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as found in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, Werke 7 in Werke in 20 Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996). Other works by Hegel are cited as follows: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)—hereinafter, PdG; Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)— hereinafter, E. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in quoted texts will be from the original. 2 Houlgate, “Introduction,” Outlines, xvii. 3 See also PR, §4Z: “Will without freedom is an empty word, while freedom is actual only as will, as subject.” 4 Simon Lumsden, “Hegel, Derrida and the Subject,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3, nos. 2–3 (2007): 46. 5 We have borrowed the terms “personal freedom,” “moral freedom,” and “social freedom” from Frederick Neuhouser, “Hegel’s Social Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 205.

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Houlgate provides a lucid and convincing explanation of this passage; see Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 183. 7 As Neuhouser explains: “Persons are conceived of as possessing a set of given drives and desires that have the capacity to motivate them to act, but they are persons in virtue of the fact that they are not determined to act on the drives and desires they happen to have.” Neuhouser, “Hegel’s Social Philosophy,” 206. 8 As Houlgate explains: “If I wish to preserve the sense that my freedom lies in facing a set of options to which, as a free individual, I am not necessarily committed, then the following question arises: What determines the options among which I have to choose, if it is not freedom itself? The only possibility is that those options are determined by factors other than my free will, such as circumstance, chance or nature, and that they are given to me to choose between or reject. But if this is the case, then my freedom resides in being able to choose whatever I want, I limit myself to, and make myself dependent on, whatever I happen to want or wish for at the moment; that is, whatever my particular desires happen to be or whatever my circumstances (or indeed the pressure of market or of advertising) lead me to desire. It is clear, therefore, that, when I lay claim to unrestricted freedom of choice, I am not actually as free as I think I am.” Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 184. 9 See also PR, §110Z: “The content of the subjective or moral will contains a determination of its own, i.e. even when it has acquired the form of objectivity [in the form of a deed or action], it must still enshrine my subjectivity, and the deed is to count only if on its inward side it has been determined by me, if it was my purpose, my intention. Beyond what lay in my subjective will I recognize nothing in its expression as mine. What I wish to see in my deed is my subjective consciousness over again.” 10 See the section entitled “Good and Conscience” (PR, §129–140) for Hegel’s analysis of how this dilemma comes about. 11 Morality raises problems beyond those mentioned here. Hegel believes that the sheer indeterminacy of the abstract moral will is the basis and explanation of most forms of moral evil. If the moral will must not rely on anything beyond itself, then subjective conscience becomes the ultimate standard for determining right and wrong. This, Hegel believes, leaves the moral will wide open for the dangers of selfdeception, self-complacency, and hypocrisy, which, if left unchecked, culminate in an ironic detachment from and negation of the very notion of objective values and norms—that is, a sort of nihilism. See PR, §140A and §140Z. See also Hegel’s discussion of evil in PdG, section 6.C.c.: “Conscience. The ‘beautiful soul,’ evil and its forgiveness,” 383–409. 12 As we note above, philosophy, according to Hegel, is not in the business of “giving instructions as to what the world ought to be. As the thought of the world it [philosophy] appears only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state. . . . When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of the world grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.” PR, “Preface,” p. 16. Philosophy maps and illuminates the gradual actualization of reason and freedom in the world, and though philosophy is itself part

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of this development, it always arrives on the scene too late to actively influence the process. 13 Shlomo Avineri provides an illuminating and interesting discussion of this passage. See Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 177–178. 14 The most conspicuous proponents of such a view are probably Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. See Karl Popper, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, vol. 2 of The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 27–80; and Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 730–746. See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26; and Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 195, for brief, critical accounts of such interpretations of the Hegelian state. 15 See Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 26; and Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 181–182. 16 Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 182. 17 Ibid., 209.

ON THE SUBJECT OF THE DIVINE HILLEL BEN-SASSON

Introduction: Human subjectivity, divine subjectivity The question of human subjectivity is intrinsically connected to the question of the subjectivity of the divine. Subjectivity in its modern sense1 can be understood as a process of ascribing to man several key attributions that were traditionally ascribed to God. Self-knowledge, self-transparency, self-constitution, and self-sufficiency are some of these attributes, transmitted from the realm of the divine to the realm of the human subject by some modern philosophers. It is therefore no coincidence that God is present in most of the landmark discussions of subjectivity and post-subjectivity.2 Less expected, perhaps, is the recurrent resort to biblical verses by modern and contemporary thinkers dealing with divine subjectivity. The consistent return to the Bible shows that God is the subject of the Bible, not only because of his ultimate centrality in this corpus but also because the biblical God offered many modern thinkers a paradigm of subjectivity, just as returning to the Bible continues to offer contemporary thinkers bedrock for their post-subjective ideas. Philosophies and theologies dealing with the divine turn specifically to Exodus 3:13–15, where God reveals his name to Moses from the burning bush. Offering a close reading of these verses, I wish to differentiate between several prominent, mostly contemporary, approaches to these verses and to examine the significance of the proposed reading to problems of identity and unity in the divine subject. Before we turn to Exodus, a brief account of the hermeneutical context within which we act is required.

God: From subjectivity to being and beyond Whether the apostle of subjectivity in its modern forms is Descartes, Kant, Fichte, or anybody else, one could claim that in scripture such a subject is present from the start: God the creator and master of the universe, the source of moral commitment and the inspector of souls. The “I” that opens the Ten Commandments in “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of

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the land of Egypt”3 serves for many as a declaration of the paradigmatic subject from which all later notions of pure subjectivity derive. It is only later, when scriptural tradition encounters Greek philosophy, that this figure makes way for the vocabulary of the on-tological, and notions of causa sui and Supreme Being appear in theological discourse. The discovery of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy presented religious thought with dramatic and overwhelming new possibilities for approaching the divine. It was a gold mine, containing new ways to think about God and to speak about him. It gave religious thinking a logic with which it could now develop structures and arguments relating to God. Despite the problems and difficulties provoked by reading scripture as a philosophical text, through Being a new tabernacle was built for God, and a new systematic mode of worship began—that of a science. Religious thought evolved eventually into Scholastic theology.4 In spite of its great merits, many have remarked on the serious predicament in which Scholastic theology finds itself. Contemporary theologians argue that locating God at the very top of the ontological pyramid might be nothing more than a sophisticated case of idolatry.5 The concept of God as Supreme Being is, finally, but a concept, and as such it is confined to the limited horizons of conceptualization and its logic. The divine as such, it is argued, transcends even Being. Thus, liberating God from the ontological shackles of medieval Scholasticism is viewed by a growing number of theologians as a venerable iconoclastic project. Free of Being, we reach a truer notion of God. In 1928 Heidegger proclaimed: If I were still to write a theology, something that appeals to me at times, then the word “Being” should not be allowed to appear in it. To belief, the thought of Being is not a necessary one.6

Heidegger’s challenge—to write a theology without the word “Being”—has not fallen on deaf ears. Recent theological work is invested precisely in this project: the project of speaking of God without Being (Marion), of negative theology (Derrida),7 of divine possibility or “onto-eschatology” (Kearney),8 of a becoming (werdende) God (Jonas),9 and of radical otherness (Levinas).10 The works of these and other thinkers offer guidelines for a more adequate discourse on God: a discourse wishing to avoid the immense problematic of anthropocentric language on the one hand, and of ontocentric logic on the other. A new divine figure appears, confined neither within boundaries of the self (which are idolatrous in nature, as they lead to anthropocentric theologies) nor within the horizons of Being. As already mentioned, the kind of hermeneutics involved in this evolving theological discourse return to a

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single moment in the Hebrew Bible where the divine name is first revealed and simultaneously questioned. Let us revisit this biblical paragraph and ponder its meaning.

The divine name and its significance The paragraph that stands at the center of this discussion appears in God’s revelation to Moses from the burning bush. The verses read: 13: Moses said to God: “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?,’ What shall I say to them?” 14: And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” 15: And God said further to Moses, “Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: This shall be My name forever, This is my appellation for all eternity.”11

As far as humans are concerned, God’s name is the object most closely related to God himself. The proper name is the single portal through which humans may communicate with God (at least in a religion alien to figurative icons). The name is not only a means of calling—that is, of drawing attention to oneself. In fact, we find in scripture an interchangeability of God and his name.12 In scripture the divine name serves as a concept of God in the full meaning of the term “concept” as derived from Latin: concipere (to form, devise, understand, take in, take up, receive), insofar as it enables one to take hold. Admittedly, the majority of the approximately six thousand eight hundred appearances of the divine name YHWH in the Hebrew Bible should be understood as simple and direct references. They designate he who is the principal subject of the Hebrew Bible, many times in vivid descriptions of what can aptly be termed God’s “personhood.”13 When reading these numerous references in languages other than Hebrew, one may not even be aware that the term “the Lord” is being substituted for the name YHWH. The common reader is thus not even aware that God has a proper name. The name is obscured by the reference to the function of sovereignty. There are, however, a handful of places in which the Bible deals directly and deliberately with the question of the divine name and its significance. One of these rare places is Exodus 3:13–15, but in order to understand its importance it would help to examine another, complementary text. The

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question raised by Moses at the burning bush, in its primitive form—what is your name?—is intricately rearticulated after the sin of the golden calf (in Exodus 32–34). In a moment of intimate dialogue, Moses poses the question again, this time expressing it as a wish, and “What is His name?” from the burning bush becomes, “Oh, let me behold Your Presence.”14 And God answers: “‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name YHWH. . . . But,’ He said, ‘you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.’”15 It is hard to clearly ascertain from these enigmatic chapters what was revealed and what ultimately remained concealed. Yet we find in them two particular literary tropes. First, these chapters use the terms “countenance” (panim), “name” (shem), and “glory” (kavod) interchangeably. Second, there is a repetition of the idioms “finding grace in one’s eyes” (metziat chen) and “knowing by the name” (lada’at beshem). It is quite plausible that these passages point to an intrinsic link between intimate and direct acquaintance with God and knowledge of his name.16 Thus, it may be possible that according to Exodus 32–34, the most intimate connection to God and the revelation of the divine countenance is achieved through the name and knowledge of it.17 This brings us back to the above-mentioned verses in Exodus 3. This text presents a meaningful reflection by God on his own name, and it does so in terms very similar to philosophical language par excellence. As early as the second century BCE, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, translates this dialogue in ontological terms: țĮ੿ İੇʌİȞ ੒ șİઁȢ ʌȡઁȢ ȂȦȣıોȞ ਫȖȫ İੁȝȚ ੒ ੭Ȟ· țĮ੿ İੇʌİȞ ȅ੢IJȦȢ ਥȡİ૙Ȣ IJȠ૙Ȣ ȣੂȠ૙Ȣ ǿıȡĮȘȜ ੘ ੫Ȟ ਕʌȑıIJĮȜțȑȞ ȝİ ʌȡઁȢ ਫ਼ȝ઼Ȣ.18 When translated yet again into English, the Septuagint’s rendition reads roughly as follows: And God spoke to Moses, saying, I am The Being [ho on]; and he said, Thus shall ye say to the children of Israel, The Being has sent me to you.19

Hence, the text is highly attractive for theologians.20 Jaroslav Pelikan puts it this way: Although the axiom of the impassibility of God did not require conventional biblical proof, one passage from the Old Testament served as the proof text for Christian discussions of ontology: “I am who I am”—the word from the burning bush.21

Pelikan proceeds with a survey of the way each of the church fathers made use of this passage, and concludes:

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It is no exaggeration, therefore, to speak of “a metaphysics of Exodus,” with which a Church Father such as Clement of Alexandria sought to harmonize his Christian Platonism.22

Indeed, the phrase “metaphysics of Exodus” became a common token. Some used it to explain the biblical text itself; others, who were more exegetically cautious, used it to read the history of Christian philosophy. My purpose is to challenge the first, not the second, reading. These verses led Etienne Gilson, who coined the phrase “metaphysics of Exodus,”23 to define Christian philosophical teaching as “first of all to admit that there is but one being really worthy of the name of God, and then, in the second place, that the proper name of this God is Being.”24 This view has already been contested persuasively both by Marion and Kearney.25 Whereas Marion stresses the indeterminable nature of the Hebrew “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” historically, grammatically, and theologically,26 and opens the fundamental question of this denomination of God in comparison to denominating him as Good (bonum), Kearney correctly points out that such an interpretation “misses too much of the original dynamism of the Hebrew expression. . . . In so doing it misses its mark.”27 Kearney’s alternative reading will be dealt with later in this paper.28

What is your name? In order to understand the divine name given to Moses in Exodus 3:13–15 and its implications for our notion of God, let us read the verses anew. Our method will be to progress inversely, from the common name of YHWH to the unique formula Ehyeh asher Ehyeh.29 After God reveals himself to Moses and informs him of the redemptive plan to liberate the enslaved tribes of Israel from their Egyptian hardship, Moses responds with a question: 13: Moses said to God: “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?,’ What shall I say to them?”

First, this seems like an awkward question. Despite the absence of a name for the Deity in the message conveyed by the angel hitherto, has Moses not failed abjectly in comprehending the notion of a single God? Seemingly, only in a pantheon of many gods is there any significance to the distinguishing mechanism of a proper name. One God, as it were, requires no name,30 for he is the only one to be addressed, the only one who is, simply, out there. Second, the term used in verse 6 of Exodus 3, “the God of your fathers,” is already a definitive one, thus making Moses’s inquiry redundant. Third, what

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importance might the name of the divine carry for Moses’s purpose of setting the exodus in motion? We would expect him to ask for a sign, a proof or a miracle, which he indeed receives later in the course of the chapter. How could the name of this or that divinity be a remedy for the prospective skepticism of the Israelites? This consideration led commentators such as Rashi to read Ehyeh asher Ehyeh as part of a reassuring message to Moses and the Israelites: it doesn’t really matter who I am, what matters is that I will always be there for you, just as I come now to redeem you. Ehyeh with them in this suffering, asher Ehyeh with them when they will be subjugated by the other kingdoms.31

Rather than a proper name, Rashi’s interpretation further implies that Ehyeh asher Ehyeh discloses a familial affinity similar to “Mom” or “Dad.” God will always be there for his people, like parents who are always at hand for their offspring. Whenever and wherever the child cries for help, the parent will reach out.32 This view, however, is only a sophisticated form of interpreting Exodus 3 not as a revelation of the divine name but rather as God’s evasion of Moses’s question. In the final account it leaves us with an appellation for God but with no name. Considering the centrality of the notion of the divine name in the biblical text, one must further cultivate the richness of these enigmatic verses. Here, rather than simply handing a name down to Moses, God answers three times—each time differently, yet in ways that are closely connected. Before dealing with the name(s) proclaimed here,33 some literary observations are in order. Unlike the common biblical dialogue form, in which the interlocutors speak in turn and consecutively,34 this dialogical stanza is to a large extent a divine monologue. God gives his first answer, but no response on behalf of Moses appears. God then continues to deliver his second answer, and this one too fails to produce a reply. God then gives his final answer, which concludes the paragraph with poetic rhythm. How are we to interpret Moses’s silence? Prominent critical analyses identify our verses as belonging to one source,35 so that their odd dialogical form cannot be explained as the work of careless redactors.36 Though “heavy of tongue,” words rarely fail Moses. Imputing to Moses a negligence or an ignorance of the divine message would thus constitute an unlikely reading. In his silence, in the absence of speech, it is more plausible to see the prophet’s astonishment—or, more precisely, incomprehension.37 This is supported by the wider literary context of this revelation. Moses sees a burning bush that is not consumed, to which he reacts in bewilderment and lack of understanding: “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?”38 Revelation is launched through the inability to

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frame the revealed within a familiar scheme. Incomprehension is then followed by fear: “And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”39 This reading may also be supported by the midrashic homily bringing together our passage and the one already mentioned from Exodus 33–34: Moses did not do well in hiding his face, for had he not done so, God would have revealed to him what is above and what is below, what has happened and what will happen. So when Moses later wished to behold God, as it is said: Show me, I pray Thee, Thy Glory40 (Exod. 33:18), God replied: “I came to show thee, but thou didst hide thy face, now I tell thee that man shall not see Me and live, for when I wished to do so, thou didst not wish to see.”41

Fear and lack of understanding determine Moses’s reactions, and they also necessitate the reformation of the reply, resulting in three answers. The first, which appears in Exodus 3:15, is this: YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.

Here God presents his name in the form that will come to be the divine name proper. This name, however, is followed directly by a reassuring historical description: YHWH sets his identity in the familial context of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Later, when introducing himself as a God involved in the history of his people in Exodus 20:1, preceding the first commandment, the answer is: “I am YHWH your God who redeemed you from the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves.”42 But here at the burning bush, in this special context, YHWH is more than a fossilized formula of a proper name, enveloped in taboos prohibiting even the pronunciation of the name and obliterating knowledge of its usage. Rather, the name YHWH, alongside its historical descriptive equivalent, may also be understood as a reformation of the preceding answers that name God as Ehyeh. YHWH is revealed as a uniquely structured form of the Hebrew verb hyh (ʤ.ʩ.ʤ), approximately equivalent to the English “to be.” The medieval Jewish commentators Rashbam and Ibn Ezra explicitly maintain that YHWH is a third person manifestation of Ehyeh, itself a first person form of this verb.43 Following in their footsteps, the path leads to the first-person formulations of the Divine message: to Ehyeh. God’s second answer to Moses, in Exodus 3:14, is Ehyeh: “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” The exact meaning of Ehyeh in this verse is hard to pin down. It might serve as an abbreviation of the first articulation (of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh) and it might serve here as a fossilization of that first articulation, thus rendering Ehyeh as a proper name in its strict denotative sense, a collection of sounds composing a means for naming,

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without any pretensions to further semantic content. These possibilities will be considered later on, when reading the passage in its entirety. The core of this passage nevertheless remains the first answer, which I argue is the original articulation of the divine name in its fullness.

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, the third (and first in order of appearance) answer God gives to Moses, is a double mentioning of the Hebrew verb hyh, in the first person singular, imperfect.44 This form “always refers to the future,”45 which therefore renders the majority of translations inaccurate. In fact, the translation of these three words has been at the heart of a controversy as old as the history of the text itself. The King James Version translates it as “I am that I am”; in the Vulgate we find “ego sum qui sum”; the Louis Segond renders it “Je suis celui qui suis.” All are probably influenced by the Septuagint’s “ego eimi ho on.” The choice of translation here is crucial. One can chose the present tense, as most of the aforementioned suggestions do, or the future tense offered by Luther’s version: “Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde.” Indeed, there is a grammatical usage in biblical Hebrew of the future form as present continuous, but this always appears in context and never with the being-verb. Following the choice of W. H. C. Propp in the Anchor Bible, the future here is the more accurate choice: “I will be who I will be”46 serves, then, as an interim translation. The roughly fifty mentions of the form Ehyeh in the Hebrew Bible are divided into two categories. In the first category, it is used in a formula followed by “with you” (in the dative), reading: “For I shall be with you” (ki ehyeh imach).47 We’ve seen this sense of Mitsein before in Rashi’s commentary, but the structure of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh hardly fits this pattern. The second use of Ehyeh signifies the changing of a mode of being. From the verb stem hyh, Hebrew derives two lineages: the first relates to lihyot and the other to lehithavot. In other words, the same stem gives birth to the meanings of both Being and Becoming. Accordingly, the Hebrew Bible denotes a process of becoming in two ways. One formulation uses the past tense hayah (ʤʩʤ) with the vav reversive,48 which reverses the tense of the verb following it, as the following examples show: Genesis 3:5: “And you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.”49 Genesis 17:4: “You shall be the father of a multitude of nations.”50 Deuteronomy 28:37: “You shall be a consternation, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples.”51

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Job 11:15: “Then, free of blemish, you will hold your head high, and when in straits, be unafraid.”52

The other way to express a wish, a prophecy, a fear of, or any other propositional attitude regarding a future change in mode of being—in other words, of becoming—is achieved with Ehyeh and reads: I shall be at future times X, other than what I am now.53 For example, Jonathan, the son of taunted King Saul, calms David, at that time a fugitive rebel, with the following words: “Fear not; for the hand of Saul my father shall not find thee; and thou shalt be king over Israel.” Jonathan then adds his own hope: “and I shall be54 next unto thee” (1 Sam. 23:17), meaning, I shall then become second in command.55 If we understand that Ehyeh refers to a change in the mode of being of its subject—that is, to becoming—what then is the meaning of I will be who I will be/I will be how I will be?56 Two distinct features make this a unique occurrence: (a) it is a singular case in the Hebrew Bible where the Ehyeh is followed by no dative or descriptive adverbial, and (b) it is doubled. I would like to suggest that the uniqueness of this phrase, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, should be understood as attempting to hint at something language must struggle hard to achieve. Unlike the Ehyeh form we saw with regard to human beings, which is always accompanied by an adverb describing into what the human being changes, the divine Ehyeh is not one of a determined becoming.57 God is not restricted to a becoming in a sense of becoming this or that. His becoming is much more open. For God, as he presents himself here in this telling moment of revelation, is characterized by a twofold openness of the future tense. God’s becoming is not an A turning into a determinate B but rather an A (if one may say so of God) with endless possibilities of self-manifestation. God’s promise opens an infinite range of Bs, implying that his becomings comprise not a process of completion, as in the Aristotelian account of becoming, but rather a dynamism completely different, unfathomable to onto-logic. In fact, that is what he is, pure possibility, alongside a promise of its open fulfillment. Divinity is essentially not eternity in its immutable sense (eternity is not mentioned at all in our passage). Rather than essence, God’s proper name is change.58 A general overview of the passage is now required: Moses asks God for his name and receives a genuine answer.59 God, on the one hand, refuses to satisfy the human desire for a clear-cut definition; but at the same time, he discloses a unique aspect of his nature,60 that of open changeability. God is not a being as other beings are, and he is also not Being in a primary sense. He will become in whatever way he will become. Moses, however, fails to accept this answer, for reasons we can only speculate on. God reformulates the answer but this time as a fixed signum “Ehyeh,” a code to be used, but not necessarily understood, as a convention. This too, however, seems not to be

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accepted as a name by Moses, and thus God renders Ehyeh as YHWH in the third person, his name and memory for generations to come.

Theology beyond being As already noted, basing the notion of a changing rather than an immutable God on these verses is no novelty in Western theology. An analysis of some of these positions might help us to better understand the reading just presented. We can understand the notion of a changing God in three different senses. In the first sense God is open to change, which implies that although creator and leader of the world, God is nevertheless not perfect, and his becoming is to be understood as a perpetual movement toward perfection. Such a view can be found in writings of process theologians as well as in a theological treatise by Hans Jonas. Whitehead, for instance, saw God as the only actuality in which all possibilities could reside, including those yet to be actualized. From this he derives what he calls God’s “consequent nature.” Involved and immensely invested in the processes of change, interrelation, and coming to actuality, God “is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.”61 In the same vein, Hans Jonas writes that [God’s] continual relation to the creation, once this exists and moves in the flux of becoming, means that He experiences something with the world, that His own being is affected by what goes on in it.62

Jonas suggests “the picture of a becoming God. It is a God emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity.”63 The second sense of a becoming God presents God’s essence as hyperactive, so transcendent from any ontological framework that it transcends even immutability itself. Marion’s theology can be understood in this way when he asserts the following (in one of numerous places): Hence it follows that God is expressed neither as a being nor as Being, nor by an essence. . . . The divine names have strictly no other function than to manifest this impossibility [to define and determine God]. More positively, they function to manifest the distance that separates (and hence unites) all the names of God.64

One can also claim that the author of The Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius of late antiquity hints at this direction when he writes:

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With our minds made prudent and holy, we offer worship to that which lies hidden beyond thought and beyond being. With a wise silence we do honor the inexpressible.65

It seems that Richard Kearney, in his The God Who May Be, attempts to integrate these two notions of divine becoming. On the one hand, Kearney emphasizes what he calls “the eschatological horizon” of Exodus 3:14. For Kearney, who finds support in both the canonical Jewish medieval commentary of Rashi and in Meister Eckhart’s mystical rendering of the verse, “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” is fundamentally an invitation. This name represents a potentiality for “a kingdom of justice and love”66 or, as he rereads the verse in question, “I am who may be if you continue to keep my word and struggle for the coming of justice.”67 He “who may be” will thus become fully himself only when human beings fulfill their vocation, hence positing the notion of becoming as an ongoing movement toward divine (and humanly conditioned) perfection. On the other hand, Kearney insists that the Exodic epiphany is an ingenious wordplay which heralds an eschatological transcendence: a transcendence with the wherewithal to resist the lures of logocentric immanence.68

God’s transcendence is played out for Kearney in time and through the promise of transfiguration. The third possible sense of arguing for a changing divinity understands this change as an indication of God’s freedom. If God is truly omnipotent, and we wish not to confine him within any human or natural category, then he also cannot be bound by immutability. Being free means also being free to change. We find in Schelling such a notion of the divine. In Schelling, there is a movement of the free spirit, of God, from a negative freedom embodied in an independence from necessity, into a positive sense of freedom where God reaches another distinct state of Being, “an other from his eternal or Being-concept.” This new mode of being means that what and who God is depends solely upon his own will. Schelling says this: Here for the first time can He by himself say: I will be He who I will be, i.e. He who I want to be, it merely depends on my will. . . . Here does the complete spirit represent itself as God.69

To what sense of becoming does our reading of Exodus 3:14 subscribe? I think the biblical scholar S. R. Driver is accurate in saying that a rhetorical device such as Ehyeh asher Ehyeh is used “where the means or desire to be more explicit does not exist.”70 It is clear, however, that the first sense of

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becoming as implying progress toward perfection does not apply according to our reading. The divine name of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh is not at all signaling toward a course of completion. If anything, its complete disinterest in the question of Being demonstrates the opposite. By refusing to deliver one simple name to Moses, scripture presents the divine as transcendent to human fixations on Being and concrete beings, while at the same time preserving the full and utter freedom of God to become in whatever way he wishes to be. God appears in our verses as a free and willing transcendent agent, involved in, yet not confined by, the well-being of his human counterparts. This in fact opens a horizon to a fourth sense of becoming that has to do with the twofold character of promise. As we learn from Nietzsche in the beginning of the second essay of the Genealogy, a promise is predicated on two presuppositions.71 When we receive a promise we suppose that the state of affairs in the future will be different from the current one with respect to the situation of the one who promises, the one to whom the promise is made, or the external circumstances related to the issue at hand. Uncertainty is therefore an essential component of promise, one that necessitates the act of promising in order to secure a certain expectation we have from our counterparts. Our other presupposition is that regardless of this uncertainty, the promising agent will remain able, and willing, to fulfill the promise. The fourth sense of becoming, regarding the divine, is one that takes into account free will and the uncertainty that derives from it. Yet, it presupposes that this uncertainty, be it one that is predicated either on transcendence or on freedom, does not diminish the possibility of reciprocal relationship—that is, the possibility of naming God and, when calling on his name, receiving an answer. In that sense becoming and change in the divine are essentially marked by morality, insofar as it names God by his ability to forget and move forward yet maintain character and will that bridge over uncertainty from the present into the future. With becoming understood in the sense of a promise—that is, of an indeterminacy that cannot result in the foregoing of the past, we return to the question of the subject and with this return we conclude.

Identity and covenant The question of God’s self-unity, or simplicity, has been intertwined with the debate on the nature of God since at least Plato’s time and certainly since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. In medieval Scholastic theology the great achievement of securing God’s oneness is purchased at a high price: the inaccessibility of God understood in this way.72 To attribute anything less than pure simplicity to God was an error frequently rebuked by medieval

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thinkers in all monotheistic religions.73 Simplicity and immutability were the anchors of self-unity and identity. If God is named by the promise of eternal change and renewability, the question of his unity in general and, more specifically, of his identity is reopened. Who can say whether such a God amounts to anything more than mind in Hume’s account of personal identity: a theater of consecutive and alternating perceptions, a theater where “there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different”?74 The potential found in post-subjective accounts of God is also the very locus of its dangers. From the philosophical standpoint, a God whose perpetual identity cannot be safeguarded cannot serve as a fixed center in the flux of universal change. From a plain religious point of view, the case is worse. If there is no permanent One, to whom can I pray, whose reply can I hope to receive, and how could I rely on any such reply if there is no One in the strict sense of oneness to guarantee its future fulfillment?75 Should the ancient creed “Hear O Israel, YHWH is our God, YHWH is One”76 be taken as nonsense? As already implied, the revelation at the burning bush and its sense of becoming as promise suggest that God’s dynamism is no threat to his identity. In lieu of Being, we find the notion of “covenant.” God’s revelation to Moses, and indeed everything that follows in the course of the book of Exodus, is marked by the sign of the covenant. God remembers his covenant and therefore decides to redeem the Israelites from Egypt.77 This decision is carried out precisely to reaffirm the old covenant, at Mount Sinai.78 The notion of covenant, by refining the notion of an indeterminable God of becoming, thus complements the divine name “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” given to Moses. What is a covenant? Covenants, in the ancient Near East in general, and in the Hebrew Bible in particular, are statements of contractual relationship. Scholarship has drawn attention to the reciprocal nature of these contracts, which require the powerful side to keep faith as long as the weaker side remains loyal.79 In this respect a covenant always originates from the fear of unpredictable change, and it always aims, like a promise, to secure an area of common activity from the damages of uncertainty in the future. It is also widely maintained that the novelty of the Bible in this regard is its belief that a covenant directly between humans and God is possible. This novel idea introduces a derivative idea of great importance for the present discussion— namely, that the covenant serves as a bridge that manages to overcome the profound abyss separating human temporality and divine eternity. Biblical covenants are a way to ensure stability in a fragmental succession of temporal mortals:

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On the Subject of the Divine You stand this day, all of you, before YHWH your God . . . to enter into the covenant of YHWH your God. . . . I make this covenant with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before YHWH our God and with those who are not with us here this day.80

On the human side, the covenant is the equivalent to God’s perpetuity. The first covenant in the Hebrew Bible, in which God vows to refrain from plaguing the earth with another flood, hints that the covenant overcomes not only the fragmentariness of human temporality but also the arbitrariness of the divine dynamism. In Genesis 9:8–16, God unilaterally decides on a covenant with every living creature on earth and pledges not to bring about another flood. The key addressee of this covenant is, however, God himself. When the rainbow appears, it is to remind God of his promise and to restore his commitment to withhold another flood. Through the rainbow God assures a domain of certainty in reciprocity that will remain intact through any future change he might undergo. An example might be helpful here. Human beings enter interpersonal relationships throughout their lives. When these relationships rely on a false image of subjective stability, they are bound to dissolve. Neither humans nor their interactions are immutable, and this simple truth is sometimes discovered at tragic personal cost. At times, however, people succeed in entering a covenant with others, such as matrimony. In such covenants, we do not expect our spouse to remain the identical self she was at the time the covenant began. Nor are we certain that our own attitude toward the other will remain immutable. On the contrary, we take these factors into account but make way for the covenantal to stand in place of the impossible desire for identity. We say: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Something similar might be what is meant to assure Moses that God will always be there for the Israelites, regardless of how or who he will be. Can we understand the sign given in our chapter to assure Moses of his perplexing vocation—“when you have freed the people from Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain” (Exod. 3:12)—as anything other than a covenantal promise?

Conclusion The notion of God as revealed in the burning bush rejects traditional metaphysical interpretations of his name as Being. He is named by himself as a complete openness that, unlike worldly processes of becoming, is predetermined neither by a certain end point nor by an exact series of changes that ought to lead to his end. His divinity stems precisely from his transcendence over determinacy and his active will to exercise this

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transcendence. Unlike several views, however, the dynamic character of God does not diminish the way his unity manifested in his ability to promise. God’s unity is not one of unchanging simplicity; rather, it is a unity achieved by a covenantal commitment. What can this teach us about human subjectivity? At first glance it seems that God’s name as the indeterminate is designed in the biblical verses as the complete opposite of the name of humans. Their being, indeed even their becoming, is a determined one. They are bound by both their temporality and its fixed trajectory of growth and decay. If God can become whatever he wants to become, the human, it seems, must become in order to be complete and is also bound to do it within the limits of his own nature. This, however, would be a rash and misguided conclusion to draw. For just as the covenantal promise can bridge over the abyss dividing God’s freedom and his unity, so can it liberate the human agent from the confinements of determinacy. If for God the covenant acts as a cohesive principle that enables his different potentialities and their realizations to nevertheless persist in one unified subject, for humans the covenant opens a horizon of becoming that transcends the determinism cast on every individual. The covenantal chain achieves this subjective liberation in two ways. First, it broadens the borders of the self from those of an individual to those of a community, and from those of a community in the present into those of a community across generations. The prison bars of modern subjectivity—that is, autarky that can lead to solipsism—are thus confronted not by a reduction to human temporality and its determined physical nature but rather to the human’s membership in a larger group that defines the very understanding of the subject as nonautarkic. Second, and deriving from the first, the notion of a prolonged subject achieved in covenants by overcoming the finitude of its specific members also allows the temporal and finite individuals partaking in the covenant to understand their followers in tradition as different permutations, different aspects, of their own subject. God will become as he will become, he will be what and however he wills, but even through change, the covenant remains. Humans are but humans, and as individuals they cannot escape their limits as subjects. They too, however, can become other than they have ever dreamt to be, through their extended existence in the covenant.

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Notes

I wish to thank teachers, friends, and colleagues who read various versions of this paper and contributed greatly to amending some if its mistakes: Elad Lapidot, Andrew German, Talila Warschawski, Moshe Halbertal, Merav Mack, Sinai Rusinek, and Yakir Englander. 1 For an elaborate summary and discussion of the “philosophy of the subject,” see Emily Hartz and Carsten Fogh Nielsen, “Freedom, Subjectivity, and the State in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in this collection. 2 See, for example, Sarah Kofman, “Descartes Entrapped,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 192. 3 Exod. 20:1. All citations from the Hebrew Bible are from the Jewish Study Bible (hereinafter cited as JSB). The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, trans. Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). I will note any modifications I make to the translation. 4 A paragraph from Augustine may serve as an example: “That which God spoke by the angel when He sent Moses to the children of Israel: ‘I am that I am.’ For since God is the supreme existence, that is to say, supremely is, and is therefore unchangeable, the things that He made He empowered to be, but not to be supremely like Himself.” Augustine, City of God 12.2, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 483–484. 5 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16–107. 6 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe [Complete works], vol. 15 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986), 436–437 (my translation): “Wenn ich noch eine Theologie schreiben würde, wozu es mich manchmal reizt, dann dürfte in ihr das Wort “Sein” nicht vorkommen. Der Glaube hat das Denken des Seins nicht nötig.” For a rich survey of Heidegger’s treatment of the relation between theology and metaphysics, see George J. Seidel, “Heidegger’s Last God and the Schelling Connection,” Laval théologique et philosophique 55, no. 1 (1999): 85–98. 7 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3–70. 8 Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 124n31. Kearney also offers an extensive bibliography of Derrida’s theological work. 9 Hans Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine jüdische Stimme [The concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish voice] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). 10 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy 1,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Phaenomenologica 100 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), 153–173 (especially 168); Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pt. 2. 11 Exod. 3:13–15 (JSB). I replaced “the Lord” in verse 15 with the transliteration YHWH.

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12 See Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 62–66. He argues that the Shem or “name” in the Hebrew Bible means an extended physical manifestation of the divine. 13 See Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005), 55: “There is a root tension in the nature of YHWH, the God of Israel. On the one hand, He is utterly other than the stuff of the world or its laws. . . . And yet, at the same time, this being of total nondependence is portrayed in the Bible as having qualities that can only be described as human.” 14 Exod. 33:18 (JSB). Other translations offer “glory” instead of “presence.” 15 Exod. 33:19–20 (JSB); YHWH replacing the original “Lord” here. 16 The revelation at Exodus 34:6 (JSB) itself indicates a similar message, since it is comprised of a host of divine attributes preceded by a double repetition of YHWH, YHWH. 17 See also Isa. 42:8 (JSB): “I am YHWH, that is My name; I will not yield My glory to another, nor My renown to idols.” Another negative formulation appears in Jer. 23:27 (JSB): “. . . to make My people forget My name, by means of the dreams which they tell each other.” 18 Exod. 3:14, Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha: With an English Translation and with Various Readings and Critical Notes (London: Samuel Bagster, 1900), 73. 19 Ibid. 20 For further discussion of traditional interpretations of Exodus 3:14, see Alan de Libera and Emily Zum Brunn, Celui Qui Est: Interprétations Juives Et Chrétiennes d'Exode 3-14 [The one who is: Jewish and Christian interpretations of Exodus 3-14] (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986). 21 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 54. See also Sean M. McDonough, YHWH at Patmos (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999). 22 Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 54. 23 Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 433n9. 24 Ibid., 43. 25 Marion, God Without Being, 73–75; Kearney, The God Who May Be, 27–29. 26 Marion goes on to deny permissibility of naming altogether, claiming that praise “beyond every name and every denegation of names” is the adequate way to call God. Jean-Luc Marion, “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), 27. 27 Kearney, The God Who May Be, 27–28. 28 Marion, unlike Kearney, does not produce a comprehensive interpretation of these verses. See in this context Krzysztof Sonek, “Divine Name as Saturated Phenomenon,” Revue Biblique 116, no. 2 (2009). 29 As we shall see later, there are reasons to believe Ehyeh is the first person singular form of YHWH. See the commentary by the medieval Rabbi Shlomo Ben Meir on this

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verse on Exodus 3:14. This commentary can be found in every Mikraot Gedolot version of the Pentateuch. 30 Does Parmenidean Being have a name? Does it need one at all? 31 Rashi commentary on Exodus 3:14, Nachum Y. Kornfeld, Abraham B. Walzer, and Rabbi Avraham Davis, Metsudah: Chumash/Rashi: A New Linear Translation (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2002), 2:33. 32 This might be the logic that led the medieval Jewish thinker Yehuda Halevi to claim that “the Tetragrammaton is a name exclusively employable by us, as no other people knows its true meaning.” Judah Halevi, The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Bernard G. Richards, 1927), pt. 4, par. 3, 203. Just as only a child can call his parent “Dad” or “Mom,” so is the knowledge of the divine name YHWH accessible only to the children of Israel. 33 For biblical scholarship on this passage, see Max Reisel, The Mysterious Name of Y.H.W.H.: The Tetragrammaton in Connection with the Names of EHYEH Aser EHYEH-Huha-and Sem Hammephôras, Studia Semitica Neerlandica 2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1957); and Roland de Vaux, “The Revelation of the Divine Name YHWH,” in Proclamation and Presence: Old Testament Essays in Honour of Gwynne Henton Davies, ed. John I. Durham and J. Roy Porter (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1970). 34 Gen. 18:17–33 serves as a remarkable example of this. See also the beginning of chapter 3 in Exodus; Jer. 1; Gen. 24:1–9. 35 See William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 193; G. J. Thierry, “The Pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton,” Oudtestamentische Studiën 5 (1948): 38; Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: Harper One, 1997), 250; and Samuel Cramer-Naumann, Gott als geschehende Geschichte: die elohistische Interpretation JHWHs als des Kommenden im [ehye asher ehye] von Ex 3,14 [God as occurring history: The Elohistic interpretation of YHWH as the coming in Ehyeh asher Ehyeh in Exodus 3:14] (Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1993). 36 Even if this were a manifest cast of the redaction of several urtexts, it would still call for clarification—namely, what editorial deliberation led to the creation of this peculiar passage? 37 The Anchor Bible Commentary sees here another sign of evasion: “. . . the most important contextual function of idem per idem: to terminate discussion by eliminating the option of a response.” Propp, Exodus 1–18, 225. 38 Exod. 3:3 (JSB). 39 Exod. 3:7 (JSB). 40 Emphasis is mine. 41 Midrash Rabbah: Translated into English with Notes, Glossary and Indices under the Editorship of H. Freedman and Maurice Simon; with a Foreword by I. Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1961), 3:58–59. 42 For archeological reflections on YHWH’s origins, see Martin Leuenberger, “Jhwhs Herkunft aus dem Süden: archäologische Befunde–biblische Überlieferungen– historische Korrelationen” [YHWH’s arrival from the south: Archeological findings, biblical traditions, historical correlations], Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 122, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.

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Rashbam and Ibn Ezra on Exodus 3:14. Ibn Ezra’s elaborate discussion of the divine name also provides a clarification for the formula ʤ-ʥʤʩ as opposed to ʤʩʤʩ. Similar to the distinction between ʤʩʧ (animal) and ʤʥʧ (Eve), which is the proper name derived from the noun, so is the formation ʤʥʤʩ used to distinguish the proper name from the verb declension of ʤʩʤʩ. See both commentators on Exod. 3:14: Samuel ben Meir, Rashbam’s Commentary on Exodus: An Annotated Translation, ed. and trans. Martin I. Lockshin (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2001); Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch: Exodus (Shemot), trans. H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver (New York: Menorah, 1996). 44 The categorization of Semitic grammatical phenomena through Latin grammatical terminology has been recently contested most persuasively. See, for example, Gideon Goldenberg, Studies in Semitic Linguistics: Selected Writings (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1998), 148–196. 45 Propp, Exodus 1–18, 204. 46 Ibid., 223–224. 47 Gen. 26:3; Gen. 31:3, Exod. 3:12; Exod. 4:12, 4:15; Deut. 31:23; Josh. 1:5; Josh. 3:7; Judg. 6:16; 2 Sam. 7:9; 1 Chron. 17:8 (JSB). 48 Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), §49: The Perfect and Imperfect with WƗw Consecutive. See also ibid., §111, §112. 49 ʲʸʕʥ ʡˣʨ ʩʒʲ ʍʣʖ ʩ ʭʩʑʤ˄ʠʒ˗ ʭ ʓʺʩʑ ʩʤʍ ʥʑ (JSB). 50 ʭʑ ʩˣˏ ʯˣʮʏʤ ʡˋʍʬ ʕʺʩʑ ʩʤʕ ʥʍ (JSB). 51 ʭʩ ʑ˙ʔʲʤʕ ʬʖ ʫʍˎ ʤʕʰʩʑʰ ʍˇʑʬʥʍ ʬʕˇ ʕʮʍʬ ʤʕ˙ˇ ʔ ʬʍ ʕʺʩʑ ʩʤʕ ʥʍ (JSB). 52 ʠʸʩ ʕ ʑʺ ʠ˄ʥʍ ʷʕʶ ʗʮ ʕʺʩʑ ʩʤʕ ʥʍ (JSB). 53 See, for example, 1 Sam. 23:17 (JSB): “and I shall be second to you”; 1 Sam. 18:18 (JSB): “that I should become your Majesty’s son-in-law.” Both parts in bold are identical in Hebrew: ʤʓʰˇ ʍ ʮʑ ʬʍ ˃ʍ˘ ʤʓ ʩ ʤʍ ʠʓ ʩʑʫʖʰˌʍʥ, and ʪʓʬ ʓ˙ʔʬ ʯ ʕʺʕʧ ʤʓ ʩ ʤʍ ʠʓ ʩʑ˗. 54 Emphasis is mine. 55 Another compelling use of the Being verb in terms of Becoming is found in the words of the serpent in paradise (Gen. 3:5), who tempts Eve by explaining to her the divine prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil” (JSB). 56 My rendition of the phrase. 57 I follow here William Desmond’s distinction between coming-to-be and becoming: “For in becoming, one becomes a determinate something, out of a prior condition of determinate being and towards a further more realized or differently realized determination of one’s being.” William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 248. I thank Professor Desmond for a generous exchange of ideas while working on this essay. 58 The name Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, both semantically and semiotically, serves as grounds for the prohibition against idols in the Ten Commandments. If God is primarily characterized by his indeterminacy, any icon of his is bound to turn into an idol, that is, a frozen and thus erroneous image of a living entity. It is likely that Isaiah understood the prohibition against idolatry in a similar vein when he says: “To whom will ye liken Me, and make Me equal, and compare Me, that we may be like? Ye that

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lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance; ye that hire a goldsmith, that he make it a god, to fall down thereto, yea, to worship. He is borne upon the shoulder, he is carried, and set in his place, and he standeth, from his place he doth not remove; yea, though one cry unto him, he cannot answer, nor save him out of his trouble. Remember this, and stand fast; bring it to mind, O ye transgressors. Remember the former things of old: that I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like Me.” Isaiah 46:5–10 (JSB). 59 Not, as Propp remarks, “I think that God is simply being cagey.” Propp, Exodus 1– 18, 225. 60 ijȪıȚȢ: the things that grow, move, and change. 61 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1979), 343. 62 Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 (January 1, 1987): 7. 63 Ibid., 6. Jonas acknowledges that “such an idea of divine becoming is surely at variance with the Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of philosophical theology.” He nevertheless claims that “this Hellenic concept has never accorded well with the spirit and language of the Bible, and the concept of divine becoming can actually be better reconciled with it” (6). Unfortunately, Jonas never fully elaborates these preliminary insights. 64 Marion, God Without Being, 106. 65 Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), (589b), 50. [Editor’s note: standard references for works are in parentheses and are followed by the page number for the particular edition.] 66 Kearney, The God Who May Be, 38. 67 Ibid., 37–38. 68 Ibid., 31. 69 F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophie der Offenbarung, 13. Vorlesung” [The philosophy of revelation, 13th lecture], in Werke [Complete works], (Leipzig: Eckardt, 1907), 3:808 (my translation). See also Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 45, 52–53. 70 S. R. Driver, The Book of Exodus in the Revised Version, Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 363. 71 An evangelical text of modern subjectivity in itself. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35–36. 72 William Ralph Inge, Mysticism in Religion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 76: “But when in our anxiety to escape from anthropomorphism, we identify the god of the religion with the absolute of philosophy; we find that a being stripped of all limiting attributes is not a possible object of worship.” 73 See, for example, Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, 1:chap. 50–51. 74 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), (1.4.6), 1:253. 75 Kearney’s criticism of Marion moves in similar lines when he asks the following: “If the saturating phenomenon is really as bedazzling as Marion suggests, how can we

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tell the difference between the divine and its opposites? How are we to distinguish between enabling and disabling revelations? Who is it that speaks when God speaks from the burning bush?” Kearney, The God Who May Be, 33. 76 I deviate here from the JSB translation, which is as follows: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” Deut. 6:5 (JSB). 77 Exod. 2:24; 6:4–5. 78 Exod. 19:5; 24:7–8; 34:10; 34:27–28. 79 “The vassal binds himself to keep faith with the suzerain. If the vassal keeps faith, so must the suzerain.” Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Concept of Covenant in the Qumran Scrolls and Rabbinic Literature,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 257–258. 80 Deut. 29:9–12 (JSB).

CONTRIBUTORS

Hillel Ben-Sasson – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem William Desmond – KU Leuven; Villanova University Andy R. German – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Emily Hartz – University of Southern Denmark Klaus Held – Bergische Universität Wuppertal Merav Mack – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem John Panteleimon Manoussakis – College of the Holy Cross; The Australian Catholic University Gabriel Motzkin – The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Carsten Fogh Nielsen – Aarhus University Joel Pearl – Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis Michael Roubach – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Christoph Schmidt – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Eli Schonfeld – Tel Aviv University; Shalom Hartman Institute Shem Shemy – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Volkmar Sigusch – Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main