Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics 1443883638, 9781443883634

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. Truth and Experience: The Broad Perspective
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part II. Truth and Experience: Responding to Finitude
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part III. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: The Sources
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part IV. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: New Fields
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Contributors

Citation preview

Truth and Experience

Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Edited by

Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi and Søren Tinning

Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Edited by Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi and Søren Tinning This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi, Søren Tinning and contributors The final proofreading of the volume was done by Ben Young of Babel Editing and supported by a grant from the Research Program in Philosophy and History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus; the editors extend thanks to both. 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): 1-4438-8363-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8363-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 S. Tinning, D. Jørgensen, G. Chiurazzi Part I. Truth and Experience: The Broad Perspective Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Experience, Metaphysics, and Immanent Transcendence Dorthe Jørgensen Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Being as Diagonal and the Possibility of Truth: A Reading of Plato’s Theaetetus Gaetano Chiurazzi Part II. Truth and Experience: Responding to Finitude Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 Kant’s Slumber and Hegel’s Ontological Gesture Saša Hrnjez Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 On What Is Broken Inside: Hegel on Finitude Haris Ch. Papoulias Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81 “Subjectivity as Untruth”: Kierkegaard and the Paradoxality of Subjective Truth Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97 Heidegger and Metaphysics: A Question of the Limit Søren Tinning

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Table of Contents

Part III. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: The Sources Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 117 On the Temporal-Extension of Moods and Emotions Jens Sand Østergaard Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135 What Was Heidegger’s Experience in Religious Experience when Reading Paul? Jens Linderoth Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 161 The Problem of Historical Experience in the Works of Walter Benjamin Damiano Roberi Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 179 The Role of Ciphers and Fantasy in Karl Jaspers’s Work: Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Aspects Daniele Campesi Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203 Experience and Truth in the Work of Gadamer Silvana Ballnat Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 223 Foucault’s Concept of Experience Nicolai von Eggers Part IV. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: New Fields Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 243 Between Realism and Idealism: Transcendental Experience and Truth in Husserl’s Phenomenology Simone Aurora Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 261 The Four Truths and Their Double Synthesis Ivan Mosca

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 275 The Contribution of Heidegger’s Philosophy to Geography Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 293 Mood and Method: Where Does Ethnographic Experience Truly Take Place? Rasmus Dyring Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 319 The Experience of Truth in Jazz Improvisation Jens Skou Olsen Contributors ............................................................................................. 341

INTRODUCTION

This is a book on truth, experience, and the interrelations between these two fundamental philosophical notions. The questions of truth and experience have their roots at the very heart of philosophy, both historically and thematically. This book gives an insight into how philosophers working in the fields of philosophical phenomenology and hermeneutics respond to challenges posed by these questions, not only in relation to the history of philosophy, but to philosophy itself. The book contains texts written by distinguished professors and in particular by young scholars. It is the result of a mutually inspired collaboration between the Philosophy Departments at the University of Aarhus and the University of Turin, that is: between Danish and Italian philosophers, who met up in Aarhus during the graduate conference “The Experience of Truth – The Truth of Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” September 5–6, 2013. As editors of the book, it has been interesting to see how historical awareness was coupled with a strong aspiration towards re-articulating, reconfiguring, and re-thinking the past in order to open up to and explore a plurality of possible ways of enriching the philosophical questions at stake. As a consequence of this explorative spirit, the questions of phenomenology and hermeneutics, and of experience and truth, were addressed in ways that made it meaningless to edit the book along the lines of such distinctions. In fact, some of the papers directly address these questions in the light of how we can rethink limitations and distinctions as such, while others, whilst being conceived within a certain philosophical perspective, open up to other philosophical disciplines, as well as to questions reaching beyond philosophy, e.g., to theology, politics, history, and anthropology. Generally speaking, the interchange between historical awareness and a both critical and creative approach finds – like many other aspects of the book – a point of reference in the question of finitude. The theme of finitude may only be present as an undercurrent throughout the chapters of this book, but it comes forth as the condition sine qua non determining the questions they elaborate on. This central role of finitude helps cast light on two other elements running through the contributions to the book:

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Introduction

openness and complexity. These two elements can be regarded as methodological aspirations which represent the constant effort to open up subjects critically, of being open to them, and of opening perspectives beyond them. Likewise, when the philosophical potential of this effort is to be captured, the conclusions do not counter this openness, but strive to summon its complexity. Nevertheless, the elements of finitude as well as of openness and complexity do not merely have a methodological significance, indicating the explorative spirit of the book. They also reflect an engagement with the present historical situation, in which the relation between truth and experience no longer corresponds to how it traditionally was experienced and defined. Traditionally, experience and truth were considered to constitute knowledge of two different worlds, which corresponded to the traditional distinctions between the particular and the universal, the immanent and the transcendent, and the finite and the infinite. However, in a modern world of finitude “the transcendent” as it was traditionally understood (e.g., as God) is necessarily deemed inaccessible to human knowledge. This doesn’t mean that the distinction between immanence and transcendence collapses, but that truth and experience are no longer consigned each to their own world in the traditional manner. On the contrary, they are both found in one and the same world – within immanence. In an immanent world, the relationship between truth and experience is undecided, or rather: it is un-decidable, manifesting itself in a tension between unity and fragmentation, between dispersal and synthesis, which alters the foundation of how we think philosophically. An illustrative example of this change is found in the concept of immanent transcendence, developed by Dorthe Jørgensen in Chapter One “Experience, Metaphysics, and Immanent Transcendence.” In general terms, her concept of immanent transcendence reconfigures central notions of the philosophical tradition. It relies upon the depths and insights of that tradition, but defies the traditionally strong opposition between the immanent and the transcendent by substituting them with a third term, immanent transcendence, indicating how the philosophical configurations have changed. According to Jørgensen, the immanent is the concrete historical world in which we live, with its rich diversity of relations, contrasts, and changes, and which today seems to be without any mirror in the form of a complementary transcendent world. On the contrary, the transcendent has been substituted by transcendence understood as an opening up that is constitutive of meaning, but which does not contravene the richness of the

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immanent. Unlike what was the case in traditional metaphysics, in the chapter by Jørgensen the word “transcendence” does not denote something transcendent, but an experience happening in the immanence, transcending what is a given without being an experience of something belonging to another world. This transcendence happens immanent to what is present to us, as an opening up of this very world itself, without postulating anything transcendent beyond it. On the contrary, it is an experience of the multidimensionality of immanence itself. Jørgensen’s term “immanent transcendence” thus denotes an experience (not an object, be it experiential or not), namely the experience of an event (the transcendence in the immanence) that is ahistorical (it was present already in antiquity), but always historically interpreted (as an experience of e.g. truth, God, or aura) and known only from our historical interpretations of it. Furthermore, in Jørgensen’s philosophy of experience the specific term “experience of immanent of transcendence” is reserved for the modern interpretations of this event that are expressed in the works of, e.g., Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Interpretations that are related to but different from previous philosophical and religious interpretations of the event called transcendence. Still, as Gaetano Chiurazzi reminds us in Chapter Two – “Being as Diagonal and the Possibility of Truth: A Reading of Plato’s Theaetetus” – the question of a certain experience of transcendence, or put in the terms of Chiurazzi, the question of the excess of Being, has been present at the heart of philosophy since antiquity. Chiurazzi finds this idea of a “surplus” or “excess” in the debate between the V and IV century BC concerning the problem of the incommensurable magnitudes, while he explicitly follows its traces in Plato’s Theaetetus and in the commentary Heidegger devoted to this dialogue. The main thesis of Chiurazzi’s contribution is that the Platonic discussion about the true and the false in the Theaetetus, which leads to the definition of Being as dynamis in the Sophist, involves the idea that in every experience of truth, an “excess of sense,” represented by Being, is given; Being, as Heidegger writes, is not being. Being has the same nature of the diagonal: it is incommensurable with being, different from it. In this structure Chiurazzi sees the structure of understanding, the presupposition of every truth. Therefore, Chiurazzi is in accordance not only with Jørgensen’s reference to the natural philosophers (e.g. Thales), but with her emphasis on the historical changes of both human experience and philosophical notions: we must always remember the historical dimension in the equation. This is true both because the history of thought remains an important ground for understanding our present situation, and because the

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historical can be found at the very heart of the philosophical concepts themselves. To paraphrase Heidegger, Being and time must once again become a question; and they must become so with an emphasis on time, on change, on history. Having outlined the general spirit of the book, which is developed in a more elaborate form by Dorthe Jørgensen and Gaetano Chiurazzi in Part I: “Truth and Experience: The Broad Perspective,” we can turn to the remaining three sections. Part II: “Truth and Experience: Responding to Finitude” investigates some of the questions opened by Immanuel Kant, who was the first to philosophically articulate the question of finitude. In Chapter Three, “Kant’s Slumber and Hegel’s Ontological Gesture,” Saša Hrnjez takes up G.W.F. Hegel’s answer to Kant’s investigations of the transcendental conditions of the possibility of knowledge. Central to this endeavor is Kant’s insistence upon the finitude of reason, which demands a critical investigation of the limits of what we can know and of what is beyond our knowledge. Accordingly, Hrnjez presents us with Kant’s question of the transcendental, of the condition of the possibility of knowledge. He then analyses Hegel’s reception of and his break with Kant: a reception in which Hegel argues that, for Kant, experience and truth remain completely separated, without any point of intersection. As a response, Hegel’s ontological gesture strives to surmount this underlying heterogeneity within Kant’s transcendental subjectivity in order to find the true ground of its original synthetic unity and so overcome Kant’s subjective transcendentalism. In Chapter Four, “On What Is Broken Inside: Hegel on Finitude,” Haris Ch. Papoulias addresses the question of finitude in Hegel’s philosophy. Papoulias traces Hegel’s concept of finitude and shows its importance as a driving force on all levels in the Hegelian system. Finitude is thus constitutive to the possibility of negation as well as the possibility of sublating the contingency of the finite itself. This constitutive aspect in Hegel’s idealism means that we should not conceive of his concept of the absolute Spirit in terms of a closed system; on the contrary, Hegel’s system is driven by its continual openness. In Chapter Five, “‘Subjectivity as Untruth’ – Kierkegaard and the Paradoxality of Subjective Truth,” Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth analyses Søren Kierkegaard’s answer to Hegel’s dialectical interpretation of finitude and Spirit. Lundsgaard-Leth develops Kierkegaard’s statement that “subjectivity is the truth,” showing how the notion “subjective truth”

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is essentially paradoxical in a double sense. On the one hand, a paradox occurs between the infinite subjective willing of a meaningful existence and the finite conditions of this very subject itself. On the other hand, this very willing, which characterizes the essence of the subject, is itself paradoxical. The subject is always already a willing subject before it makes any willed decision Chapter Six, “Heidegger and Metaphysics: A Question of the Limit,” investigates the traditional distinction between experience and truth, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, as described above. Interpreting this in the light of Heidegger’s question of Being, and with Kant as a central point of reference, Søren Tinning shows how this very distinction has a specific historical role and origin as a defining structure in metaphysics. Part III: “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: The Sources,” engages with some of the most important philosophers in phenomenology and hermeneutics. A chapter is here dedicated to the investigation of a specific question related to truth and experience in the work of each of these philosophers. In Chapter Seven, Jens Sand Østergaard focuses “On the TemporalExtension of Moods and Emotions” in Edmund Husserl’s writings. Østergaard first distinguishes between emotions and moods as intentionally directed and un-directed respectively, as well as characterized by an extension that is short and transparent (emotions) or enduring and opaque (moods). Thereafter he turns to Husserl and his concept of affectivity. Affectivity is here examined in regard to the temporal characteristics of Husserl’s conception of consciousness and passive and active synthesis. In Chapter Eight, Jens Linderoth poses the question, “What Was Heidegger’s Experience in Religious Experience, when Reading Paul?” Linderoth’s answer takes shape as a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s reading of Galatians, but has a much broader aim. Linderoth challenges the standard interpretation, which, led by Theodor Kisiel, focused upon Heidegger’s reading of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians in the same lecture series. This polemical stance further leads us to consider the importance of the Galatians, both in Heidegger’s reading of Paul and as a qualification of his hermeneutic phenomenological position. In Chapter Nine, Damiano Roberi addresses “The Problem of Historical Experience in the Works of Walter Benjamin.” He focuses both on the poverty of experience that according to Benjamin characterized his day and the possible historical experience that would open a messianic dimension of truth. Whereas experience belongs to our actual historical

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world, messianic truth is of a different order. Yet the two are not to be conceived within the schema of a traditional distinction between immanence and transcendence; they interrelate in a much more complex way, as Roberi shows. Chapter Ten, “The Role of Ciphers and Fantasy in Karl Jaspers’s Work: Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Aspects” written by Daniele Campesi, highlights the fundamental role of symbolic language in Jaspers’s philosophy through the analysis of two closely linked concepts: cipher and phantasy. From the definition of the metaphysics of ciphers as a “hermeneutics of the limit,” the purpose of Campesi’s enquiry is to show how the connection between ciphers and phantasy has both hermeneutical and phenomenological implications. Silvana Ballnat concentrates in Chapter Eleven on Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher indispensable to hermeneutic philosophy. Taking up the question of “Experience and Truth in the Work of Gadamer,” Ballnat argues for an essential connection between Gadamer’s double structured concept of experience (“negative experience is a truth of positive experience”) and his critique of the methodological concept of truth. In accordance with this, Ballnat develops an ontological understanding of truth as “Zuwachs des Seins” (or with Chiurazzi, as a surplus of Being), in which truth does not primordially mean a growth in knowledge but in Being. Chapter Twelve, the last chapter in this section, examines “Foucault’s Concept of Experience.” Nicolai von Eggers analyses the concept of experience in Michel Foucault’s work, showing how it has a peculiar but important strategic role in his thought. Here, experience is not something done by a transcendental subject or some sort of Hegelian spirit. Instead, experience is that which mediates a core tension in Foucault’s thought, namely between the subject and the power structure of discourse – or simply of the Other. The last section of the book, Part IV: “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: New Fields,” complements the attention paid to the individual positions in the prior section by focusing on how other currents of thought and scientific fields become re-articulated through and by their encounter with phenomenology and hermeneutics. In Chapter Thirteen, “Between Realism and Idealism: Transcendental Experience and Truth in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Simone Aurora explores how the relation between two of the most important currents in modern philosophy is re-articulated or re-configured in and by Husserl.

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The basic hypothesis of the chapter is that Husserl’s phenomenology is not a realism, nor is it an idealism, but rather it is both. Ivan Mosca, in Chapter Fourteen “The Four Truths and Their Double Synthesis,” carries out another investigation of the complex relation between different fields of philosophy. The approach here differs from Aurora’s, who showed how Husserl integrated other currents of philosophy into phenomenology. Instead, Mosca displays how the hermeneutic phenomenological kind of philosophy coming out of Heidegger has been integrated as an aspect of the concept of truth in social ontology, a recent current in philosophy. In this regard, Mosca outlines four different concepts of truth divided into two couples denoted as Tarskian-Pragmatic and Ancient-Modern. After schematically outlining these concepts and also adding a short discussion of “religious truth,” Mosca shows how social ontology (e.g. John Searle) can be conceived as a unification of these different lines of thought. The last three chapters step beyond the encounter of phenomenology and hermeneutics with different philosophical movements, in order to look at their relations to other fields of study. In Chapter Fifteen, “The Contribution of Heidegger’s Philosophy to Geography,” Ernesto Calogero Sferrazza Papa explores how geography and philosophy are intertwined, showing that they are not completely isolated disciplines, but actually determine each other. Philosophy may to a certain degree be considered to be geographical, as some central philosophical concepts such as “space,” “place,” and “world” can show us. Likewise, geography is not an isolated science, but relies heavily on philosophy, as exemplified in René Descartes’s concept of “pure space.” Developing this common ground in the light of Heidegger’s “geographical” concepts of place, dwelling, and Being-in, Sferrazza Papa shows how this implies an ontological questioning in which geography, prior to any measure or mapping of space, is confronted with questions of individual existence as well as of the fields of politics and the social world. Chapter Sixteen, “Mood and Method: Where Does Ethnographic Experience Truly Take Place?,” departs from anthropology’s claim to truth grounded in an “I was there.” In this respect, Rasmus Dyring raises the fundamental problem of what it means in anthropology to “be there.” Developing the relationship between moods and postures, Dyring then turns to Heidegger’s concept of “Befindlichkeit” as well as to Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and Hans Lipps.

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Chapter Seventeen is dedicated to an analysis of “The Experience of Truth in Jazz Improvisation.” Jens Skou Olsen here investigates the experience of truth that is characteristic of the event of jazz, as it is experienced in its extremely transient form of improvisation. Jazz improvisation is a singular event which demands the participation of both musicians and spectators and involves the specific time and place of the concert. All these elements contribute to the wholeness of the experience, in which they are brought into the openness and uncertainty so essential to improvisation, in such ways that their relations are dissolved and reconfigured. The texts described above thus take up many open and complex questions and respond to them in a variety of ways. The responses touch upon a long range of questions that revolve around experience and truth within philosophical phenomenology and hermeneutics, as well as theology, anthropology, geography, art, politics, and history. The responses also touch upon notions such as time, history, language, emotion, and subjectivity, as well as realism, idealism, ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics; they address philosophers ranging from Thales, the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle, to St. Paul, A.G. Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, and not least to more recent thinkers central to phenomenology and hermeneutics such as Husserl, Benjamin, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gadamer, and Foucault. Fundamentally, the contributors of this book all seek to answer the challenge posed by the questions of truth and experience in phenomenology and hermeneutics. This challenge is received in its most positive, but also demanding sense: as a struggle to find words and language adequate to a contemporary world, in which the old articulations must be transformed according to the changed coordinates brought about by what above was called finitude. The book thus seeks to contribute to the understanding of a world that has not been transformed once and for all (eternally), but is transformed once and again (historically). Søren Tinning, Dorthe Jørgensen, and Gaetano Chiurazzi

PART I TRUTH AND EXPERIENCE: THE BROAD PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER ONE EXPERIENCE, METAPHYSICS, AND IMMANENT TRANSCENDENCE DORTHE JØRGENSEN

Modern scientism Western philosophers have long striven to think scientifically, based on an ideal which they have found in the modern experimental sciences. This effort to turn philosophy into science has ensured that philosophy has moved away from the original wisdom-seeking philosophia. Not only does the traditional notion of truth as correspondence dominate as usual, but the mental copying of something empirical with which cognition is so often identified is now expected to follow the methodological ideal of the experimental sciences.1 According to this ideal, we only have cognition if the content is knowledge that is true in the sense that it is consistent with the empirical data. This correspondence is only ensured if it is possible to explain the process of cognition so precisely that others can emulate it and come to the same result. Consequently, the acquisition of true knowledge requires the use of a method that is clearly defined and can be taken over by others. Therefore, experience is not only identified with empirical experience; it is also regarded as something done by a subject to whom that which is learned has the status of an object. Both empirical experience and scientific knowledge rooted in this experience are thus considered to be something that we, ourselves, are in control of. Although the methodological approach of the sciences prides itself on transparency, much is taken for granted when we make use of it. For example, there is no discussion concerning what is real and what can be realized. The reality is limited to what can be observed empirically, and cognition is supposed to require a methodical processing of the material obtained in this manner. To the extent that cognition is accredited with any possibility of transcendence, its ability to transcend only consists in being

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able to reach out for data making up a reality that is given in advance, and which does not evoke wondering. Within the framework of this approach, there is no room for the kind of experience and cognition that modern thinkers and artists such as James Joyce and Walter Benjamin were concerned about.2 The sudden appearances of otherwise inaccessible reality – the experiences of a dimension of the world of which we are not otherwise aware, which Joyce called epiphanies and Benjamin referred to as higher experiences – are excluded. There is no opportunity to reflect on the unexpected experiences of a “more” – a transcendence in the immanence – that deviate from our usual experiences and cognitions of the world in which we live.

Sensitive cognition It is a long time since the Enlightenment philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten problematized a notion of cognition that acknowledges no other experience than empirical experience. Thanks to this questioning he not only introduced philosophical aesthetics, but also prepared the abovementioned experience of immanent transcendence. Baumgarten’s rationalist contemporaries only had eyes for sensibility and understanding seen as sense perception and rationality, a limitation still prevalent today.3 In analogy to other rationalists of his time, he distinguished between a lower and a higher part of the cognitive faculty; but he broke with the established notion that the lower part is nothing but a provider of material for the higher part and does not, by itself, result in cognition. According to Baumgarten, the lower part of the cognitive faculty does in fact generate a certain kind of cognition, which he referred to as sensitive, and by which he did not mean sensual. As early as in Reflections on Poetry he stressed in § 116 that the aistheta (sensations) observed by the lower part of the cognitive faculty are not identical to sensory impressions.4 The aistheta comprise all sensitive ideas, including imaginations, and they are perceived differently depending on whether they are obscure or clear. Furthermore, clear ideas can be distinct and lead to logical cognition, or they can be confused and lead to sensitive cognition. It was the latter (the confused clear ideas, which Baumgarten also referred to as extensively clear ideas) he was concerned about, not only in Reflections on Poetry, but in Aesthetica as well.5 He dealt with these ideas not only because of the sensitive cognition they allow for, but also because of the beautiful thinking associated with this kind of cognition. Because the sensitive cognition is a product of the lower part of the cognitive faculty it is not logical, but sensitive; so it is not rational or

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conceptual, but aesthetic and intuitive. However, sensitive cognitions do have epistemic value, and they even represent an individual aestheticintuitive kind of cognition which is not subordinate, but analogous to the logical-conceptual cognition.6 As a consequence of this acknowledgment, Baumgarten eventually abandoned the conventional distinction between two parts of the cognitive faculty. He began distinguishing, instead, between two independent cognitive faculties: a lower and a higher, respectively, the former being the origin of sensitive cognition. According to Baumgarten, philosophical aesthetics is the philosophy of sensitive cognition, and for this reason aesthetics is a kind of epistemology. Philosophical aesthetics explores the epistemologically rather unexplored phenomenon that sensitive cognition was at the time of the emergence of aesthetics, and which it still is. Before the formation of philosophical aesthetics, the epistemologists took nothing but rational understanding seriously, and this kind of cognition had only logical and metaphysical truth to relate to. Only conceptual thinking, which formulates explanations and provides proofs by subsuming particular phenomena under general concepts, and which therefore is characterized by abstraction, was regarded as true. Thus, true thinking only comprised thinking that results in general concepts and lawfully constructed explanations of relations. But philosophical aesthetics made it possible for epistemologists to explore aesthetic experiences as well, and thanks to philosophical aesthetics there was now also an aesthetic truth to relate to. Baumgarten’s aesthetics created the basis for examining a beautiful thinking, which thanks to its eye for the uniqueness of the particular retains the complexity of observation and, thus, is characterized by liveliness. Henceforth, thinking leading to truth could also consist of thinking resulting in understanding marked by palpability and meaningfulness. According to Aesthetics § 14, it is the perfection of the sensitive cognition that is the goal of aesthetics, and perfection is identical to beauty. Logic is not just about logical cognition, but aims at the correct logical cognition. Similarly, philosophical aesthetics is not just about sensitive cognition, but strives for perfect (i.e. beautiful) sensitive cognition.7 Furthermore, Baumgarten regarded perfection/beauty as a matter of unity in diversity. Logical cognitions explain specific phenomena and causal relations by subsuming them under general concepts. Therefore, rational understanding is characterized by abstraction, and it is marked by unity, only. Sensitive cognitions, on the other hand, are specific and characterized by both unity and diversity. They are distinguished by not moving from the particular to the general, but rather alternating between the poles. Therefore, in sensitive cognitions the many individual marks of the

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specific are not lost in abstraction, and not only complexity is experienced, but meaning as well. In sensitive cognitions we do not only sense a multitude of marks. We also perceive a whole that is characterized both by liveliness thanks to this wealth, and by meaningfulness thanks to inner consistency. According to Baumgarten, the optimum solution is to allow the beautiful thinking associated with sensitivity to supplement the logical thinking of the intellect. The aestheticological (both aesthetic-intuitive and logical-conceptual) knowledge which this may result in is the highest it is humanly possible to reach cognitively. If we really want to obtain significant insight, we need both sensitive openness and logical rigor. Both intellect and sensitivity are of an individual epistemic value and give true knowledge, but they each do so in their own way, and they should complement each other.

Creativity Baumgarten was aware of the creative aspect of the aesthetic experience, which means that it contributes to what is being experienced. This is evidenced, among other things, by his presentation of what he called felix aestheticus, i.e. the successful aesthetician. Felix aestheticus is Baumgarten’s term for a person whose sensitive cognitions are of the perfected kind and who thus meets the goal of aesthetics. Such an aesthetician is, according to Aesthetics § 28, equipped with “innate natural aesthetics” in the form of a natural disposition in all of his soul for beautiful thinking. According to § 29, this natural disposition requires that the person is in possession of an “innate graceful and tasteful spirit,” understood as a talent for letting the different dispositions of his lower cognitive faculty be encouraged, work together in appropriate distribution, and thus contribute to tastefulness in his cognition. Furthermore, such a graceful spirit requires a certain measure of higher dispositions for cognition (i.e. understanding and reason, § 38), as well as the following dispositions of the lower cognitive faculty (§§ 30-37): 1) increased sensitivity (acute sentiendi); 2) the disposition for imagining something (dispositio ad imaginandum); 3) the disposition for penetrating insight (dispositio ad perspicaciam); 4) the disposition for recognizing something and memory (dispositio ad recognoscendum et memoria); 5) the poetic disposition (dispositio poetica); 6) the disposition for having a taste that is not ordinary, but refined (dispositio ad saporem non publicum, immo delicatum); 7) the disposition for anticipating and expecting something (dispositio ad

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praevidendum et praesagiendum); 8) the disposition for characterizing one’s perceptions (dispositio ad significandas perceptiones suas).8 Concerning the creative aspect of the aesthetic experience, it is worth noticing dispositions number two and five, which are related to the faculties referred to in Baumgarten’s Metaphysics as the imagination (phantasia) and the poetic faculty (or faculty of invention, facultas fingendi).9 Imagination is the basis of the capacitas infinita of the human being, i.e. our inclination and ability to imagine something that does not already exist. Without imagination the poetic faculty would not function, and imagination is, in fact, a prerequisite for all the dispositions of the lower cognitive faculty, including memory. However, according to Baumgarten imagination as such is not creative, but merely reproductive. Imagination is the ability to restore a bygone state, and therefore it is bound to the perceptions and the related representations recalled and made palpable by its mental images (phantasmata). But in analogy to reason, the poetic faculty is genuinely creative, and this faculty is thus particularly characteristic of the successful aesthetician, who is essentially a poeticus. This aesthetician is the creative person who poetically calls forth new worlds, thus making new insights possible. Therefore, unlike the traditional notion of what it means to cognize and think, the cognition and thinking of the successful aesthetician is not a passive gazing that simply copies something mentally, be it ideas or anything else, and in which truth is thus a matter of correspondence between the observed and its imprint in the mind. In addition to being contemplative, the aesthetician’s sensitive cognition and beautiful thinking are formational, and are therefore by their very nature creative acts. They are not only dependent on the usual cognitive potential of the human being. They also rely on the poiesis acting among the dispositions of the lower cognitive faculty, namely in the form of imagination and the poetic faculty. Although the successful aesthetician does not follow the principles of conceptual cognition when he cognizes and thinks, he is not merely fantasizing. He wishes to effectualize not only aesthetic plenitude (ubertas aesthetica), but also aesthetic magnitude, truth, certitude/persuasion and liveliness (magnitudo, veritas, certitudo/persuasio et vita aesthetica), as well as aesthetic light (lux aesthetica). Thus, besides the logical clarity and distinctness characterizing conceptual cognition and the associated logical thinking, a specific aesthetic clarity and distinctness is possible in sensitive cognition and beautiful thinking.10 There is both a light emanating from the things, and a light that we ourselves make the things shine with. Our sensitive cognitions take place in the space established by this duality of objectively given and subjectively added light, and they take shape as

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unfinished and fundamentally infinite processes unfolding in a field in which it is difficult to keep subject and object strictly separated from each other. Consequently, despite Baumgarten’s rationalist point of departure he actually negated the rationalist separation and opposition of subject and object, thereby opening the paradigm of the dualist philosophy of mind from within.11 His understanding of the aesthetic experience as an unfinished and fundamentally infinite process that unfolds in the space of light between subject and object and commutes in a constant alternation between the particular and the general implied that he actually regarded the aesthetic experience as an event, and that he also considered this event to be creative.12 The aesthetic experience brings something forth – aesthetic knowledge – that would not exist if no aesthetic experience was taking place.

Phenomenology is aesthetics The latter point shows that Baumgarten’s conception of sensitive cognition contained traits of hermeneutic phenomenology, but philosophical aesthetics was often badly reputed among hermeneutic phenomenologists. Through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s criticism of the so-called aesthetic consciousness (the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and Fr. Schiller, primarily), this aversion can be traced back to Martin Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics as such.13 According to Heidegger, aesthetics is an expression of metaphysics, just like logic and ethics are, and he criticized modern aesthetics for subjectivism, as well. In this context, the word metaphysics means “objectifying scientific theory.” Because Heidegger did not distinguish between art theory and philosophical aesthetics, he thought that aesthetics arose as early as in antiquity, when Plato and Aristotle expected to be able to explain art theoretically. The way of thinking introduced by them included a distinction between matter and form, as well as an understanding of the exterior as an expression of something interior, which has since paved the way for the subjectivism of our day.14 According to Heidegger, it was this subjectivism that determined Baumgarten’s focus on sensitive cognition. The result was an understanding of art that – besides turning the work of art into an object of scientific study – thought of it as an expression of an artist’s subjective feelings and notions which caters to the subjective feelings and notions of a viewer. This understanding of art meant that now there was only an eye for the emotional side of the work of art, whereas what such a work is rooted in and originates from faded away completely.15 In order to avoid this, Heidegger, by contrast, related to the artwork in a phenomenological way.

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He wanted to describe the work of art as it appears to us, and therefore he abstracted from both the artist and the viewer. He wished to let the work of art appear as what it truly is, thus making way for the possibility that truth could happen again in the field which had been called “aesthetic” since Baumgarten. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s texts also show that emotions actually played an important role in his thinking – also for cognition and even for the experience of truth. “What we call a ‘feeling’ is neither a transitory epiphenomenon of our thinking and willing behavior nor simply an impulse that provokes such behavior nor merely a present condition we have to put up with somehow or other.”16 On the contrary, feelings can be better promoters of insight than the rational way of thinking is, because the latter makes us think of the existent as something present-at-hand. “The founding mode of attunement [die Befindlichkeit der Stimmung] not only reveals beings as a whole in various ways, but this revealing – far from being merely incidental – is also the basic occurrence of our Da-sein.”17 This emotionally given disclosure is identical to the aletheia (unconcealedness) introduced by Heidegger as his alternative to the traditional concept of truth as correspondence. In attunement, we are next to what is both the most distant and the closest, i.e. Being. However, Heidegger’s reflections on the fundamental importance of emotionality do not only refer to the way of thinking with which he tried to do away with traditional metaphysics. They also arouse associations with Baumgarten’s philosophical aesthetics. As stated above, the sensitive cognition so crucial to aesthetics is an insight of emotional origin, and sensitive cognitions are not only analogous to the logical cognitions provided by the intellect. They even surpass them, at least potentially. This is not to say that there is no significant difference between Baumgarten’s and Heidegger’s ways of thinking; Baumgarten belonged to the dualist philosophy of mind, whereas Heidegger was an existential philosopher. Nevertheless, they shared an interest in a felt kind of “cognition,” as well as the view that the logical-conceptual way of thinking is of a limited scope. Furthermore, they both considered the notion of a subject who only recognizes conceptually to be an abstraction, and they were both of the opinion that the language of philosophy must be processed – for the sake of thinking. According to Heidegger, even truth understood as correspondence is based on aletheia, because no cognition can correspond to anything without something having shown itself.18 So the more “poetic” experience that aletheia is considered to be is a precondition for conceptual knowledge. In Being and Time Heidegger thematizes this as a matter of

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attunement and of the understanding opened by attunement regarded as a precondition for all knowledge, including theoretical-scientific knowledge.19 This also points back to Baumgarten’s aesthetics, i.e. sensitivity understood as something fundamental and sensitive cognition seen as an independent kind of knowledge that is distinguished by an individual strength compared to logical cognition. Furthermore, it points back to the “aestheticological” truth regarded as the furthest and highest man can reach cognitively, and the aesthetic, i.e. sensitive, aspect of the associated aestheticological cognition seen as the source of this cognition’s strength. Therefore, in my book Den skønne tænkning (Beautiful Thinking) I conclude that Baumgarten’s philosophical aesthetics anticipated the hermeneutic phenomenology of our time, and that the latter is aesthetic by nature.20 Hermeneutic phenomenology actualizes the potential in the form of which philosophical aesthetics wintered during the dominance of the study of art in the 19th-20th centuries. But to the detriment of aesthetics, thinkers such as Heidegger have practiced this actualization without any awareness of their own debt to aesthetics. Indeed, they have even shown contempt for aesthetics.

The nature of all things The book Den skønne tænkning is subtitled “Veje til erfaringsmetafysik” (Pathways to Metaphysics of Experience). Our different experiences of transcendence, including aesthetic and religious experiences, and not least experiences of immanent transcendence, are the subject matter of what I call metaphysics of experience. This philosophy is formulated in opposition to the current trend of having an eye for two options only, meaning either we commit to metaphysics (which today is perceived as problematic) or we reject all kinds of metaphysics (from which follows that there really is only one way forward, namely to leave metaphysics behind). This trend is based on a widespread belief that metaphysics represents a historically invalidated learning about two worlds, one of which is immanent whereas the other is transcendent. Or the trend mentioned is based on the idea that metaphysics is identical to the theoretical-scientific way of thinking discussed by Heidegger that reduces Being to a being. However, the word metaphysics can also be used to denominate something else, and this is precisely the case in what I call metaphysics of experience. According to this third use of the word, philosophical thinking is metaphysical by nature, and the metaphysics thus referred to is characterized by something as significant as: 1) being open to experiences different from sensory/empirical experiences; 2) being willing

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to reflect systematically on one’s experiences of this other kind; 3) doing the latter in a meaning-seeking way, which requires interpretation and, hence, openness to something going beyond the experience itself (something that is more universal, a larger context, an idea). According to this third understanding of metaphysics, philosophical thinking was metaphysical from its very beginning. Even the so-called natural philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) thought metaphysically, i.e. they looked for more in the world than what can be observed empirically, and it was this “more” they were concerned about. Furthermore, the natural philosophers endeavored to consider the thus experienced super-sensuality systematically, and in the light of something more comprehensive than the experience itself – in the light of their idea of the “nature of all things” (physis) – they tried to formulate meaningful interpretations of it. Often the natural philosophers have been portrayed as a kind of early scientists, and it was therefore postulated about them that their philosophy broke with the contemporary realm of religious thought.21 However, as long ago as a century comparative studies of philosophy and religion sowed doubt about this understanding.22 The philosophy of the natural philosophers was probably not as different from the religiosity of their day as was previously presumed. Indeed, something new happened when they began to argue systematically for their conception of the nature of reality, but the religious understanding of this reality as something divine was inherited in the theories they formulated. Aristotle is the supplier of our knowledge concerning Thales. According to Aristotle, Thales raised the question about the nature of the one source from which everything else comes, and in asking this question he tried to determine the nature of all things, which he identified as “water” (hydor).23 Because of this interest in nature, philosophers such as Thales have been regarded as exponents of a new and more secular mindset in antiquity. But in their mental environment the water just mentioned was not an empirical natural phenomenon; on the contrary, this water was a materialization of “super-sensual nature.” They saw nature as a living and holy-sacred organism, and in their view physis was a divine “soul-substance” pervading all things. This is also the reason why Thales could say that “all things are full of gods,” thereby aiming at the nature of all things understood as something divine and subject to admiration.24 In accordance with this, the natural philosophers’ expectation of finding a “higher” nature in empirical nature rested, as mentioned, on an assumption of a religious origin, namely the idea that there is one source only of everything. This source from which everything stems is the power that is present in everything and thanks to which it exists, or the super-sensuality

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that has inspired everything with divine nature. On the whole, the thinking of the natural philosophers was probably not as different from the religiosity of their time as was often assumed. On the contrary, it originated from an experience of a divinity inherent in nature, and it was shaped as a homage to this sacred nature. Nevertheless, although religion and philosophy had a common experiential ground early in antiquity, they were media for different interpretations of what was experienced. The understanding of reality remained the same because the conception formulated by the philosophers was expressed in their understanding of nature, the content of which was of a religious origin; but the way of dealing with the super-sensual reality changed with the emergence of philosophy. Magic, mythology, and religion had an intuitive and action-oriented approach to reality: they cultivated the super-sensual in its symbolic manifestations and expressed themselves in a poetic language. Philosophy, on the other hand, had an intellectual and speculative approach to the super-sensual: the philosophers tried to define the nature of the one source and dealt with it in an abstract conceptual language. However, the values of religious thought affected the thinking of the philosophers, and philosophy was thus cut in two directions: a “scientific” direction represented by Anaximander, and a “mysterious” direction represented by Pythagoras. The first direction was an expression of man’s need for “explanation” acquired through his mastery of nature, while the latter testified to the human need for “understanding” gained through a union with nature. But both of these directions were rooted in the realm of religious thought. Anaximander’s scientific philosophy was associated with Homer and the Apollonian religiosity, while Pythagoras’ mystical philosophy was linked to the Orphic and Dionysian religiosity.

New metaphysics According to Heidegger, philosophers such as Thales did not reduce Being to a being, and this is the reason for his interest in them. They did not yet think in a theoretical-scientific way. If the philosophy of our time is to approach the question concerning the meaning of Being, it must, according to Heidegger, learn from these thinkers. Modern philosophy must drop its tendency to metaphysics, i.e. the tendency to reflect in a theoretical-scientific way. However, if we do not follow Heidegger’s pejorative use of the word metaphysics, but refer to the third definition of that word’s meaning as formulated above, metaphysics is something other than scientific theorizing. According to this other understanding of

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metaphysics, metaphysics is thinking that is sensitively open to different dimensions of the world, including a super-sensual one, and to the interrelationships and connections between these dimensions. In this perspective, Heidegger’s own thinking was metaphysical – meant as a mark of distinction. It was experiential-philosophical by its very nature, and being a philosophy of experience it operated with an expanded concept of experience. Furthermore, the experiential-philosophical rather than idealistic character of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology means that it actually represents a new and different kind of metaphysics. This is consistent with the fact that it was not metaphysics as such, but traditional metaphysics only, i.e. scientific theorizing, that Heidegger addressed in his criticism of metaphysics. We find metaphysics of a new and different kind in an even stronger form in Benjamin, whose thinking was especially concerned with experience. It was about experience in the expanded sense of the word, and this was the case all the way from his text “Experience” written in 1913 to “On the Concept of History” from 1940.25 Benjamin’s expanded concept of experience is manifest, for instance, in “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in which he introduced his concept of higher experience and also expressed a desire to develop a new metaphysics understood as a philosophy about this experience. According to Benjamin’s program, all epistemology is confronted with two realities: an empirical and a metaphysical reality respectively. This is because man does not only have empirical experiences, but also witnesses a kind of metaphysical experience, i.e. higher experience. Empirical experiences are about the spatio-temporal world, whereas higher experience is about what transcends this world. Moreover, these empirical and metaphysical realities constitute two analytical fields, each of which contains its own critical question about the truth of empirical experience and the eternal validity of higher experiences. The natural sciences are based on empirical experience, which is precisely what they should be, but according to Benjamin philosophy is mistaken when it rejects any possibility of higher experience, as has usually been the case since Kant. To remedy this deficiency, Benjamin wanted to develop an epistemology shaped as a philosophy about the epistemic value of higher experience. According to Benjamin, Kant recognized that what matters in philosophy are the questions asked and how they are asked. However, Benjamin turned this insight against Kant himself. He thought that Kant’s critique of knowledge was weakened by the question Kant formulated in his Critique of Pure Reason, or rather by his way of asking.26 Instead of asking how true cognition is possible in metaphysics, Kant raised the

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question of whether it is possible at all. Just as mathematics and the natural sciences tell us, according to Kant, that true cognition is possible within these fields of knowledge, our higher experiences tell us, according to Benjamin, that true cognition is possible in metaphysics. Therefore, in philosophy the most relevant and fruitful question is not whether such cognition is possible, but how this can be the case, i.e. how do we formulate a philosophical understanding of this cognition. For Kant, however, it was not possible to practice metaphysics with such a starting point, because he ruled out the possibility of metaphysical experience in advance. According to Benjamin, the reason for this was an inadequate concept of experience by Kant, which limited experience to empirical experience. Furthermore, Benjamin criticized Kant for giving this kind of experience a metaphysical status in mathematics and the natural sciences which it does not deserve. Since the question of how true cognition is possible in metaphysics is also a matter of formulating the philosophy of this cognition, Benjamin did not only want to ask the question. As mentioned above, he also wished to develop a form of metaphysics – though not in the sense of a philosophy about transcendent objects, but about metaphysical experiences. Despite his criticism of Kant, Benjamin supposed that Kant’s critical method could serve this purpose. Kant investigated the conditions of the possibility of knowledge before he commented on its scope and depth. A similar study of the conditions of the possibility of higher experience should, according to Benjamin, enable a systematic determination of this experience, whereas attempts to define the higher experience without considering its fundamental conditions would result in empty speculation only. However, although Kant’s critical method was applicable, Benjamin criticized his philosophy as such for containing remnants of the dualist philosophy of mind; elements revealed by the fact that Kant did not always escape presenting reality as an object for a subject of cognition, even though he himself rejected such a notion of reality. These remnants were also the reason why Kant tied experience and cognition to man’s empirical consciousness, which according to Benjamin resulted in a psychological mythology of cognition causing subjectivism and relativism in Kant’s criticism, and which Benjamin therefore also problematized. As a result, Benjamin wished to purify Kant’s system of rudimentary metaphysics, i.e. to remove the remnants of the dualist philosophy of mind and the psychological mythology of cognition. However, behind Kant’s rudimentary metaphysics Benjamin also noticed a tendency toward genuine metaphysics, and he wanted to save this impulse and unfold it in

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the form of a new and different kind of metaphysics. Consequently, Benjamin did not plan to tear down Kant’s system, but wanted to rebuild it instead. The speculative features of the system should be subject to criticism, but this criticism should serve the purpose of saving the system’s inherent tendency toward new metaphysics, and this rescue should be carried out by anchoring the higher experience thematized by Benjamin in the reconstructed system. Such a “rescuing critique” of Kant’s philosophy would potentially liberate his epistemology from speculation, while addressing the lack of genuine metaphysics with a systematically reasoned new metaphysics.

Immanent transcendence Benjamin’s notion of higher experience is certainly about experiencing transcendence, and so are similar concepts of experience found in his texts, e.g. the concepts of the aura and the profane illumination.27 Furthermore, Benjamin treated religion and theology with an open mind: several of his texts, not least “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” are religiously and theologically inspired.28 However, experiences of transcendence may be irreligious, and Benjamin’s concepts of experience, e.g. higher experience, did not denote something religious in particular. Religious experiences have an object in the sense of a god called by name, whereas other experiences of transcendence may be without any object. If someone has a religious experience, he has the feeling that he knows somehow what he is experiencing, namely the presence of what he believes to be his god. But an experience of transcendence doesn’t necessarily have anything specific as its object. For this reason, experiences of transcendence may simply be referred to as experiences of a surplus of meaning, i.e. intensified meaning. Furthermore, these experiences may be interpreted in such a way, by the person having them, that they qualify as experiences of immanent transcendence understood as something different from religious or aesthetic experiences, for instance. The term “immanent transcendence” does, indeed, appear as a religious term, while aesthetics, on the other hand, is about something worldly. However, this contrast only applies if we equip the words transcendence and immanence with religious connotations and if we detach the aesthetic from the religious. But we might just as well refrain from doing so. It is customary to identify transcendence with the transcendent, and to think of the transcendent as something divine. Furthermore, it is common to perceive the word immanence as if it

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necessarily indicates that something divine is manifested in the worldly. Following this line of thought, immanence is inevitably associated with incarnation or pantheism, for instance. However, the word immanence may also be applied without denoting the presence of something divine. It may be used as a neutral term for the sphere of everything in our immediate vicinity, something of which we ourselves are part. We are in the immanence. The world we live in is the immanence, not only understood as the materiality, but as everything, also everything intangible in culture, that represents the world around us. This is consistent with the literal meaning of the Latin term in manere, which the word immanence comes from and which means “to remain in.” Similarly, the word transcendence may be employed without being a synonym for the transcendent, whether the latter is understood as something divine or not. Instead, the concept of transcendence may be a concept of experience, i.e. transcendence regarded as identical to experience of transcendence. Instead of being the concept of a “something,” the concept of transcendence thus denotes movement. This movement does not lead into the transcendent understood as a world beyond the immanence. The movement is rather a “movement on the spot” – a movement in the immanence, a disturbance of its opacity. This movement has no subject in the sense of a controlling agent. Behind the movement that the experience of transcendence forms there is neither a particular transcendent god whose will penetrates the immanence, nor a human ego exceeding the immanence. Experience is, however, a fact and it happens in the immanence – in the sphere of that which is in our immediate vicinity. Experience is essentially for us as it happens, that is: it happens in the immanence that subjectivity constitutes. When we think of the words transcendence and immanence as an expression of two conflicting versions of the divine (i.e. the divine understood as absolutely distant and inaccessible to human beings, and the divine understood as present everywhere and immediately accessible to everyone), the concept of immanent transcendence probably appears to be meaningless. However, this concept is indeed very meaningful if we do something else, i.e. if we let it refer to a specific experience, and if this experience is an event that may happen to anyone: it happens whenever it feels as if the world suddenly opens up and lets intensified meaning come forward. In other words, the notion of immanent transcendence makes good sense to a phenomenological account of what may happen to us as human beings. What today is called aesthetic experience is one of several possible interpretations of experiencing transcendence. In antiquity and the middle

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ages, the event formed by this experience of transcendence was interpreted, not least, as an experience of beauty. The epistemic value of the experience was expected to rely on the fact that it gave an insight into things it was possible to say something specific about, i.e. the beautiful regarded as something objective (a transcendent idea; the quality of an object). However, in the philosophical aesthetics and hermeneutic phenomenology of our time it is the experience itself that is considered to be beautiful. Furthermore, even if it is an experience of transcendence, when the experience is interpreted in the particularly modern way formulated by Benjamin, for instance, it does not have anything transcendent as its object. Nevertheless, the experience is still of a transcending character: it is larger than empirical experience. But instead of leaving what is usually considered to be the realm of experience, the experience transcends to another dimension of this very realm. In the case of such an experience of immanent transcendence, the transcending character of the experience is identical to the fact that it opens up the world without leaving it, and to the fact, as well, that this opening up lets everything appear in a light different from what we are used to seeing. The experience of immanent transcendence is not an experience of anything transcendent, and it does not open up to something that can be rationally explained or understood by reason. It simply opens up – thereby transforming everything there is.

Expanded thinking Not only in experiences of immanent transcendence – Benjamin’s higher experience, for example – does transcendence happen without anyone abandoning the immanence. In some cases this is also applicable to aesthetic experiences: not to the interpretations of such experiences formulated by traditional metaphysics, but to modern interpretations such as Baumgarten’s notion of sensitive cognition and Kant’s notion of the experience of beauty. To explain this commonality between philosophical aesthetics and metaphysics of experience, it is relevant to turn to Kant’s reflections on “the expanded way of thinking.” In the Critique of Judgment Kant differentiates between different ways of thinking, one of which is appertained to the aesthetic judgment and characterized by being expanded, i.e. marked by empathy.29 It adheres to the principle of being able to identify oneself with others and to take many views into consideration, without being subjected to any one of these. By thinking in an expanded way it is possible to elevate oneself above particular, singular interests and reconsider the common weal. According to Kant, this

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expanded way of thinking is a prerequisite for effectualizing the principle of reason: without aesthetic judgment it would not be possible to act in a moral way. Kant draws this moral consequence only, but the expanded way of thinking may be considered to be a prerequisite for cognition of a truly well-informed character as well, and, thus, for philosophical thinking. As Ernst Cassirer has put it, philosophical thinking aims at the cognition of unity in diversity.30 This does not mean that philosophical thinking will obliterate all the empirical differences to replace them with a single, common denominator. Philosophical thinking does not aspire to simplification, but, on the contrary, to finding something that unites. When philosophical thinking is truly philosophical it aims at a harmony between items that are different from one another – and not similar to one another. However, as modern human beings controlled by intellectualism we usually think in a non-philosophical way. We are liable to view unity and variety as contrasts: often we end up thinking “either-or” instead of “bothand.” Due to the expanded way of thinking, aesthetic judgment may help us to reflect in a less rigid, i.e. a less theoretical, but more philosophical way. Then, in our thoughts, we may be in several places at the same time, thinking what is not, otherwise, to be reflected upon, for instance that immanence and transcendence are essentially interrelated. Thinking in this aesthetic way, we come closer to an understanding of the human beings we are than we do when we cling to the dualistic way of thinking which is so widespread. As pointed out by hermeneutic phenomenology, the simultaneousness of immanence and transcendence is in a sense far more the rule than an exception, because we are both intellectual and corporeal creatures, at one and the same time. In our thoughts we are constantly transcending many things – ourselves, the given, the here and now. According to widespread prejudices, thinking thereby leaves the material, the immanence, the actual behind. But this is a misunderstanding. We only do so in the case of the conceptual cognition produced by the intellect. Or to be more precise, we only do so in this cognition’s traditional rationalistic way of understanding itself, juxtaposing itself to immanent materiality, e.g. the body and its physical senses. This rationalistic way of thinking is still dominant, and according to it, transcendence and immanence are necessarily mutually antagonistic. However, it was this way of thinking that philosophical aesthetics was introduced to criticize. Furthermore, it is also this rationalistic way of thinking we do in fact overcome whenever we think in the expanded way appertained to judgment. We overcome the juxtaposition when we do not rely on rationality or sense perception only, but include feelings, sensations, and presentiments as well. Philosophical aesthetics understands

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man as a transcending as well as an embodied creature, because man is essentially situated as well as being self-transcending. Transcendence is happening all the time, since we cannot help thinking, and in particular we feel a strong need to reflect on our impressions and experiences. However, this transcendence does not make us abandon immanence, or it only does so when we practice and understand our thinking in a rationalistic way. This is not to say that thinking in general and experience of immanent transcendence as such are identical. Instead, the experience of immanent transcendence tells us something crucial about man as an embodied and transcending creature. Furthermore, this experience does not only tell us what sensitive cognition or aesthetic experience tells us as well, namely that man is both. The experience of immanent transcendence also tells us how human beings living nowadays might interpret the simultaneity experienced and the surplus of meaning it allows for. Being able to transcend in our thoughts is universal to man as such. Experience of immanent transcendence is what this ability for transcendence turns into when it feels like there is no “frame” available for anyone trying to get a hold on what is happening to him in the transcendence.

Notes 1

Most of the philosophical positions referred to in this chapter are of a German origin. In English the German word Erkenntnis may be translated in many ways, using not only the word cognition, but also words such as recognition, comprehension, acknowledgment, understanding, and knowledge. However, in order not to confuse what in German is called Erkenntnis, Verstehen, and Wissen, respectively, I primarily use the word cognition when referring to Erkenntnis. In a few specific cases I do, however, deviate from this rule. 2 Joyce, J. 2014. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Project Gutenberg Online. Accessed September 9 2014. And: Benjamin, W. 2001-2003. “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy.” In Selected Writings Volume 1-4, Vol. 1. Edited by M.W. Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press. 3 The German term Verstand is usually translated as understanding, but this is problematic. Using this translation we jeopardize the possibility of distinguishing between what in German is denoted by the verb Verstehen and the noun Verstand, respectively. This makes it very difficult, as well, to grasp the difference between what is meant by Verstehen in e.g. a Kantian and a Heideggerian context. Therefore, I prefer to translate Verstand as rationality or rational understanding. However, for the sake of readability I also use the word intellect, not least when referring to the conglomerate of Verstand and Vernunft (understanding and reason). From this also follows that I use the word intellectual as a synonym for rational (or in the terminology of Baumgarten: as a synonym for logical).

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Baumgarten, A.G. 1954. Reflections on Poetry: Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Translated and edited by K. Aschenbrenner and W.B. Holther. Berkeley: University of California Press. 5 Baumgarten, A.G. 2007. Ästhetik 1-2. Translated and edited by D. Mirbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. 6 In a more modern idiom, logical cognitions are conceptual cognitions and sensitive cognitions are aesthetic experiences (i.e. experiences of beauty). 7 Baumgarten’s contemporaries misinterpreted this, believing that his aesthetics was about the completely sensitive cognition, even regarded as a completely sensual cognition – a conception that is still prevalent. However, as Baumgarten stressed in a foreword to the third edition of his Metaphysics, his aesthetics was actually about the perfect sensitive cognition. It was about improving our sensitive cognitions, cultivating our ability to think beautifully. See Baumgarten, A.G. 1998. Vorreden zur Metaphysik. Translated and edited by U. Niggli. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 53-55. 8 The innate natural aesthetics also includes an innate aesthetic temperament. Furthermore, being a successful aesthetician requires not only natural aesthetics, but also aesthetic exercise, aesthetic education, etc. 9 Baumgarten, A.G. 2014. Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials. Translated and edited by C.D. Fugate and J. Hymers. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 10 Baumgarten, Ästhetik § 614. Concerning the aesthetic light in general, see §§ 614-630. 11 Although Baumgarten wanted to expand rationalist epistemology, he hardly had any wish to leave the dualist philosophy of mind behind. However, thanks to his way of understanding sensitive cognition, his aesthetics did indeed hold the potential for such a move. 12 Steffen W. Gross has also noticed Baumgarten’s anticipation of the contemporary understanding of the aesthetic experience as an event. See S.W. Gross. 2001. Felix Aestheticus: Die Ästhetik als Lehre vom Menschen. Zum 250. Jahrestag des Erscheinens von Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens “Aesthetica.” Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 132. 13 As for Gadamer’s criticism of the aesthetic consciousness, see Gadamer, H.-G. 2013. Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 81-91. Heidegger’s aversion to aesthetics is evident in several of his texts, e.g. Heidegger, M. 1991. Nietzsche: Volumes I and II. Translated and edited by D.F. Krell. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. See in particular pages 77-91 in the first volume. 14 In Nietzsche, Heidegger finds the origin of the conceptual pair matter-form (hyle-morphe, materia-forma) in Plato’s idealistic conception of beings, which also contains the seed for the distinction between interior and exterior. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1, 80. 15 After the time of Baumgarten and Kant, both scientism and subjectivism showed themselves in the psychological aesthetics of the late 19th century, since this aesthetics took the shape of a modern science about emotionality regarded as the

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actual feelings of empirical individuals. Perhaps Heidegger’s aversion to aesthetics was due, primarily, to the mixture of scientism and subjectivism that he observed in his contemporaries, but it was the philosophical aesthetics of the 18th century his criticism was aiming at. 16 Heidegger, M. 1978. “What Is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964). Edited by D.F. Krell. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 102. 17 Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 102. 18 Heidegger, M. 2013. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated and edited by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 50. 19 Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh, translation revised by D.J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 134. 20 Jørgensen, D. 2014. Den skønne tænkning: Veje til erfaringsmetafysik. Religionsfilosofisk udmøntet (Beautiful Thinking: Pathways to Metaphysics of Experience. Religio-philosophically Implemented). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. See in particular “Baumgartens æstetik” (Baumgarten’s Aesthetics) and “Heidegger’s fænomenologi” (Heidegger’s Phenomenology), Den skønne tænkning, 83-158 and 275-357. 21 One example is O’Grady, P. 2002. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and Philosophy. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 22 See, e.g., Macdonald, F. 1991. From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Originally published in 1912. 23 Aristotle. 1984. Metaphysics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2, Bollingen Series LXXI/2. Edited by J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press: Metaphysica 983b20. 24 Aristotle. “On the Soul.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1: De anima 411a9-10. 25 Benjamin, “Experience” and “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1 and 4. My presentation of Benjamin’s thought is based on my book Den skønne tænkning. See in particular “Benjamins metafysik” (Benjamin’s Metaphysics), Den skønne tænkning, 177-255. 26 Kant, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer and A.W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 27 As for the aura, see Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” and “Art in a Technological Age, 1936” plus “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” Selected Writings, Vol. 2/Part2 and Vol. 3. Concerning Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination, see “Surrealism,” Selected Writings, Vol. 2/Part 1. 28 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1. 29 Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, § 40.

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Cassirer, E. 1974. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 222-223.

CHAPTER TWO BEING AS DIAGONAL AND THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUTH: A READING OF PLATO’S THEAETETUS GAETANO CHIURAZZI

From the Sophist to the Theaetetus As is well known, in the Wintersemester 1924-25 Heidegger gave a course of lectures on Plato’s Sophist. The importance of this course for the elaboration of his own philosophical perspective, which later flowed into Being and Time, is beyond dispute, as the exergue of the book clearly attests. In this exergue Heidegger quotes the passage regarding the confusion that befell the Greeks after the first attempts to define Being,1 a prelude to the subsequent presentation of the gigantomachìa perí tes ousías between the “sons of earth” and the “friends of forms.” The ontological question that the Sophist deals with represents an attempt at solving the problem Plato already posed in the Theaetetus, the dialogue which immediately precedes it and to which the Sophist explicitly refers in its first lines. It is thus interesting to note – as if this were to signal a regression to a question prior to fundamental ontology – that during the Wintersemester 1931-32, a few years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger lectured specifically on the Theaetetus, which is now book 34 of the Gesamtausgabe (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet). In the first part of this course, Heidegger deals with the Platonic myth of the cave presented in Book VII of the Republic; in the second part, he takes on the section of the Theaetetus that deals with the second thesis about knowledge. His commentary starts at the point where, after demonstrating the untenability of the thesis “knowledge is sensation (aísthesis),” a different definition is required – a turning point to which Heidegger rightly attributes a peculiar relevance.2 In my opinion, this passage of the Theaetetus includes in nuce a set of

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questions whose development offers a glance at the roots of Heideggerian ontology and philosophical hermeneutics in general. This development also allows us to understand the passage’s profound theoretical ground, which I will take up under the name of the “diagonal.” These questions, however implicit, are in my opinion central in the Theaetetus, a dialogue dedicated to the great mathematician who, according to the tradition, produced the theory of incommensurable magnitudes – which are symbolized by the diagonal. The route I will follow to reach this set of problems is articulated in four points: a) surplus; b) time; c) dynamis; and d) difference.

Beyond sensation: the surplus of dianoia and of understanding A first point which emerges inside the Theaetetus and which Heidegger stresses in his commentary is that of surplus or excess. It arises from the question about how it is possible, on the basis of mere sensations, to reach a unitary representation of an object by unifying sounds and colours. Of each of them we say in any case that they are: it is, Socrates says, what they have in common, the fact of being. As the first koinón, Being is not however given by sensation, which provides only a specific quality and furthermore is confined to a peculiar sense organ: “What is common to them both cannot be apprehended either through hearing or through sight”;3 it is rather “thought” (dianoê)4 that is, grasped through a mediator faculty – diánoia. This issue is a classic problem: it is the problem of synthesis and of its excedent character as compared to mere sensation. Even if different elements were not qualitatively unified in a clear representation of the object, a certain synthesis is necessarily involved in their multiplicity as entities, in the fact, namely, that they could be seen and considered as “a multiplicity” of beings: Only because the one being and the other being are perceived is it possible to count them. The one and the other are not already as such two; we must first add ‘and’ as a ‘plus.’ Every plus is an and, but not every and is a plus. A plurality is still not something countable as such, it is not yet so-and-somany. Both must first be given as beings, one and the other, and then we can take them as two, although we need not do so.5

The “surplus” which is given with sensations, and which above all allows us to grasp something as “being,” showing that “Being” is their common element (koinón)6, is a kind of “excess,” the apprehension of which is not

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possible through sensation, but requires a different faculty, namely, diánoia. Its function then seems similar to that of understanding. By taking the sentence “this chair is yellow and padded” as an example, Heidegger asks in Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffes: In short, is the perceptual assertion which gives expression to perception demonstrable perceptually? […] Are the ‘this,’ the ‘is,’ the ‘and’ perceptually demonstrable in the subject matter? I can see the chair, its being-upholstered and its being-yellow but I shall never in all eternity see the ‘this,’ ‘is,’ ‘and’ as I see the chair. There is in the full perceptual assertion a surplus of intentions whose demonstration cannot be borne by the simple perception of the subject matter.7

In the sentence “the chair is yellow and upholstered” there is a surplus of sense, constituted by those syncategorematic elements as the “is” and the “and,” of which there is not, and will never be, any sensation. As in Plato’s case, the sense of the “is,” of the copula, is not perceptible, but requires a different power that only diánoia or understanding can ensure. This is a crucial point, which marks the passage from phenomenology to philosophical hermeneutics, through the critique of the primacy of sensation and the thematization of a different mode of access to Being, that of understanding. The introduction of diánoia involves the overcoming of the sensistic anthropology of Protagoreanism, which is marked by the introduction of the concept of mind (psyché): the senses are not the subject of knowledge (that which knows), but only instruments (órgana) of knowledge (that through which – diá – we know).8 The mind is the faculty in charge of grasping the excess, which sensation is not able to grasp and which appears as a certain kind of synthesis: “knowledge does not reside in the impressions (pathémasin), but in our ability to connect them” (syllogismô)9. What Plato is here theorizing could be expressed in Kantian terms as the “condition of the possibility of experience.” The way he comes to postulate the mind can in fact be seen as a proper “transcendental deduction” ante litteram: this is how Myles Burnyeat has understood it, speaking of “the first unambiguous statement in the history of philosophy of the difficult but undoubtedly important idea of the unity of consciousness.”10

Beyond the discontinuity of sensation: time and memory This unity of consciousness – the mind – is the condition of the possibility of temporal continuity, which is unknown to sensation. The various objections Socrates raises against the first thesis on knowledge (knowledge

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is sensation, aisthesis11), concern, in fact, the difficulty of forming a continuum of the real from the discontinuous representations the senses provide of it,12 that is, of synthetizing the sensible data, the multiple and different aisthetá. Knowledge is such even if a sensation is no longer actual: it is knowledge both in reference to the past and in reference to the future (the doctor is able to foretell the effect of a certain medication, and for this he is recognized as wise).13 This possibility thus implies a temporality in which past, present, and future are brought together, or rather, in which past, present, and future are possible as such. The temporality of knowledge is necessarily the temporality of the continuum the synthesis makes possible. The two similes of mind which are proposed shortly thereafter – the wax tablet and the aviary – aim at revealing the fundamental relation between mind and memory, that is, the fundamental temporal structure of the mind. Without the possibility to retain, or without the capability of actualizing a possessed knowledge, there would be no actual knowledge. Especially the latter simile, that of the aviary, introduces a distinction which, under the appearance of an epistemological problem, involves a differentiation which is ontologically not insignificant: the difference between “having” and “possessing” allows one to say that it is rightly possible to possess knowledge without having it in an actual form, as in the case of someone who “has bought a coat and owns it, but is not wearing it”: in this case “we should say he possesses it without having it about him” (Theaet. 197b). This distinction refers of course to the general Platonic doctrine of knowledge as anamnesis: but more simply, it shows that knowledge requires memory, the ability to produce a temporal continuum beyond the punctuality of sensation. The continuum involves the introduction of an analogical (geometrical) principle instead of a digital (arithmetical) principle, which rules Parmenidean logic and is briefly resumed at the beginning of the discussion about the second thesis. Here Socrates proposes to move forward by taking into consideration only the sharp distinction according to which either we know or do not know, either something is or is not (all or nothing principle): And, in each and all cases, is it possible for us either to know a thing or not to know it? I leave out of account for the moment becoming acquainted with things and forgetting, considered as falling between the two (metaxú). Our argument is not concerned with them just now.14

This “guiding principle,” as Heidegger calls it,15 leads to a series of paradoxical consequences according to which the difference between true

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and false opinion appears as the mere “substitution” of one knowledge with another. These consequences follow a digital logic that leads one to conceive of time as a succession of unrelated instants that therefore exclude becoming, that is, the passage from one state to another. Such is also the case with learning, an intermediate state between not-knowing and knowing. The metaphors of the wax tablet and of the aviary aim at overcoming this still Parmenidean and Pythagorean digital logic through the elaboration of a new ontology, which takes time into consideration: the former by thematizing the role of memory, the latter by thematizing the modal distinction between possessing (kektêsthai) and having (échein, Theaet. 198d), which implicitly involves the ontological distinction between possibility and actuality.16

Beyond the actuality of sensation: being as dynamis As Plato writes, using again the simile of the aviary, one who possesses wild birds and keeps them in an enclosure of one’s own has acquired the power (dynamis) to take and to have them whenever one likes.17 The “surplus” available to the mind, in contrast to sensation, thus appears more and more as a peculiar ability, or better, precisely as the “possibility of,” as a dynamis: this is the ontological gain, a prelude to the definition of Being itself as dynamis, which will be given in the Sophist18 and which allows Parmenideism to be overcome by introducing in it a principle of notactuality, which is at the same time a lack (what is not actual is not) and an excess (even if it is not actual, it can become it). The ability of the mind – the ability to go beyond the datum – is constitutive of its temporal structure. In fact, this dynamis is not only the possibility to actualize what is not actual, but in general the ability to relate what is actual with what is not so. In the passage where he speaks about the ability of relating different things and detecting their reciprocal relations, Plato says: “Those again seem to me, above all, to be things whose being is considered, one in comparison with another (analogízetai), by the mind, when it reflects within itself upon the past and the present with an eye to the future.”19 Heidegger comments on this passage, drawing attention to the fact that Plato attributes to the mind the ability to relate the various modes of time, but above all to relate the past and the present with the future.20 This peculiarity indicates the mind’s character as one which is fundamentally open to the future, and thus dynamic and potential – its aiming towards something that is not yet: the mind is in fact what tends (eporégetai) towards Being, the nature of which is essentially different from the past and from the present, something essentially not-present (the

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past being something which has just been present). In this definition of the mind Heidegger therefore sees a “first shining of the temporal reference of Being,” so that “the relation to Being is intrinsically a reckoning with time.”21 To say that Being is time is actually the same as saying that Being is possibility. This primacy of possibility is emphasized in Heidegger’s conception of time by the primacy of the future, in the same way Plato describes the peculiar tendency of mind towards Being, as that which is not present but towards which it constantly goes. What makes Being “excedent” is then primarily its “non actuality,” its openness to the future. The dynamis installs a tension in the mind, which leads it by going beyond what is given: but such an excess cannot be conceived as a mere addition to the datum; it is rather what makes it possible that something can be given and then be. Heidegger writes: Thus, in the order of the inquiry, we can say that this excess is an addition (Zugabe) to what is sensed. However, what we subsequently find here is in its nature and essence not ‘more’ in the sense of addition, but on the contrary it is the pregiven (Vorgabe) (however not apprehended and interrogated as such).22

What is a priori, then, is not an in-itself-fulfilled reality, but something unfulfilled, a dynamis. Only thanks to this Vorgabe is the anticipatory ability which characterizes knowledge possible: although the sensation still remains in actual vision, knowledge should be able to fore-see, to anticipate what is not yet, what is not seen and has not been seen.23

The ontological difference, or being as diagonal At this point we can ask: why assume these issues under the title of the “diagonal”? The answer can be articulated as follows: a) because the diagonal represents an excess as to the system of whole numbers, a principle of what Plato calls “the indefinite Dyad,” that is, of the more and less; b) because its irrationality is a condition of the continuous, and thus of time and of movement; c) because it is a dynamis, this being the word Theaetetus used for incommensurable magnitudes, as it results from the famous mathematical excursus in the initial pages of the Theaetetus;24 d) because a diagonal is a sign of an irreducible difference, which we can rightly define as “ontological,” as it opens up a new dimension beyond that of whole positive numbers. The concept of “ontological difference” appears for the first time in The Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie:25 it states the impossibility of understanding Being on the basis of beings, just as it is impossible to

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commensurate the diagonal to the side of the square. Nevertheless, Being constitutes a concept that stretches across the whole of beings, since it is not possible to understand beings without understanding Being. This means that Being can only be understood as different from beings. The ontological difference can then be defined analytically through two characteristics that it has in common with the diagonal: 1) obliquity, which indicates the transversality of Being across all beings and the fact that it can be grasped only in an indirect way through comprehension; and 2) difference, as it means that Being is not a being, such that the meaning of Being rests entirely in this negation. Understanding, which is made possible by the ontological difference, is then a process of the diagonalization of Being. I use the word “diagonalization” in its mathematical meaning, more precisely in the meaning of Georg Cantor’s demonstration of the uncountability of the real numbers – that is, of the set ƒ. This demonstration proceeds per absurdum. Let’s suppose, in fact, that it is possible to give a list of real numbers, each of which is constituted by an infinite sequence of decimal places. We can then put them in correspondence with the natural numbers, as in the following example: r1 = 0. 3 5 1 7 2 1 0 … r2 = 0. 9 4 2 2 1 2 4 … r3 = 0. 6 4 9 1 0 6 5… r4 = 0. 4 3 6 6 0 7 9 … r5 = 0. 7 4 0 2 9 2 6 … r6 = 0. 1 9 5 7 6 3 3 … r7 = 0. 9 0 7 5 2 8 5 … … Let’s now consider the number rN, formed by taking the first figure of the first number, the second figure of the second number, the third of the third, etc., so as to trace a diagonal in the aforesaid list (highlighted in bold). Let’s now transform the number rN into the number rN+, obtained by increasing every one of its figures by 1 (so that, if it is equal to 1, it becomes 2, etc.; the figure 9 becomes 0); this new number is different from every given number in the list, as it differs from the first because of its first figure, from the second because of its second figure, from the third because of its third figure, etc.; it then does not belong to the starting set, which was supposedly countable. It reveals the falsehood of such a hypothesis, and shows that the set ƒ is not countable. The process of understanding seems to me similar to this process of

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diagonalization: the understanding grasps the Being of beings, that is, a concept (or an idea) which reaches across all beings that fall under the concept, but that at the same time is different from each and every one of them. We can also think that this concept could be “added” to the series of beings as another being, according to a reifying procedure typical of every metaphysical realism, which even considers concepts as “entities” that exist with the same rights as physical beings; but, this procedure engenders only a reiteration of the process of diagonalization, since a new diagonal (a new concept) can be produced from the new list. At the height of this hierarchy, so to say, Being remains, which is not just a concept because it can no longer be “entified,” but because it remains structurally “diagonal” – which means also ideal – as to every possible list.

Beyond the enumeration: the measure as middle term That listing – a mere catalogical ontology, the mere enumeration of entities – is inadequate for the construction of a complete ontology appears in the very first pages of the Theaetetus, when Theaetetus answers the question “what is knowledge?” by giving a list of sciences, such as geometry, the art of shoe-making, carpentry and that of other workmen.26 To this answer Socrates objects that listing is not defining, i.e. counting is not defining: But the question you were asked, Theaetetus, was not, what are the objects of knowledge, nor yet how many sorts of knowledge there are. We did not want to count (arithmêsai) them, but to find out what the thing itself – knowledge – is.27

Defining in fact means the reduction to a unique idea; but this idea – which in many places is even presented as a common element (koinón) – should not be understood as a common factor, but rather as a “middle term” (mésos). This difference emerges in the Platonic dialogues that follow the Theaetetus, and specifically in the Statesman, as a difference between two kinds of metretic:28 the inferior metretic (arithmetic) and the superior metretic (geometry).29 The former searches for the common measure (métron), while the latter for the middle term (métrion), the intermediate – or diagonal – term between two or more elements, which then participates in both. Socrates gives an example of this way of understanding the concept when he asks “what is clay?”: an answer could be that the clay is that of the potters, that of the ovenmakers, that of the brick-makers, etc.30 But this answer is still a mere enumeration, a list of “sciences,” which do not

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explains what science is. But, Socrates objects, it is not possible to give any list of a notion (it is not possible to identify anything), if first of all we do not understand (suniénai) the name of the thing, without knowing in advance, namely, what is the matter (ibid.). Understanding means possessing an idea, which has an ontological status quite different from the beings of which it is an idea. The example of the clay shows it clearly: Socrates comes to say that a very simple answer to the question “what is clay?” could have been that “clay is earth mixed with moisture, never mind whose clay it may be,”31 without reference, namely, to whomever uses it (the potter, the ovenmaker, and so on). The definition of clay – an “obvious common thing”32 – is thus not only an example of definition, but is the example which says what the definition in general is: a mixture of two (or more) heterogeneous elements, which forms something completely different from them. In the Sophist the mixture (meíxis) will be recognized as the condition of every predication, that is, of every judgement. The concept – or the idea – is then something similar to clay: the result of a mixture, or of a diagonal procedure which mixes various elements, just like a mediation between them, and which produces something new quite irreducible to them, so that it can not be understood by simply resolving it in its constitutive elements. The art of maieutic is charged with this ability. It has normally been understood as an “analytic” art through which one attended women in childbirth and then cut the umbilical cord between mother and child in order to separate them. It has perhaps not been highlighted enough that the art of the midwife is also a “synthetic” art: the midwives, Socrates says, “are the cleverest match-makers, having an unerring skill in selecting a pair whose marriage will produce the best children,” an ability of which they “pride themselves […] more than on cutting the umbilical cord.”33 The maieutic is clearly a genetic art that helps to conceive a new being: the logos – the discourse or the concept (we must pay attention to the fact that the term “concept” refers undoubtedly to the generative function, since a concept is something which is “conceived” and results from the interaction of two members) – is the outcome of this maieutic art: the copula (Being) is the expression of this synthetic operation. The formation of a concept therefore requires a different ability, which is neither that of sensation, nor that of counting (arithmésthai), as they both share the same digital logic; it is instead a matter of an analogic, synthetic and comparative ability. As we saw, this ability is peculiar to the mind, which grasps the identities and the differences, setting itself as a mediator and conjunctive term between them. Diánoia is therefore an

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ability which, like the diagonal (diámetros), “goes across” beings by joining opposite angles. For these reasons, diánoia – and with it the diagonal – requires the overcoming of the Protagorean anthropology, which reduces the human being to sensation. Plato achieves this overcoming through the concept of mind; but, such a new anthropology can be found already in the famous excursus about the two modes of life,34 that of the rhetor and that of the philosopher. This excursus has been considered by the critics, above all of analytic formation, as a deviation from the main epistemological problem, as an “abortive discussion” or a “strange intrusion,”35 or even as a digression completely “irrelevant to the topic of the dialogue,” as an “edifying relief from argument,”36 a mere “footnote or appendix.”37 As a matter of fact, the digression about the two alternative bioi, which occupy the central part of the whole dialogue, is in my opinion fundamental to the subsequent development of the argumentation, and not because through it, as Burnyeat writes, “we may be jolted into reflecting for a moment that the question ‘what is knowledge?’ is important because there are certain things it is important to know,”38 but because it outlines a completely different anthropology from the Protagorean one. According to Plato’s interpretation of the homo mensura, a human being is defined only by sensation, and can then be compared to the pig, the baboon, or even to the tadpole; thus, by identifying knowledge and sensation, of which all animals are gifted, Protagoras has really demonstrated that, “while we were admiring him for a wisdom (eis phrónesin) more than mortal, he was in fact no wiser than a tadpole, to say nothing of any other human being.”39 The philosophical bíos shows that a different way of being human is possible, characterized by the ability to transcend the immediacy of sensation and to live in a temporal continuum, that of the scholé, which is not conditioned by the impelling punctuality40 and definiteness of the rhetor’s life that is “urged by the water running in the clepsydra” and by the schedule of the points to which he must confine himself. This heterodetermination of the rethor’s life recalls the life of the slave in the cave (the rhetor, Socrates says, “is a slave disputing about a fellowslave”41), forced to see only in front of himself, tied to the immediacy of sensation and unable to move himself at will in the space where he lives. The philosophical life is instead a life that “has time,” that constitutes itself as continuity by transcending the immediacy of the hic et nunc; thought, which characterizes the philosopher’s life, “takes wing, as Pindar says, ‘beyond the sky, beneath the earth’, searching the heavens and measuring the plains, everywhere seeking the true nature of everything as

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a whole, never sinking to what lies close at hand.”42 The philosophical life therefore prefigures a new ability, unknown to sensation: that of thought, of diánoia, thanks to which the philosopher is able to go beyond the superficial level – the depthless level of shadows – of sensation, and to move freely from the depths of the earth to the sky, that is, to ascend to a new dimension. This “ethical” excursus, then, is not at all a deviation from the gnoseological path of the dialogue: it constitutes the central part of it and the turning point, showing that a different, nonsensistic model of human being is possible. But at the same time it constitutes the overcoming of the conception of man as the measure: the mind, in fact, does not primarily measure the real, but mediates between beings; like the diagonal, it crosses them and remains irreducible to them. Its incommensurability is the sign of its exceeding the realm of sensation to which the homo mensura is confined.43

Notes 1

Plato, Soph., 244a-b. The Thaetetus and the Sophist are quoted from F.M. Cornford, 1967. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato, translated with a running commentary, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 2 Plato, Theaet., 185a ff. 3 Ibid. 185b. 4 Ibid. 185a. 5 Heidegger, Martin, 2002. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. Trans. T. Sadler. New York: Continuum Press,134. (“Also erst aufgrund davon, daȕ das eine Seiende und das andere Seiende wahrgenommen ist, können wir sie zählen. Das Eine und das Andere sind nicht schon als solche zwei; hinzu müssen wir erst das „und“ nehmen, als „plus“. Jedes Plus ist ein Und, aber nicht jedes Und schon ein Plus ist. Ein Mannigfaltiges als Mannigfaltiges ist noch kein Gezähltes, kein So-und-so-viel- Erst müssen beide seiend gegeben sein, ein und anderes, und dann können wir, müssen aber nicht, diese als zwei nehmen.” Heidegger, Martin, 1988. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hölengleichnis und “Theätet”. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 184-185). 6 Plato, Theaet., 185b. 7 Heidegger, Martin, 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Trans. T. Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 57-58 (“Die Frage ist: Ist die Wahrnehmungsaussage, die der Wahrnehmung Ausdruck gibt, wahrnehmungsmäȕig ausweisbar? […] Den Stuhl, das Gepolstertsein und das Gelbsein kann ich sehen, aber das „dieses“, „ist“, „und“ werde ich in alle Ewigkeit nie sehen, so wie ich den Stuhl sehe. In der vollen Wahrnehmungsaussage liegt ein Überschuȕ an Intentionen, deren Ausweisung durch die schlichte Sachwahrnehmung nicht bestritten werden kann” Heidegger Martin, 1979. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffes, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 77

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Plato, Theaet., 184c ff. Ibid., 186d, trans. modified. 10 Burnyeat Myles, 1990. The Theaetetus of Plato, with a translation of Plato’s Theaetetus of M.J. Levett, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 58. 11 Plato, Theaet., 151e. Unlike the English translation (F.M. Cornford, 1967), I prefer to translate aísthesis with “sensation” and not “perception”: this is because perception refers in some way to the consciousness, as Kant clearly points out (see Kant Immanuel, 1911. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in: Kant’s gesammelte Schriften vol. III (B) and IV (A), Berlin-Leipzig: Akademie der Wissenschaften, A225 / B272); but this condition appears in the Theaetetus only with the mind, at the level of dóxa and not of aísthesis. 12 Cf. Ferrari Franco, 2011. Introduzione a Plato, Teeteto, it. trans. by F. Ferrari, Rizzoli, 49. 13 Plato, Theaet.,178 c. 14 Ibid., 188a; cf. also 188c-d. 15 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, 298. 16 Cfr. Hardy, J. 2001. Platons Theorie des Wissens im ‚Theaitet’. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 195) “Zwar bleibt die Unterscheidung auch hier auf einzelne Kenntnisse eingeschränkt, die im Modus der Möglichkeit (im Sinne von Verfürbarkeit) und im Modus der Wirklichkeit (als aktualisierte Kenntnis) in der Seele vorliegen können.” 17 Plato, Theaet., 197c-d. 18 Plato, Soph., 247e. 19 Plato, Theaet., 186a. 20 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hölengleichnis und “Theätet”, 226. 21 Ibid. 22 Heidegger The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus,165166 (“Also in der Ordnung des Untersuchens, im Fortgang zu dem, was noch dazukommt, können wir sagen: dieses Mehr ist eine Zugabe zum Empfundenen. Was wir da nachträglich auch noch finden, ist jedoch der Sache nach und seinem Wesen nach nicht das „Mehr“, die Zugabe, sondern umgekehrt das, was vorgegeben ist: die Vorgabe (aber nicht als solche erkannt oder gar begriffen oder befragt)” Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hölengleichnis und “Theätet”, 231). 23 The ability to go from the delón (what is manifest) to the adelón (what is not manifest) is important for the notion itself of time: it is the ability Cicero does coincide, in his commentary to the Stoic logic, with the inferential capability of passing from the antecedent to the consequent, that is the capability of understanding the signs, since these have the same structure of the inference (if A then B, if the smoke then the fire), which the Stoic called phantasìa metabatiké. On this point and its relation with the hermeneutics cf. Chiurazzi Gaetano, 2010. The Condition of Hermeneutics. The Implicative Structure of Hermeneutics, In 9

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Consequences of Hermeneutics, Fifty Years After Gadamer’s “Truth and Method”, edited by J. Malpas and S. Zabala. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 24 Plato, Theaet., 147d-148c. 25 Heidegger Martin, 1975. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 22-23. 26 Plato, Theaet., 146c-d. 27 Ibid., 146 e. 28 Plato, Pol. 284e . 29 For this terminology cf. Joly Henri 1994, Le renversement platonicien. Logos, épistémè, polis, Paris, Vrin, 268. 30 Plato, Theaet., 147a. 31 Ibid. 147c. 32 Ibid. 147a. 33 Ibid. 149c. 34 Ibid. 172c-177c. 35 Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato, 34. 36 Ryle Gilbert, 1966. Plato’s Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 278. 37 McDowell John, 1973. Plato, Theaetetus, translated with notes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 174. 38 Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato, 36. 39 Plato, Theaetetus, 161c-d. 40 I use this word in a mathematical meaning, as indicating what consists of or is confined to a point in space. 41 Plato, Theaet., 172 e. 42 Plato, Theaet.,173e-174a. 43 This text has been published in Italian, in a rather different version, with the title “L’ontologia dell’incommensurabile: da Heidegger a Platone,” in: Constellations herméneutiques, ed. by R. Dottori, I.M. Fehér, C. Olay, Münster-Berlin-WienZurich: LIT Verlag: 2014. I thank here Lit Verlag for the permission to publish it in English.

PART II. TRUTH AND EXPERIENCE: RESPONDING TO FINITUDE

CHAPTER THREE KANT’S SLUMBER AND HEGEL’S ONTOLOGICAL GESTURE SAŠA HRNJEZ

We could say that entire edifice of the Kantian critical philosophy rests upon two main distinctions. One distinction is between the transcendental and the transcendent, and the other is between these two, on the one hand, and the empirical on the other. In other words, these two distinctions introduce a clear demarcation between the following three fields: firstly, the field of the empirical, i.e. the field of possible experience in the unity of intuitions and concepts; secondly, the field of the transcendent, i.e. the field of impossible experience, or non-experience, consisting of something that remains distant and resides beyond the limits of possible cognition; and thirdly, the field of the transcendental, of the very possibility of possible experience, that is, the subjective ground and the constitutive truth of the entirety of experience regarding the conditions of its possibility.1 The last field – that of transcendentality – is in a certain sense a focal point which draws the line of demarcation between the empirical and the transcendent. An empirical object is knowable and cognizable insofar as it is subjected to the subject’s a priori synthetic activity. As Kant himself writes in the Preface to the Second Edition of Critique of Pure Reason: “[w]e can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.”2 The area of experience is determined by our own subjective conditions which – on the transcendental level – open the possibility of every objective cognition. The objective reality of experience is provided by the fact that the object must be given, that is, the subject of experience must be affected by something outside of him. And here lies another instance of the demarcation line between the empirical and the transcendent: if the object is not given, and the subject’s receptivity is not affected, then all our a priori concepts are deprived of an empirical ground, and we run into the void, wandering in the field of unknowable

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transcendence. In other words, the internal a priori condition of our own “putting into things” must be supplemented by the external condition that this thing has to exist as the effect upon us and our sensibility. The peculiar and epochal Kantian move is in the fact that such givenness is not enough for cognitive experience, since for Kant, experience is always the synthetic configuration of perceived givenness. If experience is always synthesized – and for Kant it is – then we are never able to experience directly the pure manifold of sensations, the pure state of disassembled and fragmented intuitions. And that is the reason why Kant insists that, even on the level of intuitive cognition, there is a synthesis; even the most basic sensuous elements of experience are always part of the whole, composed and synthesized.3 Synthesis is always at work, and at the very moment when we judge some object as given, this given object is already determined by our own subjective operation of synthesis, that is, the empirical object as such is always synthesized, already constituted, and this totality of synthesized material, of the unity between form and matter, Kant calls experience. So the pre-ontological (pre-synthetical) space of something that should be a mere manifold is not possible in the order of experience. It can be valid only as a postulate, a presupposition for synthesis; in the same way as a thing-in-itself might be judged as hypothetical ontological notion with a strategic role to play in establishing the limits of our possible experience. Between these two “hypotheses,” or non-experiential Grenzbegriffe – the pre-synthetical manifold and thing-initself –, Kant prospects the terrain for the legal construction of experiential cognition and scientific knowledge as well. It should be noted that the Kantian division between the a priori and the a posteriori does not set up an absolute opposition between that which is independent of experience (a priori) and that which is knowable only within the experience (a posteriori). Kant’s aim is to show that the a priori and the a posteriori belong to the same process of the constitution of experience. The existence of a priori elements is fundamental to every a posteriori cognition. This means that the inaugural and programmatic Kantian question (How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?) at the same time asks about the possibility of a posteriori knowledge. On the other side, a priori forms of cognition cannot be totally detached from experience; they are by definition independent, but nonetheless cannot be deprived of their relation to the possible experience. Without this relation a priori forms would lose their character as conditions (How can something act as condition and be totally separated from that which it conditions?). And when Kant claims that a priori forms (e.g. time and space) have transcendental ideality and empirical reality, he thinks exactly

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this: a priori forms must stay in relation to the possible experience. The empirical reality of a priori forms is a relational determination and means possible relation to the empirical material. Kant’s novelty in comparison with the previous empiricist tradition can be traced back to these claims about the relational character of empirical reality and objective validity. Although we receive the objective material by means of sensations, the object’s unity does not reside in the external material, but is the result of the subject’s synthetic activity. The same is valid for universality and necessity, which do not originate from experience (which is also a Humean point). But in order to avoid the disavowal of objectively valid knowledge, Kant is brought to ground universality and necessity inside the structure of subjectivity itself. The discovery of the synthetic a priori functions as a guarantee for the truth – in a broader ontological sense of the identity of subject and object – that is to say, with synthetic judgments a priori Kant is able to ground empirical knowledge without suffering the Humean consequences of destroying the objectivity of thought-determinations, as Hegel puts it in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. As many interpreters agree, Hegel’s critique of Kantian critical idealism – a complex critique full of ambiguities, acknowledgments and charges – really begins with his early work Faith and Knowledge. In this work, where Kant is treated together with Jacobi and Fichte, we can grasp a few common qualifications ascribed to these three philosophies. Kant’s philosophy is marked as “[a]n idealism of the finite,”4 the philosophy which remained in the sphere of the finite, since affirming “[t]he absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute.”5 On the other hand, as heir to the Enlightenment, Kant’s philosophy is defined as – and this is also valid for Jacobi and Fichte – nothingness turned into a system.6 This nothingness actually is the name for the negativity of Reason, which discovers its own negativity in the recognition that it is incapable of knowing the supersensible. The positive knowledge that Reason acquires can be only the knowledge of something empirical, while the supersensuous and the eternal remains beyond, and this beyond is pure nothingness, the “[i]nfinite void of knowledge” which “[c]ould only be filled with the subjectivity of longing and divining.”7 Hegel’s conclusion is that Reason which discovers this nothingness of the beyond and “the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute” necessarily seeks refuge in faith. And his more radical and paradoxical conclusion is that the Enlightenment philosophy became once again the servant of faith. But another paradoxical and odd conclusion, which interests us here, concerns

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the empiricist and even skeptical consequences of Kant’s philosophy of subjectivity, which is strictly tied to the question of experience and the transcendental foundation of experience. First of all, Hegel acknowledges that Kant, in common with the empiricism of Locke, “[r]aised the standpoint of the subject”8 to the first and highest place. This raising of subjectivity, which in Hegel’s view turns out to be metaphysics, posits the antithesis between finitude, i.e. concrete experience, and the infinite, i.e. the idealistic character of the subject and its formal structure. Therefore, for Hegel Kant’s metaphysics of subjectivity is the “[c]ompletion and idealization of this empirical psychology”9 (and by empirical psychology here Hegel thinks in the first place of Lockean empiricism). In addition Hegel quotes one passage10 from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to show that Kant’s critical project of knowing the limits of our knowledge and of the foundation of experience on the basis of the critique of the cognitive faculties was already present in Locke. In this respect Kant is somewhat more “acceptable” for Hegel than Locke and his empiricism, being as it is from Hegel’s perspective some kind of “transcendental empiricism.”11 This strong claim must at least sound strange if we take into consideration all that we have said at the beginning concerning the substantial distinction between three fields, and the demarcation line between the transcendental field of non-empirical conditions of cognition and the field of the empirical cognition. In front of this problem we have two possible solutions: either Hegel is making a big mistake by overlooking the significance of Kantian transcendentality or he has in mind something different when he wants to reduce Kant (and not only Kant) to the tradition of empiricism. Moreover, what makes the analysis more complex is that Hegel declares that Kant’s philosophy has the merit of being idealism; and his argument for this is that experience in Kant is not possible without the unity between concepts and intuitions, since intuition by itself is blind and concept by itself is empty.12 Hegel accepts Kant’s definition of experience and furthermore takes it as the main statement of Kant’s critical idealism. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he attributes to Kant the idea of showing that “[t]hought is so to speak concrete in itself,” that is, the thought is synthetic a priori and independent from everything that is external to it. The standpoint of the philosophy of Kant, on the contrary, is in the first place to be found in the fact that thought has through its reasoning got so far as to grasp itself not as contingent but rather as in itself the absolute ultimate … Thought grasped itself as all in all, as absolute in judgment; for it nothing external is authoritative, since all authority can receive validity only through thought.13

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The idealistic character acknowledged by Hegel lies in this “absolute” and concrete thought which is determinant within itself, i.e. synthetic activity. For Hegel, the synthetic judgments a priori represent the connection of the opposites (matter and form, concepts and intuitions), in so far as this connection has its ground in itself. The connection needed for experience is not given in experience, but is grounded in thinking, in self-consciousness. Synthetic judgments a priori are nothing else than a connection of opposites through themselves, or the absolute Notion, i.e. the relations of different determinations such as those of cause and effect, given not through experience but through thought. … Since Kant shows that thought has synthetic judgments a priori which are not derived from perception, he shows that thought is so to speak concrete in itself.14

When Hegel identifies such synthetic activity with “the absolute Notion,”15 he focuses precisely on the idealistic character of synthesis as the moment of truth, of the unity which stems from the unity of self-consciousness. The principle of apperception, of self-consciousness, as the original ground of categories (the universal thought-determinations which determine the sensible manifold), brings unity into the empirical material of experience. It means that the unity between concepts and intuitions is by itself the work of thought, of spontaneity. What Hegel wants to accentuate is the original synthetic unity of apperception as the principle of every unity of what is different in the manifold. This idea of an apperceptive self-consciousness, which is originally synthetic, is exactly what Hegel identifies as speculative, and is the key principle which makes Kant’s philosophy genuinely idealistic.16 So, if Hegel recognizes the idealistic essence of Kant’s philosophy, based as it is on the principle of subjectivity, what is then empiricist in Kant? The problem lies in the fact that the Kantian identity between concepts and intuitions as constitutive for experience is an example of “finite identity,” the external or formal unity of somethings that are totally antithetical and irreconcilable. As we said, Kant sets out from the assumption of an absolute antithesis between subject and object, between thought and being, where one term is the negation of the other. This supposition, which we can define as essentially Cartesian, is common to the empiricism of both Locke and Hume as it is to Kant. However, if this is the reason why Kant’s idealism is to be identified as empiricist, how are we to square it with the supposedly unique nature of Kant’s idealism which Hegel openly wants us to recognize? In order to understand this, and to see that Hegel’s objections to Kant in Faith and Knowledge are not some confusion or an error of a young

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head, we must pass to Hegel’s Encyclopedia, particularly taking into consideration the section known as “Three Positions of Thought with Respect to Objectivity” (Drei Stellungen des Gedankens zur Objektivität”). The methodological decision to deal with Kant’s critical philosophy together with empiricism in the same section and within the common framework of the “Second Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity,” is already an indication of Hegel’s intention to show the common background of empiricism and Kantianism, or in other words, to present, as his early writing Faith and Knowledge describes, Kantianism as the idealization of empirical psychology, accusing Kant of being on the same line as Locke. It will suffice to quote from the eloquent first paragraph dedicated to Critical philosophy: Critical Philosophy has in common with Empiricism that it accepts experience as the only basis for our cognitions; but it will not let them count as truths, but only as cognitions of appearances.17

In this claim, which condenses many points of Hegel’s critique, we have to distinguish two moments of argumentation: the first moment concerns the legitimate source of cognitions, which means for Kant only the empirical stemming from intuitions synthesized by our a priori thoughtforms; the second moment concerns the character of these cognitions, which for him cannot be considered to be valid as truth. Thus, what we have here is the separation of experience from truth. It seems as if Hegel wants to say that experience qua the unity of intuitions and concepts cannot provide us with real access to the truth of things, since empirically based cognitions are only the cognitions of appearances. If Hegel thinks that Kantian experience is somehow untrue experience since it is detached from the real truth of things, it would mean that Hegel gets the Kantian difference between appearances and thing-in-itself wrong, thinking that true reality is that of things-in-themselves. Even elsewhere we can find indications that seem to support the idea that Hegel has simply misunderstood Kant. In the Difference essay Hegel claims that Kant’s perspective is not supposed to affirm anything concerning the reality of nature. The perspective remains wholly subjective, therefore, and nature purely objective, something merely thought.18

In the last pages of Faith and Knowledge we can find the charge that in Kant

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the world as thing is transformed into the system of phenomena or of affections of the subject, and actualities believed in, whereas the Absolute as [proper] matter and absolute object of Reason is transformed into something that is absolutely beyond rational cognition.19

From Hegel’s point of view Kant is able to explain the world only as a system of believed actualities (or realities), the mere system of appearances. So, does Hegel think that the Kantian conception of phenomena involves some ontologically inferior reality, and that beyond this world of phenomena there can be another real world of truths – that unattainable true world whose existence, for example, Nietzsche rejects in Twilight of the Idols? However, we do not have good reasons to conclude that Hegel misunderstood Kant’s crucial distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself.20 Firstly, it is true that according to Kant’s account experience in general can be defined as a system of appearances, but here the accent must also be placed on the term “system” and not only on the meaning of the appearances. Kant is very clear in stressing that appearances (phenomena) are not mere illusion or some contingent representation which does not reveal the real essence of the object. Besides, appearance or phenomenon is not an accidental predicate ascribed to the object, or some kind of secondary property à la Locke.21 Kant’s move consists in claiming that the object as such has the character of the appearance, i.e. the appearance means nothing but the empirical object of possible experience. When Kant asserts that in our experience we only have to do with appearances it does not mean that beyond the world of appearances there is some other real world which we cannot know. On the contrary, this phenomenal world is the only world that we have (and can cognize) and the only world that in fact exists as objective. The whole discourse about phenomena has the function of stressing the subjective grounding of every perceivable object. To assert that the object is phenomenon does not mean reducing its ontological status, but rather it means posing the question of its ontological status in terms of transcendental subjectivity. That is to say, the object appears and is always for some subject, and objectivity as such is not possible without relation to subjectivity, to the subjektive Beschaffenheit. In this sense appearance is not a contingent property of the object, but the necessary way for the subject to represent any object.22 And to say that experience is a “system of appearances” is exactly like to say that experience is a product of an a priori synthesis of the subject. What is contained in the very concept of appearance, which is always appearance for someone, is the idea of “correlationism.” As Quentin Meillassoux writes in his After Finitude:

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And what would the role of Thing-in-Itself be in this account? In the first place, the Thing-in-Itself is not an object, as is often believed; that is to say, it does not designate some real object beyond appearances. On contrary, the Thing-in-Itself is the lack of an object, the pure non-object, something that cannot be represented and in that way cannot be “objectified” (put before as Gegenstand), because it is presupposed as being something that escapes relationality with the subject. And exactly because of this the Thing-in-Itself cannot refer to anything empirically real. It cannot be an object since it is not subjected to the a priori conditions of knowing. As such the Thing-in-Itself is only a hypothetical, strategic concept that shows the limits of our experience in the sense of its constitutive relationality with the subject. If we have all this in mind, how can we interpret Hegel’s charge that Kant’s world is only a system of actualities believed in, and that Kant’s notion of experience lacks the value of truth because what is real and true is beyond experience, whilst Kant’s categories are not fit to express the Absolute?24 All these reasons, as we have seen, are the main reasons why Hegel associates Kant with “metaphysizing empiricism” (metaphisizirenden Empirismus) in opposition to the type of simple, plain empiricism (unbefangene Empirismus) which in the last instance turns out to be materialism or naturalism.25 Kant opposes this latter, an elementary modality of empiricism, raising the principle of spontaneous subjectivity and freedom, as another realm in respect to the world of sensuous perceptions. But this for Hegel means that Kant remains within the same principle of empiricism, i.e. the principle of absolute antithesis and dualism between reason and phenomenal appearances, sensibility and spontaneity, nature and freedom. So the main inconsistency in Kant lies in his attempt to unify what is explained as incapable of unification, resulting in the waddling and shuffling from one side to another (herüberhinübergehen). In other words, Kant’s “correlationism” has not been sufficiently thought as a true and real correlationism. Kant posits the correlation between subject and object as a necessary demand, but at the same time he deprives it of its reality, since the relation is shown to be unilaterally that

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of objects conditioned by subject, and not vice versa. The subject is, however affected, and in that sense conditioned, by something external, but this effect is carried out on the level of the first and immediate sensible contact with the world, leaving the whole transcendental structure of subjectivity untouched and unchanged. Transcendental philosophy discovers conditions which remain external to the conditioned. Transcendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of internal genesis.26

Although these words come from the pen of a philosopher thoroughly different from Hegel, it is quite sure that Hegel would subscribe to this formulation. Transcendental principles are supposed to constitute the correlationism between subject and object, but at the end the desired reciprocity fails, for these principles remain external to what they must condition, in the same way as the sensibility remains external to the understanding. This external relation – which exactly as external cannot be truly correlative – falls under Hegel’s main contention concerning the nature of the “absolute antithesis” which dominates Kant’s thinking and which is the real reason why his thinking shares the same assumptions as empiricism. At this point we shall recall Kant’s famous passage from the Prolegomena where he acknowledges Hume as the immediate cause that awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.”27 This slumber consists in the dogmatic belief that outer reality has independent existence, and that the direction of conditioning goes preeminently from the object to the subject of perceiving. Consequently, awakening from this slumber consists in Kant’s discovery of the transcendental structure of the subject and its a priori operation of synthesis. However, following Hegel’s interpretation that Kant’s critical idealism has empiricist implications, one could say that Kant’s slumber is not interrupted. He woke up from a dogmatic slumber but continues to dream. What does Kant’s slumber consist in? It consists – paradoxically – in what Hegel grants as the main effect of Kantian philosophy, that is: “The main effect of Kant’s philosophy has been that it has revived the consciousness of this absolute inwardness.”28 This “absolute inwardness” as pure abstraction refuses everything that possesses the character of the externality. The exclusion or absorption of externality implies “representationalism”: the pure subject of thought is on the one side, and on the other side we find the world as represented world. According to the Kantian perspective, this also implies that form is opposed to matter, and that from matter we cannot derive any form – form can only be imposed on matter from outside. And we have the similar

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opposition within subjectivity which is heterogeneous by its very nature, that is, receptivity of sensibility and spontaneity of categories should be strictly separated, but on the other hand only the relation between them can constitute experience. Therefore, when Hegel criticizes the separation between experience and truth he aims exactly at this point – the point of the identity between subject and object, between given sensible content and intelligible form, the point that in Kant remains expelled from experience.29 However, the only way to introduce it inside experience is to change the very concept of experience, drawing it from the epistemic register and shifting to the ontological register. On other hand, when Hegel targets the world as representation of believed realities he does not endorse the metaphysical stance that somewhere behind or beyond there is some knowable real reality, but rather, remaining true to the same transcendental line as Kant, and radicalizing its implications, Hegel’s point is that phenomenal reality is not sufficiently recognized as real and objective.30 We can express this from the other, subjective side: the forms and conditions cannot be just subjective, but they belong to the content, to nature and reality – thoughts are not only subjective, “[t]houghts are not merely our thoughts, but at the same time the In-itself of things and of whatever else is objective.”31 Or to put it in other words: “As Hegel says, subjectivity is not purely subjective, but in some sense subject-object. It not only conditions but is also conditioned by nature.”32 It is important to show that such a Hegelian direction is not thoroughly anti-Kantian, even if it goes against the assumptions of Kantianism, namely against the heterogeneity within subjectivity and absolute opposition between independently given sense content and intelligible forms. In my view, Hegel is just repeating the Kantian approach on the level of objectivity. He is moving toward some kind of transcendental objectivity.33 With regard to the question of experience, it means that experience is not only the subjective field of possible knowledge, but that objective content has its own experience as well, its own phenomenology. Hegel actually takes seriously the Kantian claim that the conditions of the possibility of experience are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.34 There is no object outside experience, and therefore object can be given only through experience. Hegel’s gesture – his “ontological gesture” – actually consists in recognizing the ontological function of Kant’s transcendentalism. It is false to see the Kantian approach only as an epistemic approach, oriented strictly toward the conditions of knowledge. Kant’s conception of experience is strongly ontological, in the sense that it is dealing with the

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constitution of objectivity as such. Hegel follows this ontological line (where Kant stopped halfway) and tends to radicalize it further by liberating the whole discourse from subjective idealism. How to understand this ontological radicalization of Kant? Since in Kant thoughts and phenomena by their nature do not correspond to each other, the limits of experience are always explained as subjective limits, the limits of our thoughts which are to be restricted to the range of sensations. Insufficiency is always ours, or as Hegel puts it: in Kant “[t]he defect is shifted onto the thoughts; they are found to be unsatisfactory because they do not match up with what is perceived.”35 Hegel’s point is that insufficiency is also objective. There is something in the object which limits, something that impedes and obstructs its full realization and, consequently, the full realization of the knowledge of that object. This is the mode in which Hegel overcomes the externality of the relationship between being and knowledge, experience and truth – which is according to him, as we saw, the shared assumption of empiricism and Kant’s critical idealism. On Hegel’s account, there is a common incompleteness which has its ontological and epistemic side united: our limits of experience are also the limits of the objects in themselves. The object is not full, it is not complete, or in other terms, it is always contradictory. Therefore the main objection to Kant can be expressed in this way: The contradiction is, in Kant, the necessary outcome of our reason which steps across the legitimate borders of experience; thus, contradictions originate only in our thinking, while being in itself, the things are not thought as contradictory. So what Hegel targets is this feature of contradiction as being exclusively subjective, as something that belongs to Reason, and not to the order of being. The point is to understand whole reality as contradictory. Or as Hegel writes: Nevertheless Kant shows here too much tenderness for things: it would be a pity, he thinks, if they contradicted themselves. But that mind, which is far higher, should be a contradiction – that is not a pity at all.36

When Hegel criticizes Kant for maintaining that “what is truly real and absolute” remains outside experience, he does not actually think that we can immediately approach something that is supersensible, or that now we can know everything, even look at the divine with our own eyes. He does not want to say that there is an immediate representation of the supersensible and the transcendent. Hegel is targeting representability as such, saying that Kant remains the prisoner of the model of representation even when he speaks about the irrepresentable. Even to presuppose something like the Thing-in-Itself means to remain within this model of representability: the Thing-in-Itself is thought as something that stays

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outside of relationality with the subject, as non-object, but this indirectly confirms that the relation between subject and object is only that of “being-before,” “being-in front of” us in the form of Vorstellung. In such a constellation, the transcendent is thought as something beyond, something that remains unreachably exterior with respect to experience. So Hegel’s point is not that transcendence becomes reachable and representable, but rather that it is to be considered now as unreachable interiority; transcendence is not somewhere else, it is inside the phenomenon and belongs to the experience as its core, as a tension between concept and being.37 Or, as another of Hegel’s readers, Slavoj Žižek, writes38 there is no abyss between phenomena and noumena, but the noumena is this very abyss which resides inside the phenomena, inside the objects-appearances which are moving from their “in-itself” toward their “for-itself.” This movement has the character of the “coming-to-notion” (zum-Begriffkommen) as a way of producing the truth, which in Hegel means identity of the objectivity with its notion, that is the process of becoming what should become. So if we have seen how Hegel tends to unite experience and truth, conceiving both of them as dynamic and profoundly antagonistic processes, and if we accept that this attempt is founded on refuting Kant “within the horizon opened up by Kant himself” then one more question remains: Can Hegel be more Kantian than Kant himself?39

Notes 1

These three fields to a certain extent correspond to Kant’s division in Critique of the Power of Judgment, where Kant distinguishes the concepts of field, territory and domain. Field stands for the most general (non-contradictory) relation between concepts and objects, regardless of whether a cognition of the latter is possible or not. Territory is that part of the field where cognition is possible, and where empirical concepts have their place. Domain is the part of territory where the concepts are a priori legislative, and there are only two main domains (that of the concepts of nature and that of the concepts of freedom). Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer and A. Wood, The Cambridge Edition of The Works of Kant. UK: Cambridge University Press, 61-62. 2 Kant, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by P. Guyer and A. Wood, The Cambridge Edition of The Works of Kant. UK: Cambridge University Press, 111. 3 Kant actually speaks about the synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense, reserving the term ‘synthesis’ for imagination, and the term ‘unity’ for the activity of apperception (A95), but on the other hand he proposes a threefold synthesis where the first one is synthesis of apprehension in intuition (A99). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 228.

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Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 64. 5 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 62. 6 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. 7 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. 8 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 63. 9 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 63. 10 This passage is the following: “For I thought that the first step towards satisfying several inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run into, was, to take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what things they were adapted. [ … ] Thus men, extending their inquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the capacities of our understanding well considered, the extent of our knowledge (Erkenntnis) once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.” (Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 68-69). Hegel quotes Locke from the German translation by H. E. Poleyen (Altenburg, 1757). English translation of Faith and Knowledge which we use quotes from Locke, J. 1961. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Yolton. London: Everyman, 8-9. 11 As we know this is the expression of Deleuze who explains his own philosophical position as a “transcendental empiricism.” Deleuzian “transcendental empiricism” stays in contrast to Kantian subjective and reflexive transcendentalism – although taking many elements from Kant itself -, but nonetheless we use the same description (“transcendental empiricism”) as something that could have been ascribed to Kant from Hegel’s stance. Furthermore, by adopting the Deleuzian term in a Hegelian context we would like to indicate the idiosyncratic and heretical convergences between Hegel’s and Deleuze’s critique of Kant (e.g. the critique of external relation between concepts and intuitions, as well as the critique of formalistic and abstract transcendentalism, but there is also the common appreciation of Kant’s third Critique). As Henry Somers-Hal writes: “Both Hegel and Deleuze can be seen as attempting to overcome the limitations of Kantian philosophy, on the one hand, and an abstract and external image of thought, on the other.” (Somers-Hal, H. 2012. Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation Albany: State University of New York Press, 1). With regard to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and its relation to Kant see also: Bryant, R. Levy. 2009. “Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: Notes Towards a Transcendental Materialism.” In Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant. A Strange Encounter, edited by Willatt and Lee. London/New York: Continuum, 28-48.

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“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193.) 13 Hegel, G. W. F. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieaval and Modern Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 424. The statement from the first edition is even more incisive: “Der Standpunkt der Kantischen Philosophie ist, daß das Denken durch sein Räsonnement dahin kam, sich in sich selbst als absolut und konkret, als frei, Letztes zu erfassen. Es erfaßte sich als solches, daß es in sich alles in allem sei. Für seine Autorität ist nichts Äußeres Autorität; alle Autorität kann nur durch das Denken gelten. So ist das Denken in sich selbst bestimmend, konkret.” (Hegel, G. W. F. 1986. Werke, Band 20, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 331.) 14 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieaval and Modern Philosophy, 430. 15 We also find reference to the absolute Notion in the following brief summary of Kant’s philosophy: “If we sum up the Kantian philosophy, we find on all hands the Idea of Thought, which is in itself the absolute Notion, and has in itself difference, reality.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieaval and Modern Philosophy, 476.) 16 In fact, in Faith and Knowledge Hegel traces in Kant a few points of the identity of subject and object which are not (and cannot be) further developed within Kant’s perspective. Firstly, he refers to the synthetic judgments a priori which express the a priori and absolute identity of subject and object. Then, also the synthetic unity of apperception stands for such original identity which unifies the opposites (“I” and the given manifold). And finally, the faculty of productive imagination, which represents for Hegel a truly speculative idea, is also thought as the original identity, that which is primary and original, and therefore has been identified with Reason as such. It is very telling that Hegel treats the a priori, apperception and the imagination in almost the same way, recognizing in them the absolute dimension of original identity. Hegel will also find the same speculative point of the intuitive intellect, which for him is the same Idea of the transcendental imagination. In all these aspects Kant came close to the speculative idea of identity, but he did not affirm it, so that this speculativeness remained obfuscated within the empiricist framework of the heterogeneity between discursivity and intuitivity, infinity and finitude. And, as we will see in the next pages, what we have called here the “ontological gesture” of Hegel is oriented toward a further affirmation of those speculative moments insufficiently present in Kant. 17 Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Translated by T. F. Geraets and W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, §40 80. 18 Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: State University of New York Press,163. 19 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 189.

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See in particular Sally Sedgwick’s recent book on Hegel in which she exposes such and other similar problems, taking Hegel’s side against naïve interpretations which tend to make of Hegelian perspective some kind of caricatural metaphysical stance which falls below the critical achievements of Kant’s philosophy. (Sedgwick, S. 2012. Hegel’s Critique of Kant. From Dichotomy to Identity Oxford: Oxford University Press.) 21 Kant gives the example of the rainbow (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B63/A46, 170): a rainbow is not a mere appearance, while rain would be something like the thing-in-itself. In fact, both are appearances, as phenomenal objects of experience. 22 “We start from the idea: phenomenon equals apparition. The phenomenon is not the appearance behind which there would be an essence, it’s what appears in so far as it appears. I can add that it appears to someone, all experience is given to someone. All experience is related to a subject, a subject which can be determined in space and time […] I would say that all apparition appears to an empirical subject or to an empirical self. But all apparition refers not to an essence behind it but to conditions which condition its very appearing.” (Deleuze, G. 1978. Cours Vincennes: synthesis and time – 14/03/1978. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/ texte.php?cle=66&groupe=Kant&langue=2. Accessed May 15, 2014.) 23 Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency London: Continuum, 5. 24 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §44, 87. 25 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §60, 106. 26 Deleuze, G. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by H. Tomnlinson. London and New York: Continuum, 85. 27 “I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.” (Kant, I. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. http://www.webexhibits.org /causesofcolor/ref/Kant.html. Accessed May 5, 2014.) 28 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §60, 107. 29 This point we can understand in another way, by posing the question of the possibility of transcendental knowledge as such. If our empirical knowledge is based on some preconditions that cannot be empirically known, the question is how they can be known at all? Or in other terms: if knowledge is only empirical, then we are not allowed to know our own cognitive faculties, we cannot have any knowledge regarding the knowing subject because this subject, thought as transcendental, is never object of an empirical representation. Kantian solution for this problem can be found in his third Critique, in the realm of the reflective judgment and in the aesthetic experience which stages this transcendental knowledge without being known, i.e. empirically determined. However, Hegel’s point here would be that this transcendental knowledge must also be determinative, and not only reflective. The knowing of Absolute, of which Kant’s perspective is not capable, actually coincides with the knowledge of our own transcendental

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capacities – a possible indication that we ought to consider the absolute knowledge not as negation of transcendentality, but rather as its ultimate radicalization. 30 “In the history of modern philosophy it is Kant who has the merit of having been the first to rehabilitate the distinction between the common and the philosophical consciousness that we have mentioned. Kant stopped halfway, however, inasmuch as he interpreted appearance in a merely subjective sense, and fixated the abstract essence outside it as the ‘thing-in-itself’ that remains inaccessible to our cognition. It is the very nature of the world of immediate ob-jects to be only appearance, and since we do know that world as appearance, we thereby at the same time become cognizant of its essence. The essence does not remain behind or beyond appearance, but manifests itself as essence precisely by reducing the world to mere appearance.” (Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §131, Addition, 200.) 31 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §41, Addition 2, 83. 32 Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant. From Dichotomy to Identity, 96. 33 A similar idea we can find in Gadamer: “As it stands, his logic remains a grand realization of the goal of thinking ‘the logical’ as the foundation of all objectification. Thus, Hegel brought to its completion the development of traditional logic into a transcendental ‘logic of objectivity’ – a development which began with Fichte’s ‘Doctrine of Science’.” (Gadamer, H. G. 1976. Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 99.) 34 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B197/A158, 283. 35 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §47, 91. 36 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieaval and Modern Philosophy, 451. 37 Hegel’s “Essence must appear” does not mean that behind appearance there is some hidden necessity, some hidden truth which manifests itself. The essence is this “must appear,” the inner tension of the appearance which is in movement. “Shining is the determination, in virtue of which essence is not being, but essence, and the developed shining is [shining-forth or] appearance. Essence therefore is not behind or beyond appearance, but since the essence is what exists, existence is appearance.” (Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), §131, 199.) 38 Žižek, S. 1992. Der erhabenste aller Hysteriker. Psychoanalyse und die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus Wien/Berlin: Turia und Kant, 114. 39 See Chapter IV, Hegel’s Logic of Essence as a Theory of Ideology, in Žižek, S. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative. Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology Durham: Duke University Press. Concerning the formulation “more Kantian than Kant himself,” see also Žižek, S. 2012. Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London/New York: Verso, 281 and Pippin, R. 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91.

CHAPTER FOUR ON WHAT IS BROKEN INSIDE: HEGEL ON FINITUDE HARIS CH. PAPOULIAS

Die endlichen Dinge in ihrer gleichgültigen Mannigfaltigkeit sind daher überhaupt dies, widersprechend an sich selbst, in sich gebrochen zu sein und in ihren Grund zurückzugehen1

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss particular aspects of Hegel’s treatment of finitude, since this task would be proper to a Hegelian assembly. The volume includes the works of scholars in contemporary philosophy, therefore my intent is only to contribute a general outline of their subject matter from an Hegelian point of view, showing that, in Hegel’s System of Knowledge, the truth of experience is strictly connected with the experience of truth. The empirical precedence of experience is something immediate for a finite being and it has never been denied by any idealist; but it is also something that has to be sublated in order to obtain the passage from a simple certainty to what we call properly truth. Not every experience is true; if it were, no distinction could arise between hallucination and rational thought. The experience is to be verified, and through this movement, finite being has to dismiss its proper finitude. Contemporary philosophies, particularly phenomenology and existentialism, pay specific attention to what human existence and reality are, which is in direct opposition to the “out-of-date” metaphysical thought, mainly represented by German Idealism, and precisely by G.W.F. Hegel, whose System of Knowledge is recognized not only as the last great System of Philosophy, but also as the most hostile System to every singularity and individuality. In such a system there seems to be no space for the human condition, its finitude and its contingency – well, at least according to its critics.2

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Nonetheless, this prejudice is not a novelty; in fact, it is as old as the system itself. Perhaps it is with Kierkegaard that for the first time we can perceive a strong resistance to the inclusion of the single existence in a logical-metaphysical system. Contemporary scholars often use the Romantics as the counterpart of the Hegelian Will to “sublate the individual.” However, this is not an exact assertion; for the Idea of a System of Knowledge, scientifically presented as an arbor scientiarum, is one of the “revolutionary projects” that the Romantics inherited from 18th-century philosophy.3 It seems that only for Kierkegaard – or for some other left-wing Hegelians such as Stirner – the single existence has been declared as totally incompatible with the Idea of a System; and it is through his legacy that contemporary philosophy positioned itself against Hegel.4 To construct a system for the individual was also the intent of Novalis, of Hölderlin, and of course, of Fichte and Schelling. So why does this charge refer to Hegel and not to the rest? First of all, of course, only Hegel can be considered as successful in achieving his target; all others were let down by their own expectations. Secondly, for the majority, the principle of the supposed all-comprehensive system would be the “I,” or its declinations, such as the Genius, the Witz, the Irony and so on. However, for Hegel it was the Spirit, i.e. an inter-subjective principle. The Subject that the Absolute is, as it is said in the Preface of Phenomenology of Spirit, is not the empirical subject. The Spirit, as the only real Subject, guarantees this kind of communitarian foundation of the human condition. Perceived as such, the real Subject, in the systematic treatment not only is not absent at all, but quite the contrary, it is the main actor throughout the Whole. Nevertheless, while we stay on the safe side, beyond the Romantic self-centeredness, the old accusation emerges: this kind of Subject does not know anything about the finitude or the problems of existence. That is not true at all. Perhaps it is true for the political Hegelianism that dominated the scene after the death of Hegel; that kind of Hegelianism gave all the weight to a specific part of the System, called the Objective Spirit, i.e. the ethical and political constitution of Spirit. But this is only a specific part of the whole system. Further, finitude and subjectivity are main issues for Hegel and they are treated in every part of the System of Knowledge, not partially, not even in the margins as a remainder, but at the very center of every treatment.

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I intend to follow the pace of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, in order to capture the circular evolution of the concept. So, let me start with Science of Logic.

Aspects of finitude in Science of Logic Those who are not familiar with the Hegelian philosophy may be surprised to verify that many contemporary terms have their proper place in the doctrine of Being. For instance, existence as Dasein and finitude [Endlichkeit], are treated here for first time. Logic, being the most abstract part of the System, has nothing to do with empirical facts, as later the Subjective Spirit will have. It is also true that Logic is the theoretical and ontological foundation of these facts. Hegel refuses to induce categories from sensibility: What is involved here is the strain of negation, of putting all sensation off to the side and of keeping our own bright ideas to ourselves.5

These kinds of assertions, present already in the Great Logic, make many scholars believe that the “finite” is a priori excluded in the system. This is not true: as we know, the System of Knowledge, for Hegel, is a Cycle made of cycles, that is to say, somebody could begin from another standpoint, such as Nature, or Anthropology, and in that case, empirical facts would be the first to be dealt with. But to pretend to do so in Logic would be a crucial error that historically has been done several times. The famous Kantian argument of the Hundred Thalers seems to Hegel to be such a mistake, i.e. a confusion between the levels of sensibility and concept. So the existence that is treated in Logic is not the concrete human existence, but its conceptual determination in Thought. For Hegel – and generally for the Idealistic tradition – this kind of treatment is not far from what is more important to human beings; on the contrary, it is only in such a way that we can understand it clearly and profoundly. Also in the introductory paragraph of Philosophy of Spirit (last part of the Encyclopedia), which is supposed to be a more concrete sphere of Knowledge, Hegel advises again that we avoid the mistake made by many doctrines “whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart” (§377). Also in the concrete life of Men, what counts is not any occasional passion, but the very essence of it. That is to say, here, like in Logic, the thing that counts is our Thought and our consciousness about all these contingencies, for these “in-their-selves” are insignificant.

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Once deprived of all multicolored passions, what should be the meaning of existence? The word Da-sein, as we know, literally means to be there; but to be there in the Doctrine of Being does not have the meaning of space – for space is a determination that arises only in the Philosophy of Nature. We must think about it in a more abstract way: it just means to be determined in general; it is the first real determination of Being. We can easily understand that the first triad of Logic (Being–Nothing– Becoming) is characterized by the complete absence of determinations: a Being without any determination is completely void, that is to say is Nothing. The transition from being to nothing is what we call becoming. The existence is coming forth as the first concrete figure of becoming, as the simple unity of being and nothing. This simplicity is called immediacy6 and for this very immediacy (that is determined immediately), negation arises. Of course, as “possibility,” negation was present in the abstract Being; but only now a concrete negation is coming forth, because to be determined means to have limits, to be distinguished from something else. That is also the sense of the Spinozian assertion “omnis determinatio est negatio.” We see how every moment, in Hegel, must be seen under a double direction. Nothing exists abstractly; everything has to be concrete; but that means determined and determined is to demarcate the boundaries, the limits that define what exists. So something is itself and not other. This “not-other” is a form of negation that everything keeps internally. It is for that reason that something is something and not everything; but this also means that it is not infinite. Finitude, paradoxically, is what makes something be determined, existant, “being there,” da-Sein. The finitude is its life, and that sounds as if to say, “death is the condition of life.” When we say of things that they are finite, we understand by this that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only reality and existent determination, that they are not merely limited and as such still have existence outside their limit, but rather that non-being constitutes their nature, their being. Finite things are, but in their reference to themselves they refer to themselves negatively – in this very self-reference they propel themselves beyond themselves, beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is (as in Latin) their finis, their end. The finite does not just alter, as the something in general does, but perishes, and its perishing is not just a mere possibility, as if it might be without perishing. Rather, the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of this transgression in their in-itselfness: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.7

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So, as we see, we must keep in mind that the finite for Hegel is not a simple “nothing,” but something that actually lives by its own death. How could such a thing be possible? Remo Bodei notes that for Hegel, “finite is not reducible to nothing, it lives in its proper abolishment, in the wholeness of the Entire.”8 A valuable observation by the Italian philosopher on this argument is the following: “we could also say that Hegel destroys the Infinite [instead of the finite]” because, from an abstract point of view, finite and infinite have the same value if they remain separated from each other. Only in Movement do they acquire their specific character. So, it is a mistake to understand Hegelian Idealism as a negation of the finite’s reality. On the contrary, “idealism is, indeed, for Hegel the negation of the finite’s reality out of its relations in the ensemble.”9 And what is the point of this conception? Once again, Bodei states it clearly: The dissolution of the finite and of the tangible in relations permits the extreme mobility of thought and spirit: things and events are being forced out of their immediacy to be elaborated.10

Aspects of finitude in Philosophy of Nature11 The Kingdom of Nature has three sections: Mechanics, Physics and Organics. Once more, like in Logic, the ascendant way is from major abstraction to a better determined concreteness. From the concepts of space and time, Idea is evolving to animal life. It is interesting that the ante literam vitalistic idea is not only that nature itself works in an unconscious way in order to sublate its own finitude, but also the fact that when this development reaches its maximum degree, death comes to establish this result as the very seal of the living condition. Science of Logic shows that “existence” emerges from the category of Ground. “Ground” (in German: Der Grund) has an ambiguous sense that means on one hand the “reason of existence” of something and at the same time its own death (like in the expression zu Grunde gehen, that literally means “to go to the Ground,” but also “to die”). I like to read this ambiguity in such a way that a distinction between the empirical-finite and the finite spirit could be understood better. In nature we can only find the last meaning of “ground”: death is the ultimate chapter (literally and metaphorically) of what is empirically finite. In the last sphere, the Philosophy of Spirit, the real Ground of Existence will come forth as its very reason of being; that would be the Spirit. But we will come to that later.

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Here we could give a reason to Kierkegaard when he denounces the devaluation of singularity in Hegel. Not because Hegel does not care about the single person, but because for Hegel it is not the singularity that is essential to the existence. Its essentiality is, on the contrary, “universality.” “Singularity” is not a synonym for “existant”: singularity is the reason of the emergence of contradiction in the existant and what finally makes it die. That becomes clear if we follow the last part of Philosophy of Nature: starting from §367, we find the last natural process developed under the general title Der Gattungsprozeß, or The generic process, in this order: a) The genus and the species, b) The sex-relationship, c) The disease of the individual, d) The Inner Death of the Individual.12 It is the concept of death that comes to open the way to the freedom of the Spirit. What until now has been presented as finitude, only here becomes the real concept of death. Disease and death not only seem to be mere negative grades, but also the very distinctive forces in the establishment and triumph of animal life: A stone cannot become diseased, because it is destroyed in the negative of itself, is chemically decomposed and its form does not endure: because it is not the negative of itself which overlaps (Ubergreift) its opposite, as in illness and in self-feeling. (§371Z).

In the Remark of §368 (Petry and Miller §370R.13) we can catch the profound glance with which Hegel looks at the animal life: Almost less even than the other spheres of Nature, can the animal world exhibit within itself an independent, rational system of organization, or hold fast to the forms prescribed by the Notion, preserving them, in face of the imperfection and medley of conditions, from confusion, degeneration, and transitional forms. This impotence of the Notion in Nature generally, subjects not only the development of individuals to external contingencies – the developed animal (and especially man) can exhibit monstrosities – but even the genera are completely subject to the changes of the external, universal life of Nature, the vicissitudes of which are shared by the life of the animal (cf. Remark, § 392), whose life, consequently, is only an alternation of health and disease. The environment of external contingency contains factors which are almost wholly alien; it exercises a perpetual violence and threat of dangers on the animals’ feeling which is an insecure, anxious, and unhappy one.

As we can clearly see, Hegel is absolutely aware of the danger of rationalizing nature. As long as finitude reigns in Nature, schemes, forms,

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and peaceful accordance with the concept will not be possible – that is the impotence of the Concept in Nature. Hegel does not need anyone to see clearly the impotence of the Concept; but to defend nature’s accidentiality is to defend monstrosities and leave the existant to be conceived as a mere product of contingency. Individuals die because they belong to the becoming of the Genus, which is their “Universal.” They are because they are not. The genus preserves itself only through the destruction of the individuals who, in the process of generation, fulfill their destiny and, in so far as they have no higher destiny, in this process meet their death (§369-EC§370).

Genus is the universality to which all finite animals belong. Genus exists as universal because there is no singular component that holds in itself: singulars are born and die in order to give existence to their Genus. They are for the Genus and they live as long as they participate in it. But to be part of something that exists only as much as it transcends its very parts, means to die, to sublate the proper singularity for the life of the Whole. The Singular cannot resist Nature’s power of dissolution, but the Genus can and so goes on giving life to more and more individuals. On one hand, all natural processes – including the process of Genus – are empirical and occur in a spatial externalization (i.e. they are literally ex-stantes, as to say, they are out of their selves). On the other hand, the Individual tries to conform itself to it with the appearance of the highest universality that the Idea of Life has reached in Nature (i.e. the Genus). “The disparity between its finitude and universality is its original disease and the inborn germ of death,” writes Hegel (§375). This affirmation regarding the animal-subject will be valid for the human-subject as well, and Spirit, in all its acts, will do nothing more than hatch out a plan to overcome this very disparity. We know well that social institutions, organizations, religion, and so on, have been regarded as such attempts in the life of the human spirit. But it’s really surprising to see how Hegel focused in every single activity, from the organic assimilation to the more abstract syllogism, in order to display this ascendant process of liberty. “The removal of this disparity is itself the accomplishment of this destiny” (§375), Hegel says again on this matter. But let me point out what I think is the tragic character of his thought. For the positivists and the evolutionists that were still to come, this kind of process has no ambiguity. Go forth is always equivalent to getting better. Anyone who has explained the Hegelian System in this way, maybe because of the common view of his Lectures on Universal History, has failed to grasp what really moves

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the whole System – in the words of J.-L. Nancy14 – : the restlessness of the Negative.15 Certainly, the Individual – through the process of Genus [r]emoves this disparity in giving its singularity the form of universality; but in so far as this universality is abstract and immediate, the individual achieves only an abstract objectivity in which its activity has become deadened and ossified and the process of life has become the inertia of habit; it is in this way that the animal brings about its own death [aus sich selbst tötet]. (ibid.)

As we already saw in Science of Logic, the finite is presented as the traitd’union between opposite forces, between universality that does not pass away and singularity that disappears under the force of becoming. If the finite was a simple accidental creature that in one lapse of time is and in the next is not, there would be no mystery, nothing sublime at all, in what we call “conscious life.” But the Finite, in terms of Subject, the finite that is not only existing or living as a mere externality but a Subject that exists and lives by its own act, is the linkage between the void, senseless, finitude of Nature and the Whole as the eternal presence of the Idea. It seems significant that here, in the Kingdom of Nature, Hegel gives the very first determination of what in a while will be called Subjective Spirit. So, before proceeding to the exposition of Philosophy of Spirit, let us read the important Hegelian Remark to §359. In this paragraph, Hegel speaks about the role of negation, of limit and of lack for the (animal) subject. We would not understand anything about death if we had to assume it as something ontologically foreign to our nature, as something that comes externally (as systematically a lot of religious thought did and as common sense still does); and even not as something simply internal, from which we cannot escape (as it happens to all natural finitude). For Hegel, to be constituted as a subject means to overcome this opposition (and we know, “overcome” something, in Hegelian terms, means to preserve it as sublated). Here is one of the most striking Hegelian remarks: Only what is living feels a lack; for in Nature it alone is the Notion, the unity of itself and its specific opposite. Where there is a limitation, it is a negation only for a third, for an external comparison. But it is a lack only in so far as the lack’s overcoming is equally present in the same thing, and contradiction is, as such, immanent and explicitly present in that thing. A being which is capable of containing and enduring its own contradiction is a subject; this constitutes its infinitude. Even when reference is made to finite Reason, Reason demonstrates its infinitude in the very fact that it characterizes itself as finite; for negation is finitude, a lack only for that which is its accomplished sublation, infinite self-reference (cf. §60,

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Remark). Thoughtlessness stands still at the abstraction of the limitation, and in life, too, fails to grasp the Notion though in life the Notion enters into existence; it sticks to the determinations of ordinary thought (Vorstellung) such as impulse, instinct, need, etc., without inquiring what these determinations in themselves are. But the analysis of their concept will show that they are negations posited as contained in the affirmation of the subject itself.

Aspects of finitude in Philosophy of Spirit Philosophy of Spirit is the third and last great sphere of the Encyclopedia. It covers the sections of Subjective, Objective and Absolute Spirit. The famous work Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 has here been significantly reduced and compressed in the second level of Subjective Spirit, between Anthropology and Psychology. While we observe that this “existentialist” Hegelian work has been dismembered, we must also recognize that Hegel’s attention to the individual has been increased and enriched by the general development of the whole section. In this treatment, the Individual is not only what the single consciousness does or undertakes on its way to self-understanding, but also its “pre-conscious” life (that is the subjectmatter of Anthropology), as well as its complicated development as a free, rational being (the subject-matter of Psychology). So, if we speak about “finitude” as a synonym for “human being,” the right place for its treatment in the System of Knowledge would be here. Hegel announces finitude as the topic of this part and dedicates a paragraph to it (see §386). Here, he refers to the first two levels of Philosophy of Spirit, namely, the Subjective and the Objective Spirit. These parts, Hegel says, embrace the finite spirit. Let us note, first of all, that not only Subjective Spirit (i.e. the Individual) is finite, but also the Objective one (i.e. human society, institutions, States and Nations). For a long time, Objective Spirit was looked upon as the promised land of the entire Hegelian philosophy. But for Hegel, the rise and fall of Empires or States is not very different from the Genus process that we saw in Philosophy of Nature. Certainly a State is spiritually “higher” than a natural organism, or, we should say that it is a more complex organism whose degree of freedom is higher and so on. But that is not enough to render it infinite. Its infinity is a “bad” infinity, in accordance with which an objective form of Spirit succeeds another in a linear historical process. Maybe the spatiality of Nature has been replaced by a certain “interiority” in the sense of Time, but this kind of History (Time and “Facts” added one to another) is not the “comprehended History” of the Phenomenology’s

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conclusion,16 as many have assumed. Hegel states clearly that both subjective and objective sections are to be considered finite. In any case, Hegel never considered the human spirit as a kind of substitute of the divine. The very last paragraph of the Introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit emphasizes exactly this aspect and the importance of finitude in the conceptual comprehension of Spirit. To not treat finitude as such, but to posit it, in spite of its ontological inconsistency, is one of the central aspects of evil according to Hegel.17 In §386 Hegel expresses clearly and without any ambiguity the place of finitude in Philosophy: first of all, Logic has to expose, elucidate and examine the determination of finitude; consequently, the rest of Philosophy, of course, has to treat the concrete forms of finitude, but this kind of treatment has to disclose only the fact that “the finite is not, i.e. that it is not that which is true, but simply a mere passing over which passes beyond itself.”18 It would be a mistake to consider this “passing over” as a mere disregard for the destiny of human existence. On the contrary, it is this very element that permits Hegel to identify the real determination (in the double sense that the word Bestimmung has in German, both as “determination” or as “destiny”/“vocation”) of finite. There is a passage created out of Hegel’s lessons on Philosophy of Spirit and placed as an addendum (zusatz) to the Great Encyclopedia, where we can find his belief about what the “Bestimmung” of the finite is. Immediate sensation, unpurified by rational knowledge, is burdened with the determinateness of what is natural, contingent, self-external, incoherent. Consequently, in the content of sensation and of natural things, infinity consists only of an abstract formality. In accordance with its Notion or truth however, spirit is infinite or eternal in the concrete and real sense of remaining absolutely identical with itself in its difference. This is why spirit has to be considered the image of God, the divinity of man. […] Rather than the finitude of spirit being regarded as something absolutely fixed however, it must be recognized as a model of the appearance of spirit which in no way limits its essential infinitude. This implies that finite spirit is an immediate contradiction, an untruth, and at the same time the process whereby this untruth is to be sublated. This contesting of what is finite, the overcoming of the limitation, marks the divinity in the spirit of man and forms a necessary stage of eternal spirit.19

Particularly in the Subjective Spirit, Hegel treats the nature and the functions of human faculties. These are not mere abilities of the human mind in elaborating empirical data. Their metaphysical value is to transform them in thought and in that sense to redeem us from contingency and death. In reading these paragraphs maybe that higher

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sense of the human condition is not immediately clear, but every time the occasion was given, Hegel addressed his audience in the following way: The sentient vitality of the single being has its terminus in death. As singular, our single sensations are transient; one sensation drags away another, one impulse, one desire, drives out another. This whole realm of the senses posits itself as what it really is, in its demise. This is where finitude ceases and is escaped from. The escape from this finitude in consciousness, however, is not just what is called death; the escape from this finitude is thought generally – it is already present in representation so far as thinking is active in that.20

Given in Philosophy of Religion, this passage refers to the subject matter of Psychology and to the importance of Representation in the elevation to Thought. Thought, in itself and through the determinations gained by its very activity, is presented as a liberation from finitude: The determination of finite spirit consists of its treating the various stages of this activity as appearance, by dwelling upon and traversing them. They are stages in its liberation, in the absolute truth of which, the ascertaining of a presupposed world, the generation of the same as being posited by spirit and the liberation from and within this world, are one and the same. Appearance purifies itself into the infinite freedom of this truth in order to attain knowledge of it.21

As we said before, both Subjective and Objective Spirit are finite. What should be out of finitude is the Absolute Spirit, the very last sphere of knowledge of the Hegelian System. But, in fact, finitude remains as an active element in the Absolute as well – and that is a great contribution of Hegel to our way of thinking the Absolute:22 not as something isolated in another hyper-sensible world, but active in the restless negativity of the only world. It is always the same world which, taken as an object of ignorance, appears as finite and irrational; and it is the same world which, taken as an object of science, appears as infinite and rational. Of course, that way of speaking is a kind of simplification, since what we call “ignorance” could have several levels – think about Plato’s definition of doxa23 or Spinoza’s definition of ignorance as “imagination”24 – while “science” also could present several levels – Hegel makes numerous distinctions as, for instance, between intellectual and speculative sciences. In the Absolute Spirit, this leveling can be traced in three passages where he decides to speak about finitude: in §556, first paragraph on Art; in §573A, speaking about Religion and further in the same long Anmerkung, speaking about Philosophy.

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In the first instance, finitude is related to the form of immediacy in which Art develops its proper configuration. As we said, Hegel differs from his predecessors in so far as he sees in the elaboration of immediacy by the means of imagination a great advance toward the realm of ideas and not a fallacy of sensibility that makes Reason deviate from its purposes. In the second instance, in Religion, finitude is presented as a matter of form – the form of “community of the believers” – posited against the infinite content – the speculative truth. Here, again, the chief thing is the spread of doctrine and education among all mankind. As art did by intuition, religious education elevates all subjects to a spiritual sense of community. The last reference to finitude appears when the discourse turns to the relationship between religion and philosophy. As we just said, philosophy traditionally has been accused of promoting a pantheistic view of God, precisely because of an abstract conception of finitude. By saying that all things are One, nothing more is given than an “empty representation […] hanged on the air,” says Hegel. It would be a mistake for philosophers to say that by adding empirical things, the result could be the unity of God; but it is also a mistake of religious people when they accuse philosophers of doing so. The circular elevation of Knowledge, from intuition to representation and then to concept, with all the middle stages, as it is summarized in a very concise way in three syllogisms (§575ff), has only one purpose: to include profoundly into the Absolute Knowledge every aspect of finitude and to permit a kind of self-presentation of its internally dismissed and sublated finitude.

Conclusions To study the aspects of finitude in the three sections of Subjective Spirit, or in the three spheres of Philosophy of Spirit, would be a matter of initiating many research papers. Here, we could only limit our effort to what would gradually appear as the specific existentialist attention in Hegel’s philosophical thought. An empty rhetoric speaks against the socalled “system of existence.” But what is the meaning of “system”? Is it enough to exhibit a dialectical process in order to create the suspicion that existence is underestimated? Or that it is subordinate to logic? When Kierkegaard says that in the “culture of Spirit” first comes Irony, then Ethics, and at the end Humor and Religion,25 hasn’t this classification a claim to be a “systematic” one? Does it not demand an order and does it not show a progression? Of course, it does not depend on logical assertions and it is not a syllogistic conclusion; but in such a way, does it

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not mean the opposite of what it pretends? Is this not a claim to a “system,” at the same time that every objective possibility to obtain one has already failed? When somebody considers doctrines – as the one of Kierkegaard – that demand the absolute position of truth based on completely subjective feelings, he has only two possibilities: either he accepts it, because he feels the same way, or he has to suffer it, to bow to it without any other explanation, since every explanation, if it is to be understandable, has to be logical. That is the real danger for the existence: a kind of epistemological – and at the same time existentialist – violence: things are as they are, because it is so… On the contrary, the Hegelian System pretends to bring transparency to every phenomenon.26 Some aspects still remain obscure, but at least they are recognized as such and not as holy mysteries.27 The other great falsehood that follows the will to demonize the Hegelian System is its “closure.” More than the Encyclopedia, it is the Hegelian Lectures (before their critical edition) that have inspired such an idea.28 Far from being static statements of personal verdicts – think about how critics speak about the “end of History” or the “death of Art” and so on – these lectures are the field of continuous experiments and ever-new elaborations of more and more material, collected by Hegel with great effort, year after year. The new critical German edition gives us clearly such a view.29 All these renewal attempts, year by year, are based again and again on the same single book: the Encyclopedia. It is worth asking how come a single book gave rise to continuously differing approaches, if what critics maintain – precisely that it is a “closed” system – should it be true? I believe that the Hegelian System is not a “closed” System at all, and furthermore that the finitude of the human condition finds its real ground in it as well as the only possibility to overcome such finitude.30 From Logic to Absolute Spirit, the whole System could be seen as the struggle to obtain the experience of Truth. For that reason the Spirit has to pass through the truth of Experience. That means that not every kind of experience is something true in a systematical sense. For Hegel, most of our everyday experience of the world has not to do with truth, but with certainty. The difference between these two forms of experience is that the last has to do with an adequacy between an external object and my representation of this object. Instead, truth has to do with the adequacy between the thing and its concept. In this latter case, representation could be variegated, charged with figurative elements and

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rich in sensations. It could be multiple in a single subject, or multiple because of the many representing subjects. To conceive Spirit as absolute Freedom and Freedom as true Infinity, as total Return (total Rückehrt31) after a complete alienation, is to have an experience of Truth. Art or Religion could present Spirit as a dove or as the owl of Minerva, but this would be a finite content, something that could be historically certain or not, but in no case could be true. For Hegel Philosophy has precisely this duty: to transform all of our representations to concepts. That is to say, the real point for Hegel is not how we experience Truth, but how we conceive it. That means literally that for him there is no experience of Truth at all; if we conceive Truth, all the rest of our human experience becomes finally true. Everyone could recognize that a principal attribute of the finite is that it has its limits in itself. That means that it is continuously directed to its own death. So, why should we insist on attributing Truth to this very limit? To understand this internally broken subjectivity as such, to recognize its un-truth, is the only appropriate and respectable way to overcome this finitude. Hegel does not construct any ontological proof as Anselm did. Hegel sees in every subject the ontological proof as a living one, as a matter of fact, and that is the ultimate power of his doctrine: that every human reality, from our poor existence to the greatest social organization, is a living proof that finite is not and therefore the Absolute is.

Notes 1 “Finite things, in their indifferent variety, are therefore just this: to be contradictory, internally broken and bound to return to their ground”; translation slightly modified; see Hegel, 2010. The Science of Logic, translated by G. Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 385. 2 In Italy, this accusation dominated the academic mainstream in the post–World War era: not only the recent existentialist philosophy, of which Abbagnano and Pareyson represented the two alternative faces, but the Hegelian-inspired Marxist philosophy, with contributions by important Italian personalities in the sixties, such as Della Volpe, Mario Rossi, Colletti and Merker; see R. Bodei, 1975. Sistema ed epoca in Hegel, Bologna: Il Mulino, 240 ff, particularly fn. 69-70. 3 See Livia Bignami, 1995. “Il concetto di ‘enciclopedia’,” in Filosofia e scienze filosofiche nell’“Enciclopedia” hegeliana del 1817, edited by F. Chiereghin, Trento: Quaderni di Verifiche, 23–62; particularly: 44 ff. 4 It is curious that while existentialist philosophers react against every kind of System, the Phenomenology of Spirit becomes a central source of inspiration for them; see the Preface to the English Edition of Jean Hyppolite, in his book: Studies

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on Marx and Hegel, New York 1969; see also the chapter The Concept of Existence in the Hegelian Phenomenology, 22ff. 5 Hegel, 2008. Lectures on Logic, transcribed by Karl Hegel, translated by Clark Butler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2. 6 Hegel 1968 ff. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), Gesammelte Werke, Bd.21, edited by the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 97; The Science of Logic, 83. 7 Ibid, 216; 101. 8 R. Bodei, Sistema ed epoca in Hegel, 242 f. 9 Ibid., 243; emphasis is mine. 10 Ibid., 244; author’s emphasis. Here Bodei recalls a favorite Marxist argument: the ontological value of labour for human consciousness. But the first philosopher that turned the eyes on earth and not on the “starry sky,” was in fact Hegel and not Marx (the first sign of this revolutionary turn to the appreciation not of Nature in itself, but of its transformation throughout human activity is documented on the early Hegelian diary of 1796 from the journey to the Alps). 11 I quote here Miller’s translation: Hegel 2004. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, as a more actualized version. We refer also to the important annotated translation of Petry in 3 volumes: Hegel 1970. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 12 I therefore translate the Hegelian title “Der Tod des Individuums aus sich selbst”; Petry translates “The death of the individual of its own accord.” In the translation we lose the “inner” property of finitude that comes aus sich selbst. Miller, prefers “The Self-induced Destruction of the Individual” but in this translation we lose the fact that animal’s death is something more than a simple “destruction,” as it would be for a stone. 13 Miller, as Petry already has done, follows Michelet in dividing this section in a different way to the 3rd Berliner edition. On the arguments, see Petry 1970, vol. III, 170 ff.; on the conceptual importance of the order of these paragraphs, see L. Illetterati, 1995. “Vita e Organismo nella Filosofia della Natura” in Filosofia e scienze filosofiche nell’«Enciclopedia» hegeliana del 1817. Trento: Quaderni di Verifiche, 415 f., n.233. 14 J.-L. Nancy, 1997. Hegel: l’inquiétude du négatif. Paris: Hachette. 15 On this argument the Hegelian researchers have developed many viewpoints. A well-known Hegelian philosopher, A. Kojève, presented the whole System as a development of Human negativity (see his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Agora/Cornell University Press 1980). For the logical aspects of this topic, see the classical works of D. Henrich, 1974. “Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik,” Hegel-Jahrbuch; 1976. “Hegels Grundoperation. Eine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Logik” in Der Idealismus und seine gegenwart. Festschrift für Werner Marx. Hamburg. For a modern interpretation, see: D. Brauer, 1995. Die dialektische Natur der Vernunft, HegelStudien (30) Bouvier Verlag: Bonn.

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See Hegel, 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 493. There, Hegel, makes a fundamental distinction between the two senses of history to which the determination, the concept of finitude, is extremely important: “regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance” (ibidem). 17 See §386; particularly the Anmerkung, where he speaks about the vanity of holding fast to what is finite, as opposed to that which is true: “In the development of spirit, this vanity will yield itself as evil, spirit’s supreme immersion in its subjectivity, its innermost contradiction, and therefore its turning point.” 18 Ibid. 19 §441Z. 20 Hegel 1995. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I: The concept of Religion, translated by P. Hodgson. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London, University of California Press, 290. 21 §386. 22 See, for instance, the note on §386: “[…] the supremacy of the standpoint of finitude should be firmly maintained.” 23 See: Plato, 1997. Republic, Book V, in: Complete Works, edited by J.M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. 24 See particularly the second part of Spinoza, 1992. Ethics, translated by Samuel Shirley, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 25 See S. Kierkegaard, 1985. Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 26 “Transparency” that has to be gained through the complete clarification of all presuppositions that Thought has in itself. In Italy, Maurizio Pagano has claimed that it is possible to reach this transparency, the convergence in Hegel’s thought between the Concept and a Hermeneutical approach (See: M. Pagano, 1992. Hegel. La religione e l’ermeneutica del concetto, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane 106). 27 “On account of this predominant and conscious harmony between knowledge and its general object, between form and content, a harmony which excludes all scission and hence all change, spirit in its truth may be said to be that which is eternal as well as perfectly blessed and holy. For since only that which is rational and knows of what is rational may be called holy, neither external nature nor mere sensation has a right to the designation” (§441Z). 28 We insist on saying before the critical edition, because it was exactly by this critical ordering of his lectures that it became clear that Hegel in every new exposition elaborated his subject matters more and more in order to open new perspectives. That has been shown, for the Philosophy of Law by Ilting (see his Naturrecht und Sittlichkeit: begriffsgeschichtliche Studien, Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta 1983), for the Philosophy of Art by Gethmann-Siefert (see her Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte. Untersuchungen zu Hegels Ästhetik, Hegel–Studien: Beiheft 25, Bonn: 1984), for the Philosophy of Religion by Jaeschke (see his Die

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Religionsphilosophie Hegels, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1983); particularly on the different Hegelian presentations of the concept of Religion, see also: Pagano, Hegel. La religione e l’ermeneutica del concetto, 59 ff.; S. Achella, 2010. Rappresentazione e concetto. Religione e filosofia nel sistema hegeliano, Napoli: La Città del Sole). 29 Let us say that if critics have had a more objective and “disinterested interest” in dealing with Hegel, then it would be enough to read his very last statement, which was given only a week before his death, to understand his real intentions and thoughts on the openness or the closure of the System: “Anyone who in our times labors at erecting anew an independent edifice of philosophical sciences may be reminded, thinking of how Plato expounded his, of the story that he reworked his Republic seven times over. The reminder of this, any comparison, such as may seem implied in it, should only serve to incite ever stronger the wish that for a work which, as belonging to the modern world, is confronted by a profounder principle, a more difficult subject matter and a material of greater compass, the unfettered leisure had been afforded of reworking it seven and seventy times over” (Science of Logic, 21; for a comment see Bodei, Sistema ed epoca, 308). Are these words proper of the caricature that Kierkegaard or others – without ever having read the texts – have created? Do we have to keep philosophizing by clichés or wouldn’t it be better to read the original texts? 30 I keep taking as generally given the will to overcome finitude, but I recognize also that several philosophers really believe in the positive permanence of finite things. Some of them are atheist and I cannot understand what kind of perverse pleasure they find in this “finite permanence.” Others, as the theologians, more coherently seem to hope for a final apokatastasis as a restoration of the whole physical and moral person. Perhaps we have to recognize this point as an important distinction between Hegel and Christian thought (as far as I know all dogmas agree with such kind of restoration). 31 Expression used by Hegel in his ninth lecture in Hegel, 2011. Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, translated and edited by P.C. Hodgson, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER FIVE “SUBJECTIVITY AS UNTRUTH”: KIERKEGAARD AND THE PARADOXALITY OF SUBJECTIVE TRUTH KRESTEN LUNDSGAARD-LETH

Subjectivity, inwardness […] is truth. Is there now a more inward expression of this? Yes, indeed; when talk of ‘subjectivity, inwardness, is truth’ begins as follows: ‘Subjectivity is untruth.’ But let us not be in a hurry. Speculation also says that subjectivity is untruth, but says this in exactly the opposite direction; namely: that objectivity is truth. […] [I]n setting about becoming truth by becoming subjective, subjectivity is the difficult position of being untruth. The work thus goes backwards, that is, back into inwardness.1

Preliminary remarks: Truth-dependent experience and experience-dependent truth What is experience and what is truth? It seems fairly uncontroversial to suggest that the concepts of “experience” and “truth,” respectively, must be thought of as being somehow interconnected. As such, I continuously – and usually without any cognitive effort worth mentioning – experience something as being either true or false (e.g. the mathematical proposition that “2 plus 2 equals 4,” the empirical fact that it is – in fact – raining, as well as the somewhat harder-to-grasp social “fact” that I can actually trust my partner to be truthful, just to mention a few examples). That being said, it seems just as uncontroversial to point out that the alleged interconnection between experience and truth can – and must – take on many different forms depending on which kind of experience we are dealing with. On this line of reasoning, there is no such thing as one single way in which we can experience the world (not to mention ourselves). And what is more: this insight implies that there can be no one

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way in which the “objects” of our experiences are experienced as true. To be sure, mathematical, empirical and social phenomena can all be experienced as true. This does not entail, however, that being true in a mathematical, an empirical or a social way, respectively, can be understood in the same way, not to mention described with identical vocabularies. Or to put the same point a different way: things that are essentially different must be made sense of in essentially different ways. Allow me to move on to a first distinction here: experiences of truth can always be classified phenomenologically as either (i) experienceindependent or as the opposite hereof, i.e. (ii) experience-dependent. At first, it appears somewhat oxymoronic to talk about experiences of experience-independent truth(s). We should not, however, become confused by this mere appearance of self-contradiction. All that is implied in this ad hoc concept of experience-independency here is the almost trivial observation that some truths are experienced as being true in such a way that it is of no relevance at all how they are experienced (e.g. the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4). Other experiences of truth, to be sure, are essentially different from this in so far as the truth implied requires us to experience it in a certain way, qualitatively (e.g. the experience of someone else as truly loveable, which – for its part – has to be experienced in a loving way). Terminologically, one may well refer to the experience of experience-independent truths as being epistemological in character to the extent that they are experiences of objective matters-of-facts to which the specific state of mind of the experiencing subject can be deemed completely irrelevant. As far as the scope of this chapter is concerned, these preliminary remarks will allow us to bracket a certain philosophical challenge to this distinction (namely the question whether all truth is not to be understood as – transcendentally – dependent on the (a priori) structure of experience?).2 All we need to move on is for the aforementioned distinction to make phenomenological sense, which it surely does, intuitively. But even though we can rely on this distinction, how can we flesh out the self-experience of the experiencing person herself as a free subject? It seems clear that the (possible) truth of freedom is essentially different from the truth of the experience-independent facts of epistemic cognition. Still, that does not take us very far in trying to understand what true selfexperience might amount to. For one thing, self-experience seems to differ not only from the experiences of experience-independent facts (such as mathematical propositions) but just as well from the experience of most experience-dependent qualities (such as experiencing something as e.g. loveable, likeable, tasty, or disgusting). As such, we must realize the

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phenomenological difference between experiencing something in such a way that it matters to the experience how the subject experiences – on the one hand – and the existential experience of subjectivity itself – on the other – given that we can make sense of such a “thing” in the first place. That being said: how should we approach this challenge, philosophically?

Turning to Johannes Climacus and the formal ontology of freedom of the Fragments In order to address these questions, allow me to turn to one of the most prominent pseudonyms of the Danish existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, namely Johannes Climacus. As an author in his own right, Climacus is credited for having written both the Philosophical Fragments (1844) and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). In both of these writings, Climacus is very keen to highlight how the truth of particular kind of experiences is inherently co-constituted by how these experiences are experienced. That is to say: the experiences towards which Climacus directs his attention have to do directly with truth in an experiencedependent way. More specifically, Climacus is occupied with explaining the experience of freedom. On this interpretation, we only begin to get at what Climacus himself is getting at as soon as we move from the Fragments to the Postscript. Nonetheless, we must initially have a look at Climacus’s first work. The Fragments polemicize against what Climacus takes to be the core of “Hegelianism” in so far as Hegel’s method (i.e. retroactively applying the concepts of dialectical logic to world history in order to understand the “necessity” of its movements3) makes it – to Climacus’s mind – positively unthinkable how one is to experience actual freedom in the world. Freedom implies “becoming,” as it is, and what becoming ultimately designates is a certain way of making sense of reality qua an ultimately incalculable transition in the “moment” from the “possible reality” of the future to the “realized possibility” of the past. Dialectical “necessity,” for its part, is of a completely different order than the real dialectics of possibility and reality (which is the very essence of freedom from the point of view of the Fragments), and Climacus insists consistently that if the radical unpredictability of becoming’s free transition from possible reality to realized possibility turns out to be in itself impossible (i.e. necessary; i.e. not not possible, from the point of view of “speculative” philosophy) – but instead calculable by means of dialectico-logical inferences or causal mechanisms – then there is quite simply “no room for freedom” in the world.4

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I believe, however, that the very way of presenting the problem of freedom implicit in the Fragments can be said to rely on a somewhat dubious premise on Climacus’s part. This premise can be fleshed out in the following manner: it is implied in the core argument of the Fragments that what it actually means for there to be no “room for freedom” in the world is thought of as being (onto-)logically dependent on the knowing subject’s incapability to think freedom. To claim this clearly implies stressing a specific reading of the Fragments. I do nonetheless think of it as the primary tendency of Climacus’s early work that it presents a very epistemologically conceived concept of “faith.” The reason is that the faith of the fragments first and foremost has to do with thinking about the truth of the world as a place of free becoming rather than a place of logical necessity. Climacus’s counterargument against Hegel thus amounts to him offering an alternative formal ontology to Hegel’s ontology of dialectical necessity.5 The problem with the Fragments’ otherwise exquisite piece of conceptual clarification is that although Climacus may be right in theory, being right in theory turns out to be the wrong way in which to truly counter “Hegelianism.” Or to be more precise: being right in theory (thus arguing that freedom implies a worked-out ontology of becoming in the sense of radical possibility) amounts to being ultimately wrong since the relationship between experience and the truth of freedom cannot be – well – thought of as being epistemological in character. That Climacus himself as a matter of fact also happens to look at the problem in exactly this way can arguably be deciphered from the text by the attentive reader. Climacus thus refers to one of the chapters of the Fragments as a “Metaphysical Caprice” (i.e. a downright stupidity of sorts) and moves on to describe a different chapter as a “Thought Project.”6 The thing is, that it is precisely the key feature of the failure of Hegelianism to abstract from the experiencing subject as existing by turning all of reality into a massive thought-experiment (of his logical method, regarding the case in point). This being the case, one obviously has to be careful when indulging in an allegedly anti-Hegelian chapter which describes itself as nothing but a thought project. What is more: the idea of a metaphysical caprice inherent to the structure of the Fragments themselves strongly suggests the interpretation that the very attempt by the text to replace one formal thought-experiment about the true meaning of freedom with a different one is precisely what it claims to be on the level of chapter headlines, namely: a metaphysical caprice. As I believe becomes evident once one considers the consequences of decomposing the sub-structure of the Fragments in the way I am here suggesting: the peculiar

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capriciousness of the overall caprice-character of Climacus’s early work ultimately reveals itself to consist in the incapability of the text to resist the temptation of defeating the thought project of Hegelian speculative logic by means of just another thought-experiment-based speculation. In other words: at the end of the day, the alleged radicality of the difference between Climacus’s own endeavor and the Hegelian one amounts to merely offering a different (conceptual) content (i.e. “becoming” instead of “being”) within an identical form of exposition (i.e. a thought project). When it comes down to it, thus, Climacus’s effort in the Fragments to conceptualize what I have dubbed an alternative ontology of freedom is faulty in at least two decisive – as well as distinct – ways: firstly, it (i) is simply too formal to truly get at what is implied in the actual experience of freedom. Secondly, it (ii) comes dangerously close to treating freedom as an experience-independent matter of fact. Ultimately, these two failures are obviously closely interconnected since it is surely the dependency of freedom on a particular manner of phenomenological experiencing (presentable only in qualitative and existential terms) which at the end of the day ensures that freedom is incomprehensible to purely formal (i.e. rationalistic or idealistic) as well as to purely experience-independent (i.e. empiricist or materialistic) vocabularies (both of which Climacus – as well as a number of the additional Kierkegaardian pseudonyms – think(s) of as only capable of dealing with “quantitative” distinctions and predicates, respectively).

The joke of the Postscript and the task of thinking existentially If we move on to the Postscript, we can now begin to understand to what extent Climacus is simply cracking some kind of a philosophical joke when he insists that the Postscript virtually adds “nothing” but minor details to the problem of the Fragments, merely dressing it “up in its historical costume.”7 Or to put the same point differently: To suggest that nothing is added in the Postscript turns out to be an instance of earnest existential irony8. On what grounds do I claim that Climacus must be understood as being deliberately humorous in suggesting this? As it turns out, the (re)investigation of the experience of freedom in its historical costume will reveal itself to be the real investigation of the – well – real experience of freedom.9 Having realized this, it becomes all the more understandable why the Postscript is about five times longer than the alleged main text itself, namely the Fragments. On this reading, the Postscript must be considered as the thing in itself rather than merely the

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thing for us, in Hegelese, since freedom itself is quite simply not there unless it is experienced (and lived) by the experiencing “subject” in a very certain as well as very peculiar way. Or to once again paraphrase the Hegelian manner of putting things: freedom in itself is co-dependent on being there for us (i.e. the experiencing subject) in a certain way, wherefore the real in-itself of freedom cannot be made sense of as something other than an in-itself-for-us.10 A less Hegelian way of putting the same point would be to say that the shift of emphasis in the transition from the Fragments to the Postscript is a fundamental change from conceptualizing freedom as the key concept of a formal ontology of becoming to understanding it as the – in a number of ways – defining experience of an existing human being. Crucially, this admittedly dialectical aspect of Climacus’s notion of actual freedom is – as we shall have a closer look at in the following – of a different sort entirely than its Hegelian counterpart. But let us move on. To be sure, Climacus does not by any means wish to say that engaging oneself in thinking will – in and of itself – with necessity lead to an unavoidable existential self-deception. The “task” of an existing subject is thus not to completely get rid of thinking but instead a matter of thinking differently (i.e. neither formally nor objectively) about the facticity of one’s freedom. Climacus articulates his point in the following way: The systematic idea [i.e. the standard for Hegel’s philosophical method, KL-L] is the subject-object, the unity of thought and being; existence is, on the contrary, precisely their separation. It by no means follows that existence is thoughtless; but it has made space and put space between subject and object, thought and being. Objectively understood, thinking is pure thinking, which corresponds in just such an abstractively objective way to the truth of its object, which object is therefore itself, and the truth the correspondence of thought with itself. This objective thinking has no relation with existing subjectivity. […] Someone existing is constantly in coming to be; the genuinely existing subjective thinker simulates this existence of his constantly in his thinking and invests all his thinking in becoming.11

As Climacus makes clear in the concluding sentences of these considerations, to exist authentically requires thus both to think and to have to exist with one’s thinking. This last point (i.e. having to exist with one’s thinking rather than just having to think it) turns out to indicate the decisive move of the above passage as well as of the Postscript overall in its distancing itself from the pseudo-systematic tendency of the Fragments. We are not purely thinking creatures, as it is, but something else entirely, namely:

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creatures with a thinking relationship to a thought-related but also always thought-transcending world of experience. Not least in the various modes of the peculiar phenomenon of experiencing ourselves. Because of this, the objectifying tendency of conceptual thinking – and thinking is per definition conceptual and thus always already also per definition objectivizing – must thus be thought of as fundamentally problematic rather than first and foremost problem-solving in relation to existing human subjects, since the latter’s experience of itself as someone who is becoming – i.e. free in the phenomenological and existential sense of the term – rather than something that must be conceptually clarified is nothing short of being incompatible with this subject handing itself over to any clear-cut essence discovered by abstract thought. To Climacus, the truth of the experience of oneself as free – which is no doubt the quintessential experience of freedom itself – is not a theoretical insight into the world’s ontological freedom-character. Instead, it is a certain way of passionately willing one’s existence as something completely meaningful because of the necessary “uncertainty” of any such meaning from the point of view of objectivity; not in spite of it. 12 As such, we should stop thinking about the experience we have of our existence as constitutively unfinished and incalculable as an obstacle to the meaningfulness of life, as it is exactly this very incalculability of our lives which makes possible our “infinite” will to – well – will that our finite lives be meaningful.

The paradoxality of the will, Part 1: the Socratic interesse Thus, the truth of existentially experiencing oneself as free can be described as a theoretical “paradox”; something Climacus famously never grows tired of stressing.13 In the following, we will turn our attention to how the transition from the Fragments to the Postscript also implies a change as to how Climacus understands the relationship between truth and subjectivity with special emphasis on the paradoxality of this very relationship. In addressing this relationship, Climacus famously turns to the event of the Christian “incarnation.” At first sight, the idea of “God” himself becoming “human” seems to imply nothing but that which was already stated in the above section, namely: that there exists an “infinite” discrepancy between the human longing for “eternal happiness” (i.e. a fulfilled and meaningful life), on the one hand, and the radically finite conditions under which we mortals have to execute any such longing, on the other.14 Another way of fleshing out this point may be to draw on an

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illustrious passage from Descartes’s famous Meditationes, wherein Descartes points out how one of the pivotal virtues of a modest thinker consists in having the patience to refrain from acting upon one’s (potentially) infinite “will” until one’s finite intellect has figured out the way in which things truly are. We thus ought to take the time to get to know what the world is like before we start to act into the world, if Descartes – on this reading – is to have his way.15 To Climacus, as should be obvious, the Cartesian proposal to always think-through-before-acting ultimately amounts to an abstract denial of the human condition of being indispensably torn between willing infinitely and knowing finitely. To paraphrase a both conceptual and philosophical point presented by Axel Hutter: if we have a closer look, an adequate understanding of the “passionate infinite interest” of human beings actually requires us to give more than a one-dimensional account. As such, “interest” (Interesse) implies an intricate two-layered interestedness which must be adequately addressed: firstly, interesse is (i) interested in the ordinary (and passionate) sense of the term of willing to do or have something.16 Secondly, however, any first-order interesse always co-implies (ii) its very own conditionedness which – for its part – must be understood as nothing but the aforementioned and existentially constitutive being-torn (i.e. being-in-between (inter-esse)) of every actual interest between infinite interest and finite conditions (biologically, cognitively, temporally, etc.). To put it another way, we simply cannot grasp the founding second-order inter-esse of existence without realizing that it makes no real sense to demand that people entirely know why and how and with which consequences they act before they act with determinateness.17 Important – and very Kierkegaardian – as this line of argument may be, the Postscript turns out to have an additional – and more radical – lesson to teach us regarding the claimed paradoxality of subjective truth. It is thus one thing to accentuate that an acting subject must be able to act with “subjective certainty” from the constitutive inter-esse of existence which implies that any such certainty must always be accompanied by “objective uncertainty.”18 It is another thing, however, to claim that truly experiencing one’s own subjectivity requires for the experiencing subject to fundamentally dislocate the very structure of paradoxality. But what could be meant hereby? And from whence to where – not to mention for which reason? – ought paradoxality to be dislocated? From Climacus’s point of view, to think of the paradoxality between infinite longing and finite conditionedness as the most fundamental paradoxality of existence amounts to sustaining an inadequate and ultimately somewhat shallow conception of one’s existence. This line of argument is probably best

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explained by considering the reason as to why Climacus labels any such existential (self)understanding an instance of “Socratic” reasoning. To Climacus, the merely Socratic mode of existence is quintessentially a docta ignorantia, i.e. a knowledge of one’s ultimate lack of knowledge due to the finitude of one’s (knowing) existence.19 As such, the “Socratic” stance is surely at an advantage in comparison to theories which claim that human beings can simply know the objective truth of the world. Still, in the very negation of the possibility of applying the understanding of objective matters to the (self)-understanding of one’s own existence, the Socratic position remains crucially indebted to theories of objectivity in terms of how to think about truth in the first place. When we stage our take on paradoxality in the “Socratic” way we thus come very close to suggesting that although our constitutive finitude prevents us from ever actually knowing what it is, there nonetheless is an “infinite” objective truth which could potentially (and ideally) be cognized by a superior being not limited by our petty, all-too-human finitude.

The paradoxality of the will, Part 2: subjectivity as untruth Here, the radical move of Climacus consists in positing a second paradox within the paradoxical dialectics of the first one. But how are we to make sense of this? Well, exactly by skipping any notion of the experience of the truth of existence that could even potentially have been cognized objectively (i.e. experienced as being (at least potentially) independent from the experiencing subject). By renouncing any objective conception of existential truth the focus shifts from the paradoxality between the (infinitely) willing and (finitely) knowing subject on the one hand and its “eternal” truth on the other, to the second-order paradoxality within existential truth itself. As it is, this is also the place in the Postscript where Climacus reveals the real reason as to why his thinking draws on the “absurd” dogma of the Christian incarnation. We misunderstand the paradoxality of the incarnation if we think of it as first and foremost indicating the (i) purely conceptual self-repudiation of putting together the finite (“Man”) and the infinite (“God”), not to mention if we conceive of it as pointing exclusively to the (ii) radical unreachability of the eternal truth (or “happiness”) for finite human beings. The error of the former conception is that it simply fails to move beyond the epistemological unthinkability of the paradox, whereas the mistake of the latter lies in its incapacity to think

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about the truth of the incarnation as itself being a paradox (rather than – in “Socratic” fashion – merely out of reach for us á la the Kantian noumenon).20 With the above-standing negation of alternative interpretations, however, it still remains rather unclear how exactly Climacus manages to use the dogma of the incarnation to depict the truth of existential selfexperience in such a way that the truth itself (of this experience) is shown to be paradoxical. In the following, I shall suggest some preliminary outlines of an interpretation hereof that I believe to be both exegetically on point and – more importantly – potentially philosophically fruitful. Before we move on, however, allow me to recapitulate very briefly: at first glance, it would seem as if the transition from the Fragments to the Postscript is exhausted in and through the transition from a (somewhat obscured) ontology of freedom to a far more existential accentuation of the peculiar experiential truth we find within the realm of subjective inwardness and – ultimately – freedom. Yet, through the considerations of the radicalized paradox of the incarnation this transition turns out to be inadequate – not to say existentially misleading – if it has the final word. By turning truth itself – and not only our relation to it – into a paradox, Climacus argues that the true accentuation of subjective truth leads to an unexpected inversion of the existentialist perspective, articulated in the following claim: “Subjectivity is untruth.”21 To understand what Climacus is getting at here one will do well to remember what precisely went wrong in Climacus’s first attempt at an overcoming of speculative philosophy in the Fragments: the Fragments were right in their insistence on an alternative understanding of freedom. What made the Fragments ultimately fail was the way in which the argument against speculation ended up presenting itself as an alternative piece of speculative theory (or ontology, in the case in point). The Postscript refrains from this kind of counterargument by pointing to the peculiar paradoxality of existential passion and willing (rather than offering a direct theory of paradoxality, that is). To realize that this is what has to be done, however, does not necessarily amount to doing it right, and this is where Climacus’s “thesis” of subjectivity as untruth enters the equation. On my reading, the following is essentially what Climacus is trying to say with his infamous assertion: by focusing on an inside-out depiction of the experience(s) of passionate subjectivity as opposed to a distanced description of freedom from the outside, Climacus (indirectly) points to something which later existential philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre have gone on to explicate: an adequate understanding of subjectivity is not simply an understanding of just another object.22 That

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being said, the truth of willing is misconceived if we contrast it with the truth of knowing by suggesting that willing equals the capability of “spontaneously” projecting a telos (i.e. something that the will wills) into to the world, whereas knowing – on its part – knows how the things in the world works. As it is, this explanation of subjectivity would not so much be an overcoming of Hegel as an essential return to the Kantian dualism between the “laws of nature, or [laws of, KLL] freedom,” respectively.23 For Climacus, the truth of subjectivity (and of subjective experience of one’s own subjectivity) cannot be understood as the capability to be its own cause (pace Kant). Quite the contrary: the experience of willing (i.e. the quintessential self-experience of a subject) something is not exclusively the experience of producing a voluntary telos but also always already the experience of not being able to determine one’s willing. This is why our “infinite” willing of “eternal happiness” is not just paradoxical in its relation to the finitude of human existence but also paradoxical in itself. Let us try to flesh out this crucial point in more detail: On the one hand, the experience of being a subject is constituted by having certain experiences the truth of which cannot be made sense of without addressing a first-personal and – in this intuitive sense of the term – subjective level of explanation. Thus, experiences such as mortality, anxiety, and having to choose are essentially experiences of my mortality, my anxiety, and my choice. Obviously, we can objectively ascertain (in the third person) that everyone must die (wherefore I will ultimately also have to) as well as we can enumerate the social and historic context in which any possible instance of dying, anxiousness, and choosing takes place. Nonetheless, truly experiencing the aforementioned experiences always requires of the experiencing subject that she co-experiences her very own subjectivity as an irreducible dimension of the meaning of these kinds of experience. 24As such, experiencing death, anxiety, and choice is not just an instance of a subject experiencing something other than a subject but a case of a subjectivity experiencing itself. Or to put the same point differently: the meaning of peculiar experiences is not to experience some meaningful fact or another but to experience how meaning itself has to do with its beingmeaning-for-a-subject whose “highest task” (qua subject) is to make her own choices in the face of her anxiety-inducing mortality.25 On the other hand, the experience of subjectivity becomes distorted if we present the experience of subjective freedom (i.e. willing and choosing) as subjectivity’s quasi-supernatural power to happen to the world in a completely undetermined and self-causing manner. To put it precisely, it is simply not up to the will to will what(ever) it wills. Being a willing subject turns out much rather to entail the both complex and complicated task of

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ascertaining how one responds to that which one already happens to be willing. To offer an existentially accessible example, I can never be sure not to wake up one morning and find myself no longer willing what I have been (”happily”) willing so far (e.g. having this career, these friends, these children, etc.). In this specific sense, a subject is just not someone whose cognition and willing is directed to something other than itself (like knowing that this is an ice cream and wanting to eat this ice cream, just to offer an example) but also a willing somebody whose very own will is experienced as something ultimately other than me; something beyond my “willful” control. And for this very reason, the “task” of freedom must be thought of as a question of how well one deals with what one’s will wills rather than an abstract, normative demand to will the right things for the right reasons. When we look at it this way, as Climacus urges us to do, we realize that the characterization of existence as essentially free (i.e. passionately willing) is less a description of a creature with some “tool,” namely a will, which allows this creature to happen to the world as it is a claim that being free is a matter of willfully happening to oneself (qua willing) and always having to deal with this precarious existential condition. At this point, we finally realize why the dogma of the incarnation lends itself productively to exactly the kind of analysis that Climacus has undertaken: the true experience of freedom cannot be dealt with by construing a theoretical alternative to speculative-deterministic ontologies. As it is, an adequate investigation of human freedom cannot claim to address anything that we subjects relate to, be that cognitively or voluntarily. Instead, it must address something that we are, namely essentially willing; and the truth of the will qua will happens to have the structure of a paradox. Not because of its finite conditionedness (this is the “Socratic” insight) – but because of the paradoxically structured fact that the “freedom of will” implies an odd necessity of will as its own most existential precondition. Or to put it differently: the truth of subjectivity (i.e. freedom) is always already structured around that very same subjectivity as untruth in the precise sense that the will of the subject stirs (passionately) in the subject before the consciously willing subject gets to even enter the stage of “free” acting and choosing. This point must not be mistakenly equated with any social predisposition let alone objective predetermination of freedom, but has to do with the existential condition that the will wills away without the willing subject having agreed (or willed) to will what he or she wills. In this complex way, existence is indeed a dialectical “synthesis” between “freedom and necessity.”26

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Concluding remarks: The potent possibilities of the past? One further – and final – point: the full implications of Climacus’s existential analyses ought not to be thought of as restricted to one existing individual’s relationship to his- or herself hic et nunc. In temporal and modal terms, respectively, Climacus’s investigation into the paradoxical structure of the will suggests that we should cultivate a way to look to the past – and not just the future – as a domain of (not-yet-actualized) potentialities. But why is that? Does it not make much more sense, intuitively, to think about the past as necessary,27 the present as actual as well as the future as possible? It does indeed, intuitively, but Climacus’s endeavors will all have been for nothing if they have not taught us to think differently about the will. And as should be obvious: to think differently about (the freedom of) the will also requires us to rethink the existential truth of the categories of modality and temporality. In our attempt to clarify this, as I will argue, we simply have to flesh out the full implications of the idea of a paradoxically structured will. The following line of thought is my tentative attempt at unfolding exactly these implications. To begin with, it is one thing to say that the will wills before we willing creatures want it to. As an isolated claim, this paradoxical willing might somehow be thought to “take place” in a secluded instant (i.e. a hic et nunc) which transcends time and space completely. This way of looking at it, however, fails to take into account the crucial lesson from the Fragments which made clear that any adequate understanding of the will must also always involve an understanding of “becoming” – and thus: of temporality as such. With this realization follows the dissolution of an ontology in which (a-temporal) existential freedom is actualized by being somehow injected into the unconscious grinding of “natural” time or history. Or to put the point in other words: it is not as if we find some objective temporality that subjective willing must (subsequently?) set out to latch onto or into. Rather, the true experience of subjectivity as something (willingly) happening to itself implies that the fundamental experience of time’s historicity cannot first and foremost be an experience of natural events becoming what they become (e.g. acorns becoming oaks). Instead, the experience of oneself as someone willing – paradoxical as it may be – transforms the experience of history itself. In this transformation, the past no longer appears to the subject as a collection of fully actualized (and thus irreversible) facts. Thus, the past is not merely a past of things that have happened. On the contrary, the experience of one’s paradoxical freedom lets us experience the past as a past of freedom in

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which actions have willfully been executed. In this way, the paradoxical structure of a singular willing person as someone who must choose how she deals with her own willing is transferred onto all of history. On this model, past events are surely “actualized possibilities”; i.e. essentially different from future events that – on their part – are experienced as “possible actualities.”28 As it is, however, the difference between past and future events has nothing to do with an alleged necessity of past events. Qua actualization, the past is undeniably irreversible: as such, we cannot make it not have been the case that the French revolution did in fact unfold between 1789 and 1799 A.D. On the other hand, though, the French revolution was also a series of actualized possibilities some of which remain possibilities that we can act upon in the present and into the future, respectively. As such, we can (at least can try) to make the non-actualized possibilities of the past (e.g. liberté, egalité, fraternité) into actual possibilities of our present actions. In a similar way, possibilities for the future are never created by present beings completely from scratch; formally analogues to a divine creatio ex nihilo. Acting into the future without consulting experiences from the past thus amounts to a both naïve and directionless pseudo-creation, whereas real actions – on their part – will have to draw heavily on possibilities handed over to us from the past. To wrap up these complex considerations for now, the structure of the self-experience of the will turns out to be formally analogous to the structure of the self-experience of historical beings in so far as the “freedom” of both experiences is constituted by a paradoxical dialectics of having to (i) respond willingly to (ii) possibilities that have happened to oneself unwillingly (by means of one’s own will or through one’s own history, respectively). Or put differently: an existing subject has to respond to his or her own will in exactly the same way as historical human beings have – either individually or collectively – to respond to their own history. As such, the truth of subjective freedom is always also the untruth of subjectivity as completely spontaneous. The true choice to become oneself thus has to start with overtaking whoever one happens to be, as well as the true transcendence of a dissatisfactory present will only be able to truly take off by going through the potent potentiality of the past.

Notes 1

S. Kierkegaard, 2009b. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 174 (Kierkegaard’s italics). 2 Cf. I. Kant, 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, B74 ff., and B. Longuenesse, 2006. “Kant on a priori concepts: The metaphysical

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deduction of the categories,” 129, in P. Guyer (ed.) 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3 Cf. R. Pippin, 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 115. 4 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, 2009a. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. New York: Oxford University Press, 140-53 & E. F. Mooney, 2009: “Introduction” in S. Kierkegaard, 2009a. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. New York: Oxford University Press, xxiv-xxvi. 5 S. Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, 111 ff. 6 Cf. ibid. 88 & 111 (my italics). 7 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 12. Cf. A. Hannay, 2009. “Introduction” in S. Kierkegaard, 2009b. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvi-xviii. 8 For a very convincing way of thinking about the (potential) existential earnestness of irony, cf. Lear, 2011, A Case for Irony. London: Harvard University Press, 30 ff. 9 W. Greve, 1990. Kierkegaard’s maieutische Ethik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 241 ff. 10 G.W.F. Hegel, 2005. Åndens Fænomenologi. København: Gyldendal, 54-67. 11 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 73 & 105 (my italics). 12 Cf. ibid., 31 ff. 13 Cf. ibid., 271 & S. Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, 111. 14 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 24. 15 Cf. R. Descartes, 1986. Meditations of First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37-49. 16 As an attentive reader would no doubt be in the right in pointing out, the present distinction between interests of the first and the second order in the Postscript, respectively, is crucially different from Harry G. Frankfurt’s much discussed distinction between first and second order ‘desires’. As it is, the difference between modes of desires which Frankfurt is addressing points to a difference within the scope of what I have – for our present purposes – grouped together under the heading of first-order ‘interests’ (cf. H. G. Frankfurt, 1971. “Freedom of the Will, and the Concept of a Person.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68, no. 1). In a previous paper, I have briefly presented the argument that the difference between the ‘aesthetical’, the ‘ethical’, and the ‘religious’ in Kierkegaard can be said to add what one could call a third order mode of existence (i.e. the religious) to the aesthical and the religious ones (cf. K. Lundsgaard-Leth, 2014. “The Temporality, Modality, and Materiality of Hope” in G. Karabin, 2014. Hope in all Directions. Freeland: Inter-Disciplinary Press). 17 Cf. A. Hutter, 1996. Geschichtliche Vernunft – Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphulosophie Schellings. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkmamp, 209-214. 18 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 159 ff.

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Cf. Socrates, 2009. Sokrates’ forsvarstale in J. Mejer & C. Gorm Tortzen, 2009: Platon I – Samlede værker i ny oversættelse. København: Gyldendal, 18e-24b & S. Kierkegaard, 1989. The Sickness unto Death. London: Penguin Books, 120-28 20 Cf. I. Kant, 1999. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, A249. 21 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 174 (my italics). 22 Cf. e.g. M. Heidegger, 2001. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, §§ 1 – 4 & J.-P. Sartre, 2007. Væren og intet. Aarhus: Philosophia, 14-19. 23 Cf. I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 3 (Kant’s italics). 24 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 145. 25 Cf. ibid., 107 ff. 26 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 43. 27 Here, ’necessity’ should not be conceived as a logical category. Rather, necessity simply points to the irreversibility of the facticity of past events in so far as they can no longer be undone. 28 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, 144 ff.

CHAPTER SIX HEIDEGGER AND METAPHYSICS: A QUESTION OF THE LIMIT1 SØREN TINNING

Introduction Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is aimed at its constitutive conception of truth, truth as correspondence or more broadly of “agreement” – the agreement of subject and predicate, of subject and object, of “intellectus and rei.”2 His claim is not that this conception of truth is incorrect, but that metaphysics has forgotten the question of how such agreement is possible in the first place; it has forgotten the ontological meaning of agreement, i.e. of Being. What is no longer asked and thus has become unquestioned is the very “is” between the subject and the predicate. The meaning of Being determining this “is” is the condition of any possible agreement, of any possible truth. Forgetting to question the meaning of Being, and how – or that – it came to be, is the blind spot of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle onwards.3 Heidegger’s thinking can be conceived as the attempt to rethink this question in order to emancipate philosophy from its almost absolute submission to what he considers to be the metaphysical concept of truth. Heidegger carries out this endeavor on a variety of fronts and from a plurality of perspectives; yet he is also always aware that he cannot simply step out of metaphysics by choice, since he – and we – are always already, in our thought as well as in our experience, determined by its logic and its language. In the following chapter we will trace the metaphysical conception of truth from a perspective that Heidegger himself never explicitly develops. This perspective will take the notion, or figure, of limitation4 as its focus and it will be argued that this notion defines a constitutive structure that runs throughout metaphysics, i.e. it defines a fundamental structure of the traditional conception of truth as agreement. This means that we will

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investigate the same question of agreement as Heidegger does, but we will do so literally, almost graphically. In other words we will try to outline its defining figure of limitation and to indicate how this figure pervades thought and experience. This figure of limitation, which we are claiming runs through metaphysics as its determining structure, can be identified through the classical dualistic distinctions, or rather as the very distinction itself, between idea and phenomena, form and matter, God and creation, subject and object, as well as experience and truth. Heidegger refers to this as: The difference between a sensuous and a suprasensuous world. … the distinction [author’s cursive] on which rests what has long been called Western metaphysics.5

What will be investigated is a well-known figure, and it will first be traced in the well-known metaphysical structures of logic and language. But we will not focus on these structures themselves but on how they rely upon a specific figure of limitation, on a figure of a line or literally on the figure of distinction itself, such as that between the sensuous and the suprasensuous. Accordingly, the aim of the chapter will be to outline the sphere of influence of the metaphysical interpretation of limitation and to identify the concrete figure in its full shape. In parallel with this, the aim will be to indicate how Heidegger attempts to overcome this figure and to show how Kant is pivotal with regard to it, in a twofold manner: in that he both adopts the metaphysical distinction himself and provides the starting point for Heidegger’s critique of it.6

Traces of the metaphysical limit Heidegger’s relationship to the question of limitation – like his relationship to metaphysics – is problematic. To introduce the problem, let us cite Heidegger himself: We should just as decidedly have to drop the singularizing and separating word ‘Being’ as to drop the name ‘man.’ The question as to the relationship of both revealed itself as inadequate because it never reaches into the realm of what it would like to question. In truth, we can then not even say any longer that ‘Being’ and ‘man’ ‘be’ the same in the sense that they belong together; for in so saying we still let both be for themselves.7

Our interest here is not primarily with the notions of “Being” and “man,” but with the notions of “singularizing” and “separating,” which appear as

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constitutive of how we can think the words or concepts “Being” and “man.” There is, in other words, a “singularizing” and “separating” figure of limitation present the moment we use the words “Being” and “man.” This figure is however not only constitutive of how we think each word by itself, but also of the way we conceive of their relationship. In fact, it seems like the very way we think of a relationship itself, and thus the way we can inquire into a possible connection between the words “Being” and “man” is itself a constitutive part of the figure of limitation that separates them. Finally, Heidegger indicates that it is something he himself struggles with, when he points out that a notion such as “‘be’ the same,” which otherwise is a common notion in Heideggerian vocabulary8, does not suffice to reach into the realm he would like to question. In fact, in the Question of Being from which this citation is taken, Heidegger even tries to move beyond the notion of Being by writing Being with an “x” over it, i.e. by crossing it out.9 The problem of articulating a way that “‘Being’ and ‘man’ ‘be’ the same in the sense that they belong together” without them always already having to “be for themselves” appears as a continuous theme throughout Heidegger’s thinking, not only in the relation between man and Being, but also between Being and beings, being and truth, as well as in the relations of the twofold and the fourfold etc. Accordingly, the aspiration of any critique of metaphysics seems to run into the problem of a rather simple figure, a distinction, which appears to dominate the way we think and also experience things, as will be suggested below. We can give another example, one that is central to Heidegger’s thinking. This example captures how we cannot but think in terms of a distinction that marks “beings for themselves” in a way that runs counter to the interpretation of limitation Heidegger aims at articulating. Accordingly, for Heidegger the metaphysical distinction impedes an adequate understanding of what is meant by the Greek participle on, which means “being” both in a verbal and a nominal sense. On says ‘being’ in the sense of to be a being; at the same time it names a being which is. In the duality of the participial significance of on the distinction [author’s cursive] between ‘to be’ and ‘a being’ lies concealed. What is here set forth, which at first may be taken for grammatical hairsplitting, is in truth the riddle of Being.10

Once again, our focus is not on the verbal and nominal sides of the duality but on the very distinction between them, which Heidegger here brings into the very center of his question of Being. The on captures a double significance of the participle “being,” which we would tend to distinguish

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as verbal and nominal in the sense of two primarily distinct meanings each “for themselves.” For Heidegger, on the other hand, it captures the ontological difference, which is not primarily divided into two separate linguistic figures but is always already the mutual constitutive difference of “beings in being” (Seindes seiend).11 This latter difference, as Timothy Clark explains, seems ambiguous. “The linguistic ambiguity of the participle is not a superficial conflation of two meanings of one word; rather a fundamental ambiguity in the general structure of experience is announced in the duality of this.”12 From our perspective, this ambiguity is important for two reasons. Firstly, what Clark means here, and what Heidegger himself notices, naming it the “riddle of Being,” is that its ambiguity raises a question of, or causes us to wonder, how the two meanings are supposed to be conceived together. This stresses the fact that we always already have an expectation of how to conceive of the distinction – the agreement – between Being and beings. Heidegger recognizes this as he distinguishes his concept of on from how we expect it to appear. But why do participles have two meanings? Is it because they take part in two meanings? No, rather these words are participles because what they state is always applied to what is in itself twofold.13

Secondly, the ambiguity can also be considered a consequence of how we primarily think distinctions in a way that prevents us from comprehending on in its Greek sense. There is no doubt that Heidegger conceives the question of Being as a riddle, i.e. precisely as a question, but he does not conceive it as ambiguous in a merely negative sense. For Heidegger the ambiguity has a positive aspect, as it is the very definition of how he conceives the relationship between Being and being. To summarize, on captures the way in which Heidegger wishes to radically question the distinction between being and Being when this distinction is interpreted as a distinction between two different beings, that is, as the distinction which is characteristic of metaphysics.14 On the other hand, it also opens the twofold of Being and beings up for thinking, where the limitation between them is not interpreted as a metaphysical distinction, but in the sense of an interpretation of limitation as contained in the Greek sense of on. We will not go further into the latter point here, but rather continue to investigate the metaphysical interpretation of limitation, which makes this on appear so ambiguous to us. We can try to illustrate this by analyzing the title, The Experience of Truth – The Truth of Experience.15 The aim will be to emphasize how we tend to

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spontaneously conceive of truth and experience along the lines of a metaphysical “distinction” between the two, in a grammatical as well as a logical fashion; this will then prepare the way for a full outline of the concrete or literal manifestation of this metaphysical interpretation of limitation. In other words, we will try to capture how this interpretation determines our experience as well as our thinking in such a way that we are still, in a broad sense, influenced by a metaphysical a priori that determines our intuition.16 So how is our experience “a priori” determined, when we read the title “The Experience of Truth – The Truth of Experience”? This can be illustrated by first replacing the “of” in the title with an “and.” If the title had been phrased “Experience and Truth – Truth and Experience” it would have been obvious that there was a question at stake regarding truth and experience, but the second part of the title would seem like a repetition and would then be superfluous, except from the fact that it emphasizes the question of their mutual interrelation. Consequently, the use of the “and” as a demarcation of the relation between truth and experience does not open much up for questioning. We could say, it does not provoke any experience of philosophical wonder. The relationship between truth and experience can be said to be experienced as a relationship between two substantially different notions, which despite this difference also seem to be fully integrated in the same conceptual structure, in such a way that their mutual presence does not seem contradictory. The distinction remains “a priori” unquestioned. The conceptual structure here implied is best exemplified by Aristotle’s ontology, based as it is upon his conception of substance and the principle of non-contradiction. The substance is the fully “singular” and “separated” autonomous entity, which is distinct from other such entities according to the principle of non-contradiction. When conceiving truth and experience to correspond in this way, we experience nothing strange. The familiarity of the substantial interpretation of truth and experience and thus of conceiving them within a metaphysical figure of limitation can be negatively exemplified if we return the “of” to its position between the two. The “of” in “Experience of Truth – Truth of Experience” marks a genitive, the belonging of one to the other, not as two distinct or autonomous substances but a belonging where one describes or attributes a quality to the other. In this way, the title can be articulated as “truth that is experienced – experience that is true.”

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To the philosophically trained ear, this articulation immediately provokes several questions, which run to the heart of how these statements can make sense at all: how is truth that is experienced possible; and what about experience is true? This is something that must be further qualified, because we have no immediate idea of what is intended. The articulation is thus provocative because it is unusual; it defies the anticipated distinction between truth and experience. Yet, the accentuated philosophical wonder we experience here still remains fully within the framework of metaphysics. As mentioned, the “of” articulates a genitive relation between truth and experience. This relation is fundamental to Aristotle’s logic (syllogism) and thus also to his ontology; it is the grammatical articulation of the genus–species relation, in which one thing can be defined through a causal chain moving from the individual substance (Socrates) to the essential species he belongs to (man) and finally to the most universal definition of him, the genus (animal). In light of this, even the title of the present book, which at first seemed to bring into question the relationship between thought and experience, never even provoked an experience of philosophical wonder that would point beyond the metaphysical interpretation of the figure of limitation; to paraphrase Heidegger from above: it “never reaches into the realm of what it would like to question.” We could try to step out of these linguistic limitations by insisting upon an essential unity, holding both genitives of the title together as one. This would challenge our idea of what the subject or the predicate in the sentence is and thus also what the principles of non-contradiction and causality are. This is Heidegger’s solution (his double genitive), but it only makes us question this whole structure (grammatical, logical, ontological) to a certain degree, since the sense of the inadequacy of the distinctions, i.e. the figure of limitation, fully relies upon the given grammatical structure, and therefore it returns us to Heidegger’s problem we saw at the beginning, with the “singularizing and separating words” “Being” and “man.” We can say that the double genitive articulates the question of Being negatively, which, albeit crucial to Heidegger, still does not open for any possible positive articulation, any positive experience of an alternative question of Being. It articulates a finitude in our language and our interpretation of Being. Yet it remains a negative demarcation defined within, or at the limits of, what the metaphysical distinction allows us to think. The danger therefore persists that “In truth, we can then not even say any longer that ‘Being’ and ‘man’ ‘be’ the same in the sense that they belong together; for in so saying we still let both be for themselves.”17

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As of yet we have not added anything to Heidegger’s own analyses of metaphysics and its pervasiveness. The aim has been to lay the ground for the following outline of the metaphysical figure of limitation and to support our claim that it is a constitutive character of metaphysics.

The metaphysical limit So what do we mean by the notion of a metaphysical interpretation of the figure of limitation? How do we think or experience this figure? Massimo Cacciari introduces two concepts that together can help us to approach this question: [A]re we to understand ‘limit’ as limen or limes? The limen is the threshold… the passage through which one accesses a domain or through which one exits from it. Through the threshold we are received, or otherwise e-liminated. It can direct us to the ‘center’ or open onto the unlimited, to that which does not have form or measure, ‘where’ we fatally disappear. Limes, on the other hand, is the path that circumscribes a territory, and that determines its form. Its line can be oblique, certain (limus), or accidental, but it nonetheless balances, in some way, the danger that thresholds, passages and the limen represent.18

The tension in the question of limitation, which Cacciari here describes within a Latin-Roman context, is also found much later in the history of metaphysics. Accordingly, Kant develops a similar double concept of limitation with his distinction between the concept of the boundary and the concept of the limit (Grenze and Schranke). One does not need to know much about Kant to know that these concepts are of fundamental significance to his transcendental philosophy in which he aims to investigate and secure the limits of reason.19 While Kant directly translates limes into his own concept of limit (Schranke), he importantly translates terminus and not limen with “boundary.”20 Whereas terminus has the connotation of completion, limen signifies a threshold. Consequently, Kant clearly accentuates the aspect of completion in his concept of boundary, yet this concept still contains the connotation of a threshold. This connotation of a threshold is, however, not one that holds the threat of e-limitation; on the contrary, it opens the possibility to think a possible completion of Being, which, due to the limit of the understanding, we can never know.21 Kant writes: “Boundaries … always presuppose a space that is found outside a certain fixed location, and that encloses that location; limits require nothing of the kind, but are mere negations.”22 Exactly like the

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notion of limes, the limit is a demarcation of a closing-off, a “negation,” whereas the boundary in the same sense as limen opens towards a space beyond the limit, beyond the fixed location that the limit has closed off. Limen itself is the indeterminate opening of a relation to something still undetermined, something still un-limited. The “boundary belongs just as much to the field of experience as to that of beings of thought [noumena].”23 Despite this correspondence between limen–limes and Kant’s boundary–limit, there is also a difference between the two conceptual pairs. In Kant we find that the limit and the boundary have well-defined functions in relation to understanding and reason respectively: the limit restricts understanding to the world of phenomena while the boundary opens the possibility of reason to think – without any content – the completion of reason in the noumena. The noumena are radically unknown, but nevertheless they are central to the stability of Kant’s entire system. “The concept of a noumenon, as taken merely problematically, remains nonetheless not only permissible, but, as a concept putting sensibility within limits, also unavoidable.”24 The noumena are “boundary-concepts”25 that we have no positive knowledge of, but that we can think negatively. The boundary opens the closed-ness of the limit to an insight into first and foremost that primary being, which traditionally should guarantee the structure of the limit itself. Even if in Kant we can only gain the insight that we cannot know this primary being, it is nevertheless a constitutive and necessary stabilizing aspect in his thought. It is in the encounter with what we absolutely cannot know, the noumena, that reason finds its completion. Furthermore, as pure intellectual beings the noumena do not destabilize reason; there is no “abyssal” unknown here.26 The impossibility of intellectual intuition closes the possibility of knowledge by means of a limit, while the boundary opens the way for reason to move beyond the limit of possible knowledge to think what it cannot know. The threshold-boundary of possible knowledge marks the completion of reason. In this sense the limit is intimately associated with understanding, the natural sciences, and phenomena, while the boundary is likewise associated with reason, metaphysics, and the noumena. Accordingly, we can say with Kant’s crucial distinction between knowledge and thought that the limit and the boundary have distinct roles despite their shared position as demarcations of the limits of reason. This distinction is fundamental to Kant’s system, but it is far from evident, if we look at Cacciari’s notions of limen and limes, where we find a strong tension or undecided-ness. “Where does the emphasis lie when we say limit [confine]: is it on the continuum of the limes – the space of

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the limit – or on the ‘open gateway’ of the limen? Yet there can be no limit that is not both limen and limes together”27 The figure of limitation is an opening up and a closing, limen and limes occupy the very same position, and only together do they constitute limitation. Cacciari thus states: [T]he limit escapes any attempt to determine it univocally, to ‘confine’ it to a single meaning. That which, according to the root of the notion, should appear firmly secured, … reveals itself, at the end, indeterminate and ambiguous.28

Therefore, … The difficulty of defining the limit does not, however, do away with the need for it. The limit cannot be e-liminated.29

At the heart of the limen–limes relation lies a tension that renders limitation “ambiguous” and thus entails an indeterminacy, which goes undetected in Kant’s distinction of the boundary–limit relation. This is clearly due to his point of departure in terminus rather than limen. However, if we approach the question in light of Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics we can also detect how Kant’s reception of the question of limitation has a deeper root in a metaphysical determination of the question of limitation. The aspect of limes, of the limit, dominates this determination. But how does this dominating role establish itself? It would appear that this occurs when limes takes priority over limen. Umberto Eco identifies the time in which this happens in what he calls Latinity, where the notion of the limes takes the role of the fundamental idea not only in relation to the limen, but of this epoch as such.30 This is when: “the basic principle … becomes the notion of limes, that is, of the border and thus of the limit.”31 To understand this we must go back to its source: According to Greek rationalism – from Plato to Aristotle and beyond – to know is to know by a cause. Even to define God is to define a cause such that there can be no other cause. To explain the world by causes is to elaborate a notion of a unidirectional chain: if a movement goes from Alpha to Omega, no force can make it go from Omega to Alpha (in the fable of Phaedrus the wolf is an abuser exactly because it claims to reverse this principle). To found such a unidirectional chain one must assume some principles beforehand: the principle of identity (A=B), the principle of noncontradiction, and the principle of excluded middle.32

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Eco does not here develop further how the notion of limit (limes) and Greek rationality are connected, but that they are essential to each other is not doubted: Greek rationality is the source of the principle of the limit in Latinity. Developing this connection, we can say that if we are to establish a principle of identity it is necessary to be able to separate and individuate one unity from another in order to be able to state that there is an identity between them. This calls for a strong figure of limitation that does not leave any doubt as to where a thing begins and where it ends. The figure must exclude any disturbing elements that would blur its distinctions, its limiting power; thus it also constitutes the principle of excluded middle and allows for the possibility of upholding the principle of noncontradiction. This latter principle can only be applied if the contradiction between opposing elements can be identified. Thus we are back with the principle of identity and we can finally point out that it is only because of this interpretation of the limit as a closing-off, as a negation of exchange (of crossing back and forth over the limit) that it can secure the unidirectional chain of causes. It is worth noting here, as we try to establish how deeply rooted and how pervasive the figure of limitation is in metaphysics, that Greek rationalism is not a strictly abstract affair but is also rooted in a more deep-seated epochal experience.33 This is important in order to understand why and how the notion of the limit became the fundamental idea of Latinity as such, its historical “a priori,” and why it did not dominate Greek thought. Eco explains it in the following way: Fascinated by infinity [apeiron], Greek civilization elaborates, at the same time that it elaborates the concepts of identity and noncontradiction, the idea of continual metamorphosis, symbolized by Hermes. … In the myth of Hermes, the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle are denied; the causal chains fold into themselves in a spiral, after precedes the before, the god knows no more spatial borders and can be, under different forms, in different places at the same moment.34

Greek experience, as we join Heidegger in calling it, is comprised of a world of myths, the arts, the sciences, and philosophy. It would be an error of historical hindsight to keep these elements strictly apart, since they on the one hand compose one Greek experience, and on the other hand because such rigid distinctions only appear later in history. In our view the Greek experience is determined by the constitutive interpretation of limitation captured in the notions of peras and apeiron.35 This interpretation, or configuration of limitation, marks Western thought as such, but this

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mark, this determination is also forgotten and covered over by another epochal interpretation of limitation, i.e. the metaphysical interpretation. We can follow this in Eco’s description of Latinity as we move ahead towards drawing up fully the figure of metaphysical limitation. Eco writes: The Latin obsession with the spatial border was born with the myth of foundation. Romulus drew a line of demarcation and killed his brother because he did not respect it. Without the recognition of a border there can be no civitas. Bridges (pontes) are sacrilegious because they cross the sulcus, this circle of water that defines the limits of the city. This is why their construction can be made only under the strict ritual control of the pontefix. The ideology of the pax romana was based on the precision of borders. The force of the Empire lay in the fact of knowing on which vallum, inside which limen, it was necessary to set up the defence.36

We can see here how a strong hierarchical distinction between the threshold and the limit, between limes and limen, becomes apparent: only by the closed-ness of the limit and the effort to isolate it from the openness of the threshold can the Roman Empire secure its borders; and likewise, only because of the strong distinctions of the limit can logic emancipate itself from the current of Greek thought which contradicts it. The point here is not to define whether one caused the other or vice versa. The important thing is to indicate how the limit gains its status as the privileged interpretation of limitation by the insistence upon the limit as a means for safety, for order, for ratio. The limit determines and secures the distinction between beings and, in the most fundamental sense, the distinction between the highest being and beings, between the first principle and its consequences. This specific figure of limitation is taken over by Christianity and continues into Modernity, which the following citation exemplifies, in which Heidegger defines the underlying structure of metaphysics as one of calculation, of prediction; i.e. one that only can be upheld by strong distinctions. Because beings have been created by God – that is, have been thought out radically in advance – then as soon as the relation of creature and creator is dissolved, while at the same time human reason attains predominance, and even posits itself as absolute, the Being of beings must be thinkable in the pure thinking of mathematics. Being as calculable in this way, Being as set into calculation, makes beings into something that can be rules in modern, mathematically structured technology, which is essentially something different from every previously known tool. That which is, is only that which, when correctly thought, stands up to correct thinking.37

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The interpretation of limitation within metaphysics gives the limit absolute priority. It thus seems like the metaphysical interpretation of the figure of limitation is so strong that it defies, by its very essence, any challenge put to it. Nevertheless, we saw how there is no limitation without both the limit and the threshold. The figure of limen has been considered a threat both theoretically and mythically, but nevertheless it cannot be “e-liminated,” so what is its role in metaphysics? The metaphysical interpretation of limitation manifests itself in the figure of a straight line between two things, between two beings. This is most evident in relation to the limit, but it is equally evident in relation to the Kantian notion of the boundary understood in the sense of both limen and terminus (threshold and completion), because they are both present at the very same place as the limit; the limit and the boundary are the “line” of limitation. We found an immanent tension in the relation between limen and limes. This tension is also present in metaphysics but it is always considered secondary to the primacy of the order imposed by limes, by the limit. The aspect of the limen or threshold remains completely secondary to the limit. It opens the relation between the distinct beings up for questioning, first and foremost between Creation and Creator and between the subject and the object. Nevertheless, this questioning never challenges the fundamental distinction defined by the limit. This can be explained in three different ways. In one sense, the threshold can be said to have an entirely complementary role to the limit that allows for a mediation of the dualisms between otherwise closed off or radically distinct beings. In this sense, it is fully integrated in the logic of the limit: it is logical itself as the opening of a possibility of a relation between primarily closed unities of beings and thus to the synthesis of the causal chain. This complementary but indispensable role is clear in Kant’s convergence of limen and terminus, threshold and completion. What is closed off by the limit (knowledge) is completed by the boundary (thought). From another perspective, the secondary role of the threshold allows for thinking which goes against the causal chain of logics, perhaps best illustrated in aesthetic experience. Once again Kant can be used as an example. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant in fact attributes primacy to the boundary. The categories (of knowledge) are suspended in favor of a free play between the faculties of reason, which allows for an experience that defies the unilateral primacy of the limit.38 But the 3rd Critique is indeed third; it remains subordinate to the 1st Critique, The Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, its role is to answer a problem that manifested itself

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in the 1st Critique, the problem of the distinction between the faculties of reason.39 Thirdly, the openness of the threshold poses a more serious threat as it opens up to the figure of the Other. The Other is that which defies conceptualization, even conceptual thought, and thus cannot be adapted into a system even by the mediation of the boundary in a secondary role. It is accordingly that which is fully excluded, which has been denied Being. Traditionally, evil or the irrational are considered in this manner – as excluded – distinct – from the good and the rational. In this sense, the Other is still defined by the exclusive power of the limit. The Other does however have the power to rupture this power through the openness of the threshold; but in this case order is immediately regained; the threshold is reclosed by the limiting force of the first cause or principle, by the limit. Generally speaking, Kant himself never brings the fundamental foundation of metaphysics into doubt. He accomplishes this precisely by keeping the boundary and the limit radically distinct. On one hand the boundary secures the limit by opening that all-important but negative space that allows reason to acknowledge that it has limits;40 on the other hand the limit secures the boundary, since it is only by the logic of a rational faith in a causal chain based upon a first principle that the boundary does not open onto something radically unknown. Such a radical interpretation of the boundary would deprive the limit of the stability held in the promise of the highest being. Turning to Heidegger, it is precisely this radical challenge to the power of the limit that he claims to find in Kant and the latter’s dismissal of any positive access to (the knowledge of) a first cause or principle. In other words (and here it becomes clear why we have chosen Kant to illustrate our argument) Heidegger finds in Kant what in our terms is a constitutive challenge by the boundary to the primacy of the limit. He finds a constitutive challenge to metaphysics itself. The radical interpretation of the openness of the boundary is made possible by Kant but its real consequences only arise with Heidegger, who places a no-“thing” where Kant conceives of some-“thing” unknown.41 Brought to its full conclusion, this would contain the potential of a radical transformation of the entire structure of thinking in which the highest or infinite being, based upon the power of the limit, is replaced by the figure of finitude and the loss of any secure foundation of metaphysics. Thought radically, Kant’s boundary represents a lethal danger to the authority of the metaphysical limit, and could regain shared primacy with the limit, leaving their relation as an open question; a question which potentially

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opens up the possibility of an answer that is not subject to the principles of logic, i.e. to the limit. Kant’s demarcation of the finitude of reason is thus developed out of a metaphysical interpretation of the question of limitation, but it also holds the possibility of rearticulating this question in a non-metaphysical way.

Concluding remarks: a non-metaphysical limit? A challenge to the primacy of the limit could be made by attributing a higher priority to the boundary. Furthermore, it is evident that a re-actualization of the spirit of the other current in Greek thought, here represented by Hermes, could be another way; perhaps, in fact, the two are complementary. In any case, we will have to address the structure of the limit as well, i.e. the full question of limitation. This question is central to currents in contemporary hermeneutics and phenomenology that aim at responding to the experience of finitude in a way that tries to open for a non-metaphysical way of thinking. As mentioned above, Heidegger does not elaborate upon this question in any extensive manner, however we will conclude by indicating how his thought does entail a radical re-articulation of the question of limitation, in a positive as well as a negative manner. We have seen how a re-articulation of this question would entail a challenge to the concrete and almost graphically imprinted figure of limitation in the shape of a line between two things. Kant introduces this challenge by his insistence upon the finitude of metaphysics, which leaves only a negative possibility of thinking some-“thing” beyond experience. Heidegger radicalizes this as he insists upon thinking Being as no-“thing” and thus opens a question of limitation, which, by definition, cannot let two things “be for themselves” but must be answered in a radically different way that therefore could also allow e.g. “‘Being’ and ‘man’ [to]‘be’ the same.” The course of Heidegger’s thinking circles around this question. A concrete manifestation of it in relation to the question of limitation can be illustrated by confronting the Roman conception of the bridge with the one Heidegger describes in his late Building Dwelling Thinking. Heidegger here directly defines this bridge as a figure of limitation and this in its most constitutive sense as a manifestation of Being or more precisely of place.42 Yet, it is not to be found at the limit or border of some closed unity posing a threat to it; instead it is to be found at the very center of the landscape as the constitutive and defining force of this very landscape itself.

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The bridge swings over the stream ‘with ease and power’. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridges crosses the stream. […] With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.43

Notes 1

I would like to thank Samuel Henk Dames and Ben Young for their corrections of my English. 2 See: M. Heidegger, 2001. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, §44. 3 The forgetfulness of this does not happen at once. Plato and Aristotle stand so to speak at the threshold between genuinely responding to the question of Being and articulating an answer that will come to dominate Western thought at the very place of the question itself; i.e. that will bring about the forgetfulness of this question. See: M. Heidegger, 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Polt and G. Fried. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 182. 4 We here use the term limitation rather than limit, because the latter will be used as the term for the defining concept of the question of limitation in metaphysics. Limitation is thus to be understood as a generic term for different aspects and answers to the question of limitation in the ontological sense we are here attributing it. Hereby, it is also implied that we, in line with Heidegger, consider the question of limitation related to a historical question of Being. In my Ph.D. dissertation, I develop in detail this historical-ontological question of limitation in Heidegger. At the moment of writing the dissertation is still in its final stages and has therefore still not been published. 5 M. Heidegger, 1982. “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language. New York: Harper & Row, 14. 6 The approach is determined by Heidegger’s perspective but will to a large extent focus upon metaphysics. It is evidently beyond this work to do anything but to draw up a sketch of what is intended with the metaphysical figure of limitation here. Methodologically, the article will therefore move between a general outline of a broad question of limitation and more specific examples to illustrate these. 7 M. Heidegger, 1958. The Question of Being, trans. W.Kluback and T. Wilde. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 77. 8 The late Heidegger often uses the concept of the Same to qualify the question of Being over against an interpretation of it, where it is determined by a metaphysical concept of identity. See e.g.: M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 147 9 M. Heidegger, The Question of Being, 8. 10 M. Heidegger, 1984. “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking. USA: Harper &Row, 32-33. 11 M. Heidegger, 1968. What is Called Thinking?, trans. F. Wieck and J. Gray. New York: Harper and Row, 223.

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T. Clark, “Heidegger, Derrida, and the Greek Limits of Philosophy,” Philosophy and Literature 11, no. 1, 78. 13 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 221. It is also worth noticing here that the Twofold is another way of saying on, they capture the Same question of Being. 14 The decline of metaphysics sets in when Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes) no longer are questioned as ontologically different from each other but in terms of a distinction between two beings. This decline is grounded in the highest or primary being, in God (or the Subject as the primary ground of knowledge). “A metaphysical consideration must represent God as the highest being, as the first ground and cause of beings, as the un-conditioned, the infinite, the absolute.” M. Heidegger, 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu. Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press, 354. 15 The article is the result of a re-worked paper that was presented by the author at a conference by the mentioned title; a confrence, which was part of the collaboration that later led to the present book (see also this book’s ”Introduction”). The use of the wording of this title is important for the argument here and has thus been kept in its original form. 16 It should be stressed here, that we here use the Kantian concept exactly in the broad sense of “a priori,” as a demarcation of the broad influence of the metaphysical interpretation of limitation. It is thus not an a priori in the sense of a universal structure but rather a “historical” a priori. 17 M. Heidegger, The Question of Being, 77. 18 M. Cacciari, 2015. “Place and Limit,” in The Intelligence of Place. Topographies and Poetics, ed. J. Malpas. London: Bloomsbury, 13. Note: In this translation “limit” has the same generic sense as our use of the notion of “limitation” here. 19 See e.g.: I. Kant, 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Unified Edition, trans. W.Pluhar. Indianapolis, USA: Hackett Publishing Company, Aii, BXXII-BXXiii 20 See: I. Kant, 1970. Vorlesungen über Metaphysik und Rationaltheologie, vol. XXVIII; 2,1, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 644 Kant elaborates his notions of boundary and limit most thoroughly in the “Conclusion” in: I. Kant, 2005. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. G. Hatfield. UK: Cambridge University Press. For a more thorough investigation of Kant’s concepts of boundary and limit and their influence upon his critical thought, see: A. Gentile, 2003. Ai confini della ragione. La nozione di “limite” nella filosofia trascendental di Kant. Roma: Edizioni Studium. 21 The distinction between knowing (or cognizing) and thinking is central for understanding Kant’s critical philosophy and how he introduces the finitude of reason. We can only know what we can experience, but we can think beyond this, and only in this possibility to transcend our knowledge do we have the possibility to distinguish critically between what we can know and what we cannot know. See: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Unified Edition, BXXVi.

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I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, 103-104. 23 I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, 108. 24 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Unified Edition, A255, B311. 25 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Unified Edition, A255, B310. 26 Even if we were to accept Heidegger’s claim, (which we tend not to), that Kant withdrew from the discovery of the abyss of Reason, the point is that he withdrew. Kant insisted upon or never questioned the constitutive and stabilizing role of the noumena. See: M. Heidegger, 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, fifth enlarged ed., trans. R. Taft,. Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press, §31 27 Cacciari, “Place and Limit,” 13. 28 Cacciari, “ Place and Limit ,” 13-14. 29 Cacciari, “ Place and Limit,” 14. 30 U. Eco, 2007. “Weak Thought and the Limits of Interpretation,” in Weakening Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, ed. S. Zabala. Canada: Mc GillQueen’s University Press, 37. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Heidegger conceives of Greek thought as an expression of a specific Greek experience, which is almost inaccessible to us, because we think in the light of another kind of experience, the experience of metaphysics that is coming to an end. See: Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 51. 34 Eco, “Weak Thought and the Limits of Interpretation,” 38-39. 35 In the present paper, where the focus is upon the metaphysical interpretation of limitation, we do not have the space to discuss the peras-apeiron relation in Greek thought. But it is one Heidegger returns to and brings up as a constitutive demarcation of how he himself interprets limitation. See: Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 53-54. 36 Eco, “Weak Thought and the Limits of Interpretation,” 38. 37 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 207. Heidegger here points out an essential difference between, on the one hand, the interpretation of Being in Modernity, where something only “is” if it corresponds to the truth of possible calculation, to the truth of correct thinking; and, on the other hand, earlier ways of relating to Being, where Being could not be calculated. However, and that is our point here, there is also a continuity that moves along the fundamental interpretation of Being relying upon the distinction between God and Creation and between subject and object. It is in the continuity of this distinction, we find in the correspondence between God’s “thinking out in advance” and calculation. 38 See e.g.: I. Kant, 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 76, 82. 39 I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 64-66.

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“Our understanding acquires a negative expansion, i.e., it is not limited by sensibility; rather, it limits sensibility by calling things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances) noumena.” I Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Unified Edition, A256, B312. 41 The noumena in Kant are unknowable but they remain boundary-concepts, and as such they are never deprived of their role as primary beings, albeit this role is highly problematical. In Heidegger this conceptual content is replaced with a radical nothing, a radical question of Being. We could also say that Heidegger dismisses the noumena as boundary-concepts in favor of the boundary itself. 42 M. Heidegger, 1975. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought. USA: Harper & Row, 152. The late Heidegger defines his thought in this period as topological. See: M. Heidegger, 2003. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Four Seminars. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 41. 43 M. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 150.

PART III. PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS: THE SOURCES

CHAPTER SEVEN ON THE TEMPORAL-EXTENSION OF MOODS AND EMOTIONS JENS SAND ØSTERGAARD

Introduction It appears to me that the lion’s share of work done on the subject of affectivity in the philosophy of psychology in recent years has been devoted to developing a concept of emotion, with concepts like moods, desires and feelings playing second fiddle in determining the qualitative nature of an experience of affect. The reason for this convergence on emotion as a means for examining the nature of affectivity appears primarily as a result of how well the concept of emotion lends itself to descriptions in terms of propositional thoughts and attitudes,1 and, by extension, cognitivist2 or non-cognitivist3 terms. However, it is my contention that the readiness with which the concept of emotion renders itself in these terms is not in and of itself an argument for explaining the nature of affectivity in terms of emotions; as the phenomenon of affectivity extends further than the notion of emotions, an account of emotions must address them as situated in a form of intentionality which may find its sense of expression within an extended sense of affectivity. To this aim, I will employ the concept of moods as forming a backdrop for the intentionality of emotions, as moods seem to relate the notion of affectivity to a qualitative experience of association, despite lacking a definite intentional object. In the first three sections, I will qualify the notions of moods and emotions by examining their relation to the associated properties of intentionality, extensionality and their relative degrees of transparency and opacity. By doing so, I will argue for a connection between moods and emotions which relates to an overarching sense of affectivity. This notion of affectivity will then be examined with respect to its temporal characteristics according to a conception of consciousness within the

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Husserlian phenomenology of passive and active synthesis. Here I will argue for a notion of consciousness which takes the retentional properties of time-consciousness as modulating the qualitative experience of the present through an affective awakening of latent sense-unities. In the final section, I will show how this phenomenology of affectivity is expressed in the life of consciousness by examining a phenomenological expression of how the pure-ego lives towards the present through a notion of transcendence within immanence.

Intentionality A preliminary step in regard to uncovering the differences and relationships between emotions and moods in terms of their intentionality may be given by taking note of how they are used in ordinary language: the conditions for using an affective term in a sentence is often an effective basis for evaluating the underlying patterns and properties of that term, because it reveals its relation to the subject and object of that sentence. The first step in an approach to distinguishing between and among affective phenomena is, therefore, examining locutions which employ examples of these phenomena as their central term: 1.

Statements of emotion: a. “S [fears/trusts/hopes] that p” b. “S is [angry/happy/sorry/surprised] that p”

2.

Statements of mood: a. “S is in a [bad/good] mood” b. “S is in a [light/dark] mood” c. “S is [anxious/capricious/depressed].”

The first thing to note is the difference between statements of emotion (1) and statements of moods (2) in terms of their relation to a propositional content: statements of emotion seem to imply a structured relation to the propositional content of their expression; moods, on the other hand, do not. Although statements of emotion can be given as a fully formed sentence (for instance “S is angry”) without specifying a definite propositional content as a sentential constituent, statements of this sort nonetheless seem to be in anticipation of some object or proposition which serves as a reason for the state of affairs described thereby (i.e. “Why is S angry?”). Statements of emotion therefore seem to imply an evaluation of some propositional content as an attendant property, either as a formal or simple reason for its elicitation – i.e. “S was upset that [T broke her vase]”

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– or in terms of how this reason figures as a premise in an overarching sense of a subject’s appraisal of some state of affairs – i.e. “S was upset that T in a drunken stupor inconsiderately [broke her vase].” Emotions understood as cognitive events in which the subject can deliberate on the sense of his or her emotional relation to the corresponding propositional content of that event therefore seem to be assessable in terms of epistemic, prudential and moral rationality, which in turn makes their analysis in philosophical terms more amenable. Statements of mood, on the other hand, do not initially seem to carry this relation to a propositional content, as it is possible to be in a particular mood without being able to specify a definite reason for being in this mood; a person may form evaluations of the mood that he or she is in (i.e. as a good or a bad mood), but may be unable to specify either how or why he or she came to be in that mood. This difference between moods and emotions in terms of their structural property, or lack thereof, to the propositional form or content of their experience has, to some extent, been an argument for constituting moods as a form of implicit or generalized emotions which are less specific in their relation of intentionality to a definite object, but may nonetheless be constituted as a form of enlarged relation to the world as a whole. Moods are generalized emotions: an emotion focuses its attention on moreor-less particular objects and situations, whereas a mood enlarges its grasp to attend to the world as a whole, typically without focusing on any particular object or situation.4

However, the seeming objectlessness of moods is not in and of itself an argument for the presupposition that they imply a relation to the world as a whole, as this seems to undermine the individuated nature of their expression for the subject, which seems to be at the heart of the statement above. Moods do not seem to imply a passive or generic reference to the world at large, but seem instead to relate to the associative nature by which occurrences are understood by the subject; the fact that a specific object or situation is not specified by a statement of mood is not an argument for a generalized reference to an open-totality of propositional content, but instead to the associative manner by which possible, as well as concurrent, mental contents are perceived by the subject. As such, rendering the intentionality of moods as a generalized form of the propositional content of emotions seems to neglect the specific character of the individual’s intentionality in moods.

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Extensionality Another character trait related to intentionality which distinguishes moods from emotions may be given in terms of what can be called their extensionality, which I will here broadly characterize by the vivacity, longevity and pervasiveness that the experience of associative connections has for the experiencing subject. In terms of an experience of vivacity, emotions seem largely to be more vivid than moods, as they are experienced at the moment with clarity of content rather than extended in uncertainty over prolonged duration – the fear that one has left the oven on seems more vivid than the anxiety that there is something one has forgotten to do. Moods, on the other hand, seem more pervasive than emotions in that they may persist in the manner of their occurrence for the person for extended periods of time, even as the occasion of their elicitation has passed from consciousness – one may be angry that one’s presentation did not go as planned, leaving one in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Thus, although moods owing to the untowardness of their intentionality do not seem to render a vivid experience of propositional content, they are, however, often characterized by how they colour experiences: in a good mood we seem to experience the day as “twice as bright,” but in a bad mood the day seems “clouded in a perpetual gloom.” This analogy between the experience of moods and colour serves to underline moods as an associate quality of experiences rather than to their own object, but also serves to underscore how the reception of certain impressions in experience is modulated in relation to this associative capacity. If moods are defined in their latency as attendant properties to the qualitative nature of associate experience, then the qualitative nature of moods may play a part in the receptiveness of a person to new experiences; for instance, when someone says that the boss is in a foul mood, then it would be prudent to present only good news or to steer clear of him all together until the mood has passed. Thus, as moods seem to characterize the manner of association for an individual rather than their own active propositional content, they may be characterized as affecting the qualitative nature of what is and can be made present for consciousness by the receptiveness of an individual to new experiences. Indeed, as Eric Lormand has put it: […] it is plausible to consider them [moods] as essentially affecting what evaluative beliefs, desire, emotions, and intentions can become active, […]among other things, explaining overt behaviour, reasoning, and attention. Moods are not so much in the business of changing one’s beliefs

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and desires as in, […] helping to determine on what beliefs and desires one dwells”5

Thus moods may be characterized as affecting the qualitative nature of association in such a way as to make the reception of certain traits and qualities of consciousness more readily apparent, while leaving others less distinct. By this conception, moods play a role in qualitative experience of emotions rather than the other way around, because they make certain characteristics of a propositional content more salient, thereby giving rise to an emotional receptiveness to the affective experience of these characteristics. The extensionality of moods, which modulates the associative experience of propositional content, may therefore be viewed as a necessary condition or prerequisite for the experience of emotional content.

Transparency and opacity The third distinguishing characteristic to note in the relationship between moods and emotions, connected to a broader conception of voluntary and involuntary association, is their relative degrees of transparency and opacity to the experiencing subject. The relative degrees of transparency and opacity examined here relate to the concepts of moods and emotions partly by their persistence and recalcitrance as experiences of affect in light of cognitive and rational examination and partly by the degree to which the character of this affect may be characterized as non-cognitive or physiological phenomena. Although we have so far specified the emotions as being in an intentional relation to a propositional content, they may, however, not be conflated with other propositional attitudes such as beliefs and dispositions, due to the recalcitrance of being able to persist in the face of rational counterevidence6 – a person may experience a fear of flying, despite being well aware that statistically it is the safest means of transportation. This suggests that the affective experience of emotions toward a definite propositional content is not describable solely in cognitive terms as it is not amenable to rational considerations to the same extent as beliefs and dispositions. As the experiencing subject may be unable to give sufficient reason for why an emotion came to pass, even when the quality, elicitor and propositional content of its occurrence and experience is known, it seems that emotions are not fully transparent to the experiencing subject.

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The conception of moods as modulating the associative experience of emotions may help to explain this relative degree of opacity with respect to emotions. By stipulating that moods are both at a distance from intentional deliberation but nonetheless operant on the qualitative reception of propositional content, the lack of cognitive transparency with respect to emotions may be explained in terms of their occurrence within moods. However, this raises the question of how to conceive of moods within a cognitive framework: should they be construed as phenotypical characteristics of underlying non-cognitive behavioural mechanisms? Indeed, to a certain extent moods seem to align themselves better with descriptions in terms of somatic states, such as annoyance, fatigue and discomfort, than emotions do: It is facetious to claim (say) that S’s indigestion has caused him to be angry that his daughter is marrying that worthless idiot, but it is much more natural to claim (say) that S’s indigestion has caused him to be in an irritable mood.7

This would suggest that moods are more readily describable in a noncognitive vocabulary of physiological conditions for behavioural manifestation than by incorporating them into the cognitivist processing theories of mind. However, although moods do seem to bear a connection to the physiological characteristics of some mental states, such as depression, euphoria and melancholy, they seem to express these as transient properties of the person’s mode of thought rather than as inherent character traits: the statement of being in a certain mood is distinct from the self-ascription of some property of personality. Likewise, the associative characteristics of moods express themselves in relation to a person’s intentions and thoughts, as a matter of evaluative dwelling on states of affairs, rather than on matters pertaining to his or her somatic state. Moods, therefore seem neither completely cognitive, as they do not express a transparent intentional relation to a definite propositional content, yet neither are they completely non-cognitive as they express a relation of influence of the association of thoughts and emotions that is not reducible to their physiological instantiation. Indeed, as John Haugeland has argued in his essay The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism, from 1978: Moods permeate and affect all kinds of cognitive states and processes, and yet, on the face of it, they do not seem at all cognitive themselves. This suggests, at least until someone show otherwise, that moods can neither be

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segregated from the explanation of cognition, nor incorporated into a Cognitivist explanation.8

However, in the following section I will attempt to show how the phenomenological analysis of the experience of temporality in livedexperiences in the Husserlian vein allows for the incorporation of considerations of affectivity that seem at the heart of a more fully-fledged account of moods and emotions.

A Husserlian conception of affectivity Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.9

The first movement in our development of a Husserlian phenomenological conception of affectivity is by taking notice of the temporal characteristics of emotions as lived experiences. By temporal characteristics we mean something other than the fact that emotions happen in time or that they have duration, but instead that one of their central characteristics is their temporal extension as an act-continuum (Aktkontinuum); “By temporal objects in the specific sense we understand objects that are not only unities in time but that also contain temporal extension in themselves.”10 To demonstrate this point, we can conceive of an emotion in much the same way as the melody of a piece of music that is being played. To perceive the music as a harmonious continuum rather than as a succession of notes being played requires us to understand the role of consciousness in the act of making present (Gegenwärtigung). The perception of the melody is not merely the perception (Wahrnehmung) of an objectively present note, but implies a relational awareness within the perception of an immanent object of a just-past (Retention), as the notes just played, and the modifications of expectancy as to a soon-to-be-present (Protention), as the notes that follow the present. The retentional properties of the immanent perception are formed by the notes that have passed from being present, but still linger in consciousness as actualized rather than as past in remembrance. As retentional properties of the object of immanent perception, these properties point to the present in such a way as to colour its experience by their relational connections, as well as project this unity of sense in terms of expectations of what is to come. The present in lived experience is therefore best understood as a continuum rather than as source-point, as the sense of its imminence is always predicated on the sense of its past and the expectations of its future.

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However, as the present is in perpetual change, the retentional awareness of immanence undergoes continual modifications, whereby some properties are made non-actual by becoming past. This process ensures that retentional properties which are not in connection to the immanent present fade into the background as non-present. The modification of consciousness that converts an original now into a reproduced now is something entirely different from the modification that converts the now, whether original or reproduced, into the past. The latter modification has the character of a continuous adumbration; just as the now is continuously shaded off into the past and the further past, so too the intuitive time-consciousness is continuously shaded off.11

However, although these properties are no longer in a consciousness of immanent present, this does not mean that they disappear into oblivion, as it is possible to make them present in non-original intuition (Vergegenwärtigung) by an act of recollection (Wiedererinnerung). However, as suggested, recollection does not return past impressions in their original conception as present, because they undergo a modification of sense in relation to the act of making them present; the act of recollection colours the sense of past impressions with that of the present, because no new retentional properties can spring from a past occurrence. An example of this associated loss of vivacity when consciousness tries to recall an impression by an act of recollection can be given in terms of Marcel Proust’s attempt in Remembrance of Things Past of retrieving the joy and beauty he felt when experiencing Venice for the first time: I tried next to draw from my memory other “snapshots,” those in particular which it had taken in Venice, but the mere word “snapshot” made Venice seem to me as boring as an exhibition of photographs, and I felt that I had no more taste, no more talent for describing now what I had seen in the past, than I had had yesterday for describing what at the very moment I was, with a meticulous and melancholy eye, actually observing.12

Although the act of recollection can make past impressions present to consciousness once more, it does not return these impressions in the same sense of their occurrence as lived-experiences, because the voluntary act of recalling them from memory is modulated by the retentional properties of present as an anticipation of the past. As such, they are susceptible to imagination and the attribution of non-real properties, as the sense whereby they are called into consciousness at the present is not the same as the sense of their occurrence as a lived experience in the past. However, although recollection may perpetuate a sense of the past that was not

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present at the time of its experience, this does not mean that recollection is a form of imagination (Phantasie). Imagination implies the possibility of free variation and malleability of the content of what is present to consciousness, as the mode of presentation as imagined is known to consciousness; one can call into consciousness an impression of oneself as riding a unicorn, but this image is known by consciousness by its mode of presentation to be imagined rather than remembered. The sense of making present through recollection rather than imagination is therefore constrained by a two-fold characteristic relating to the nature of its intentionality. The first characteristic of what is made present in recollection is a parallel experience of an immanent unity of the past as a moment of lived experience through the present; I recognize the content of my recollection as qualitatively different from the content of present experience. The second characteristic is that the reproductive modifications of sense with regard to past experiences are only possible as an intentional process within consciousness, which by its nature strives for a unitary conception of experiences; the sense of what can be recollected from the past is always moderated by an overarching demand for coherence in the present, “[…] the unity of what is remembered.”13 The recollection of lived experiences as past is therefore always coloured by the sense of a conscious present, and yet as presence for consciousness is always an anticipation from its past, consciousness perpetuates its own sense of being in the present by being constituted by its past. Rather, everything new reacts on the old; the forward-directed intention belonging to the old is fulfilled and determined in this way, and that gives a definite coloring to the reproduction.14

Similarly to recollection, association is also for consciousness a temporal phenomenon. However, where recollection is the active attempt to make the past present to consciousness, association, for Husserl, is the underlying and unnoticed prerequisite for lived experience to be awakened as a unitary present. Association is constitutive for the experience of a lived present, because the sense of making present is always a composite characteristic (Verbindungscharakter) of the past: Something present recalls something past.15 However, as the associative character of making present does not imply a fusion of every past experience to the present, which would make experiences of both past and present indistinguishable, association must be thought of as a form of synthesis, where a similarity (Ähnlichkeit) between past and present is drawn as an unnoticed sense connection. This associative synthesis is constitutive of the lived present through a dual conception of homogeneity and heterogeneity in the

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experience of succession and of coexistence: that a temporal object is identical as a synthetic unity over duration and that it is distinct from other temporal objects existing in simultaneity. However, this sense of identity with respect to separate instances within consciousness is based only on a passive awareness of partial coincidence between contents, which nonetheless forms a communion of sense within consciousness. A fusion with respect to content is carried out in the synthesis of the two respective consciousnesses, specifically, the fusion forming a singularity of community with regard to content.16

This communion of sense remains, even as the original phenomena within its field of succession undergo a process of retentional deterioration. As such, these sense-communions are operant on the ways by which events are ordered in terms of sense and expectancy, but they are themselves at a distance from consciousness in terms of an inability to be made present to consciousness. This, in turn, implies that a communion of sense, as the merging of the present to an experience of the past, may occur in a moment of lived-experience both in spite of a person’s voluntary association of thoughts and in some cases without knowledge of how this communion of sense was associated in consciousness. An example of this may be given by returning to Marcel Proust’s example in Remembrance of Things Past of how the sensation of almost tripping on uneven pavement stones elicits an associative sensation of being in Venice that he was unable to recover from his memory by an act of recollection. … almost at once I recognized the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I had stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation.17

However, as the form and sense of succession in a conscious present is singular, a problem of individuation occurs in terms of the coexistence of localized fields of succession and sense; the present is present to us in one way rather than another. A difference is therefore established in the creation of the present as the homogenized synthesis of sense, between the identity of the present, on the one hand, and its sameness and difference on the other; the content of a lived experience could have been different if the sense of its being-given to consciousness were different. Through its passive synthesis, consciousness therefore constitutes both an explicit

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object of its awareness, as well as implicit aspects of sense formation which could or may become prominent (zur Abhebung gebracht) as the explicit sense of a present. Consciousness constitutes partly explicit objects, that is, prominent and actually affecting, and partly implicit (parts and moments) that have not come or have not yet come into relief, but which, however, insofar as they can be brought into relief under “favorable conditions,” are still taken into account under the standpoint of affection.18

The question of why some mental content is explicit as a present, while implicit aspects of associative consciousness remain non-prominent in awareness and how these implicit aspects may become prominent as a conscious present can be viewed as the question of affectivity (Affektion). Affectivity relates to an awakening (Weckung) of implicit retentional sense-properties in such a way as to make them prominent as the lived present of consciousness or the present that this consciousness lives. This passive synthesis of sense properties which culminates in an affective unity of awareness is therefore a necessary precondition for the creation of a conscious present. Affective unities must be constituted in order for a world of objects to be constituted in subjectivity at all.19

The lived-present may, however, also be thought of as a contested field of becoming, as the implicit properties of consciousness strive for prominence as the constitutive sense of immanence. This process of becoming present is, however, predicated on a sense-identity within degrees of modification and against the process of gradual diminution within retentional consciousness; as some distinctive traits of the lived present are made prominent in the foreground (Vordergrund), others shift from retentional awareness of the present into the background (Hintergrund) as past. Although this implies that an aspect of the lived present loses its vivacity in the experience of immanence and becomes non-present, it does, however, not mean that it becomes nothing. In so far as these aspects are constitutive of a sense-identity, they may remain as implicit spheres of sense in the background, even as the original aspects of their content become indistinguishable from each other as past; even though they have become devoid of their original sense identity, their sense-unity remains in the fog of consciousness (Verneblung) and may undergo a process of affective awakening as empty objectivations (Leervorstellungen) in the formation of a conscious present.

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Chapter Seven The constituted object, the identical element, is no longer constitutively vivacious; thus, it is also no longer affectively vivacious, but the sense is still implicitly there in a “dead” shape; it is only without streaming life.20

An affective awakening of these empty retentions occurs when the constitutive synthesis of sense in the origin of a lived present implies a projective institution in the distant background of conscious awareness. A constitutive awakening of sense occurs, whereby a distant sense-unity becomes present in retentional consciousness, even though consciousness may be unaware of the origin or original contents of these empty retentions. An example of this may be given in terms of the feeling of absence: the feeling of absence as a moment of affectivity implies a retentional awareness of the sense that something is non-present, but the awareness of absence does not reveal its content, because the content has become lost to consciousness. Consciousness can only retain the content of what has been lost in the foreground by tracing the sense of its present to the distant background of its constitution in the past. Recollection as the act of making present once more is therefore only possible if we raise a conscious reflection on the associative nature of our consciousness and follow the empty retentional sense-unity of the present to its projective origins in our past and breathe life into an otherwise disorganized background.

On the life of consciousness and transcendence within immanence If we adopt the position we have been developing so far – that the intentional characteristics of an object of awareness are characterized both by the apprehension of the object of the present in the foreground as well as by the formative non-present properties of sense-unities in the background – then a phenomenological psychology may relate them by their expression as subjective properties in the life of consciousness. When we engage or apprehend an object in a lived present, we do so in a naturalistic attitude (natürliche Einstellung), where the reality of the object is given only in the manner of appearance (Erscheinungsweise) for us as the object of intentionality. In this attitude, the objects of our awareness in lived experience are immanent to us in such a manner as to be given solely in the mode of their thematic appearance; we do not engage the object in its own mode of being, but rather by its presence as the object of our intentions and emotions. In this mode of being in the immanence of experience of the present, consciousness may therefore be

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described as immersed in the experience of its own object. The phenomenological method of reduction, understood as bracketing or depriving of the acceptance with regard to the objects of awareness, brings with it a change of interest in the object, as it is no longer meant as an objective existent, but rather by the sense of its being for the subject. The radical change of interest of the phenomenological reduction makes the proper existence of perception with all which is really and ideally inseparable from it the unique theme, or by expansion, the unique theme of subjectivity. The radicalism of the phenomenological reduction consists in this, that every interest in objective existence is consistently thwarted.21

Although the method of phenomenological reduction may seem to be an artificial construct, it nonetheless facilitates an act of conscious reflection, which makes the subjective sense-properties, rather than the thematic object of awareness, present to consciousness and thereby reveals the ego as the centre of its own intentional acts. A conscious reflection on the subjective sense of a lived-experience constitutes the object of awareness both as an aspect of object-polarity as its ideational sense of identity in succession and coexistence with other objects, but also implies an experience of it as an act of the ego in subject-polarity, as being the content of an intentional act. The method of phenomenological reduction therefore reveals how the ego constitutes the objects of its awareness in reflective awareness as the content for a horizon of intentional acts, but by doing so also reveals the ego as itself constituted by the sense of these intentional acts for the present: But this pure I […] is not a dead pole of identity. It is the I of affections and actions, the I which has its life in the stream of lived experiences only because it on the one hand exercises intentions in them as intentional lived experiences, toward and busied with their intentional objects, and because on the other hand it is stimulated by these objects, in feeling is touched by them, is attracted to them, is motivated by them to actions.22

Through the phenomenological method of reduction, the “pure” ego is therefore made thematic, not as an entity existing outside of the continuum of lived-experiences but rather by the manner of continuously constitutive sense-unities of lived-experiences; it is never made present to itself as the object of intentional acts, yet it is always co-apprehended in immanence as the I of these acts. In the act of reflection, the ego is therefore always present as the subject of its reflective awareness, but as the sense of the objects of reflection is experienced as relating to intentional acts of consciousness, these acts in turn become constitutive for the subjective

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sense-unity of the ego. But this also implies that the concept of the ego is in the mode of its conscious reflection in the stream of lived experiences in a dual sense, as being both immanent to the continuum of its intentional actions, as well as being transcendent from this act-continuum by being the affective grounds for lived-experience. Whatever is present to consciousness and is present to consciousness as the same in multiple consciousness is […] an ideal correlate of the synthesis really occurring in the immanence of the intentional lived experience. But everywhere this something, the object of consciousness, is inseparable from this synthesis as something itself exhibitable in it (in a certain broad sense a what directly visible in it) but as something irreal in contrast to what is immanent or, as we say also, something transcendent in relation to it.23

In the ordinary life of consciousness where intentional objects are experienced as immanent properties of the now, the constitutive accomplishment of consciousness as retentional modifications to the present is experienced as a seamless non-coincidence of the consciousness with itself in the intentionality of the now-structure. This may be witnessed by our experiences of emotion, where the contents of our intentions seem to be given to consciousness in clarity of sense to the immediate present. However, once a temporal spacing occurs whereby the intentional objects of a now-structure are no longer experienced in the immanence of their acceptance as lived-experiences but rather by a deference of self-presence in an experience of affect, consciousness is once again drawn to the constitution of its own accomplishment as the grounds for an experience of presence. This deference of self-presence, which is facilitated in phenomenological reduction, may find a similar expression in the untowardness of moods: the experience of an affective awakening with respect to an intentional object in the absence of presence, which characterizes moods such as anxiety, euphoria and melancholy, may facilitate a reflective consciousness of affectivity in the ordinary life of consciousness akin to the one found in phenomenological psychology. In these moments of affectivity, consciousness is reawakened to the opacity of its own constitutive accomplishment and must attempt to find itself in the continuum of time-consciousness. As Nicolas de Warren noted in his Husserl and the Promise of Time from 2009: The ego ‘grasps’ itself as a temporal stream such that consciousness is ‘being for itself,’ yet this being for itself is itself a ‘movement’ or becoming: transcendental subjectivity is not being, but a becoming, in the specific manner of continually constituting.24

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The ego of transcendental subjectivity, therefore, attempts to grasp the constitutive sense of its being in immanence as a being unto itself, and yet as consciousness is defined by continual modifications of relational awareness with respect to transcendence of its own temporality, the sense of its being in an original self-givenness continuously and necessarily eludes consciousness so that it may be receptive to an affective awakening in the present. The Husserlian notion of transcendental subjectivity therefore implies that this self-constitution in the analysis of timeconsciousness should be seen as an ideal horizon for a self-reflecting acknowledgment of the affective accomplishment of consciousness in relation to the temporal characteristics of lived experiences, which by its nature can never grasp the transcendental givenness of absolute timeconsciousness. However, this is not the failure of transcendental subjectivity of being towards itself, but rather the precondition for the openness and receptiveness consciousness to be towards each new now. … this withholding of consciousness from itself in order to find itself again constitutes the opacity of consciousness as the movement of life itself; not the failure of consciousness to coincide with itself, but rather the success of missing itself in such a way that consciousness remains open to itself and to the world.25

The life of consciousness is therefore characterized by the retentional modifications of its inner time-consciousness, which expresses itself as an affective awakening of sense to the qualitative nature of lived experiences in terms of moods and emotions. Our experience of these affective properties and the opacity of their relations to our sense of subjectivity as the unity of experience in the stream of consciousness therefore serve to remind us of how the life of consciousness expresses itself to us as a transcendence within immanence.

Conclusion By examining the property of affectivity in the relationship between moods and emotions, I have attempted to provide an account of how the experience of immanence in the intentionality of emotions is modulated by the associative nature of moods which, despite being themselves objectless, nonetheless colour the qualitative experience of immanence by an affective awakening of retentional sense-unities to the present. In this dual conception of affectivity, consciousness is seen as being both towards the present in the immanence of its lived-experience, as well being conditioned by its own transcendental accomplishment as constituted by

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the temporal nature of the latent retentional modifications. I have thus suggested that the life of consciousness expresses itself as transcendence within immanence, when a self-presence in the consciousness of livedexperiences is deferred by a moment of affective reawakening, such that consciousness calls attention to the opacity of its own constitutive accomplishment. In these moments of reflective awareness in the life of consciousness, transcendental subjectivity may be understood as consciousness’s attempts at once again grasping itself as the unity of its own intentional accomplishments by acknowledging itself as the I of an original time-consciousness.

Notes 1

Dennett, D. 1978. “Intentional Systems” in Journal of Philosophy vol. 68, no. 4. Journal of Philosophy INC. Fodor, J. 1981. “Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes” in Representations. MIT Press. 2 Solomon, R. 1980. “Emotions and Choice” in Explaining Emotions; University of California Press. Neu, J. 2000. A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: The Meaning of Emotions. Oxford University Press. 3 Lyons, W. 1980. Emotion. Cambridge University Press. Goldie, P. 2000. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration Oxford University Press. 4 Solomon, R. 1976[1993] The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Hackett Publishing: p. 133. 5 Lormand, E. 1985. “Toward a Theory of Moods” in Philosophical Studies vol. 47; Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 398. 6 Greenspan, P. S. 1988. Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification Routledge, Chapman and Hall. 7 Lormand, 1985, 390. 8 Haugeland, J. 1978, p. 223. “The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism” in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, issue 2. UK: Cambridge University Press. 9 Woolf, V. 1921[1994]. “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, 1925-1929; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 10 Husserl, E. 1893-1917[1991] Hua X, §7: 23. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins) Husserliana X, translated by J.P. Brough; Kluwer Academic Publishers. 11 Hua X, §19:47. 12 Proust, M. 1923-1927[1981]. Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu). New York: Vintage: p. 897. 13 Hua X, 52. 14 Hua X, §25:54. 15 Husserl, E. 1918-1926[2001] Hua XI, §26: 118. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Analysen zur passiven Synthesis), Husserliana XI, translated by A. Steinbock, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Hua XI, §28: 131. Proust, 897. 18 Hua XI, §32:149. 19 Hua XI, § 34:162. 20 Hua XI, §37:177. 21 Husserl, E. 1925[1977] Hua IX,§37: 189. Phenomenological Psychology (Phänomenologische Psychologie), Husserliana IX, translated by J. Scanlon; Martinus Nijhoff. 22 Hua IX,§41: 208-09. 23 Hua IX, §34: 175. 24 Warren, N. de 2009 p. 270. Husserl and the Promise of Time. Cambridge University Press. 25 de Warren 2009, 259. 17

CHAPTER EIGHT WHAT WAS HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIENCE IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE WHEN READING PAUL?1 JENS LINDEROTH

Wir betrachten nun nicht mehr den objektgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang, sondern sehen die Situation so, dass wir mit Paulus den Brief schreiben. Wir vollziehen mit ihm selbst das Briefschreiben bzw. –diktieren2

It seems evidently clear to us that this quotation should not be taken literally. We cannot travel in time to sit down with Paul in the act of writing/dictating. And even if we could, then we could not be in Paul’s shoes. We could not actualize3 the same experience as he did. Our “faktische Lebens-erfahrung” and our “Explikation” thereof would differ from Paul’s and we would have no access to his private experience. As Heidegger-readers we consider even the young Heidegger who wrote this, to be too clever to express such a hermeneutical naivety. And so we think we know that Heidegger does not really mean what he says. This quote should be understood as the Heideggerian kind of formalization dubbed by him “formal indication.” Together with this hermeneutical truism runs another, regarding what the primary interpreted Pauline material was, when Heidegger tried to explicate the original/Pauline/Christian experience of life. It seems indisputable that it was the letters to the Thessalonians4 where he finds a kind of proto-structure anticipating the existential “Sorge”-structure found in Sein und Zeit. Thus, the quest in scholarship on Heidegger’s reading of the Pauline letters in Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion (henceforth GA 60) has been to understand, evaluate and criticize this supposed Heideggerian formalization of the Pauline material he found in Thessalonians. Questions like: How does the formal indicative method

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work here? What is the content of the Heideggerian explications? And what “is” the status, nature or being of these explicata? Do they violate or transform their Pauline/Christian origin? Is Heidegger guilty of bad or forced exegesis? Is it reasonable to interpret Paul, original Christianity or the existential structure inherent therein from the point of view of letters considered marginal in corpus Paulinum by Christian tradition? We will challenge the double truism behind this main line of questioning5 and ask: What if the phenomenological ambition or the philosophical desire that motivated Heidegger (his “Vollzug”) were concretely to be there writing with Paul, and the concrete Paul he wanted to be there with, was the one found in the dogmatically dense and well-known letter to the Galatians? Not as if Heidegger were hermeneutically naïve but quite the opposite, as if he questioned the naivety of any “historical consciousness” satisfied through a knowledge of “historicity.” In contemporary acts of actualized understanding historical distances are emergencies covered up through “Sicherungstendenzen,” according to him (GA 60, 38 ff.). Perhaps he was not proposing yet another more sophisticated existential “Sicherungstendenz,” but making his concrete emergency of trying to experience the truth of the Paul known in the Christian tradition explicit, without giving in to dogmatical or scientific promises of religious, epistemic or existential safety against historicity. As he says it: Wir müssen also das Bekümmerungsphänomen im faktischen Dasein unverdeckt zu Gesicht zu bekommen versuchen6

Notice how his project is formulated in a hortative construction (“wir müssen…”) as a normative or emphatic quest answering an already present emergency. Not as a puzzle for science or neo-scholastic theology in the realm of timeless or objective knowledge but as a quest for lost meaning for (a (post))modern man.

A note on “formalization” If we read Heidegger in the way suggested above, as highly and deliberately engaged in his concrete personal religious life-experience as it is under transformation, then we are confronted with yet another truism concerning the concept of “formalization.” If Heidegger is completely situated and engaged, why is “formalization” a key concept in the course? Does his use of this concept not imply that what he looks for is some sort of common or general structure as an alternative to what science or

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Husserlian phenomenology could provide? Scholars inquiring in this direction now look in the famous last paragraphs of the first half of the lecture on “formal indication”7 to discern the specific Heideggerian kind of “formality.” But what if Heidegger tends to transform formalization altogether, from an act capturing phenomena in an explanation into an act of freeing phenomena to be themselves only indicated in concrete explications? Heidegger himself states that the common (“das Gemeinsame”) between formalization and generalization is: [D]ass sie in dem Sinn von ‘allgemein’ stehen, während die formale Anzeige mit Allgemeinheit nichts zu tun hat. Die Bedeutung von ‘formal’ in der ‘formalen Anzeige’ ist ursprünglicher.8

It is not easy to interpret this “more original,” but it is unsatisfying if we read the text in a way where it is translated into “a deeper” – or “the deepest level of commonality” – even if this level is called pre-theoretical. “Formal indication’ is even described as a warning and “eine Abwehr.”9,10 Thus we try to track the Heideggerian formalization down by following Heidegger’s formalizing moves when he reads Paul instead of making yet another in-depth exegesis of the direct discourse on formal indication.11 Before we return to Paul, however, let us take a look at the first explicit incidences of formalization in the course. The first time Heidegger speaks of formalization in this lecture, he tries to distinguish philosophy from science.12 Introductions to the other sciences “besitzen eine grosse formale Ähnlichkeit.”13 Here formalization is used not to describe the commonality of the sciences but to single out Heidegger’s own philosophical undertaking. Furthermore, this formal likeness is seen as not based on the idea of science “als reines rationales System verstanden,” but motivated in the idea of science “konkret genommen als Wissenschafts-Vollzug, als wirkliche Forschung, Mitteilung.” The movement of formalization here is 1) to single out what is not part of the formalization and 2) to destroy metaphysical preconceptions of the formal unity. The next time Heidegger uses formalization he is still concerned with the problematic familiarity between science and philosophy. Philosophy cannot be defined through scientific “Einordnung in einen Sachzusammenhang”14 or “ein Begriffsystem.”15 But sentences that could be part of such a scientific classification can also be found in a nonscientific undertaking like painting in a nonscientific way. An example is given and then the third use of “formalization” in the lecture occurs:

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At the same time as Heidegger concedes some kind of formalization of the phenomenon he himself performs in the course (philosophy and philosophical existence), the meaning of formalization is held in suspense. The enigmatic status of Heideggerian formalization is in itself used to keep the phenomenon, which Heidegger himself tries to perform, free of classification.

Cursus interruptus? Einleitung is divided into two parts. The first part ends with an emphatic and personal address to the students: Philosophie, wie ich sie auffasse, ist in einer Schwierigkeit. Der Hörer in anderen Vorlesungen ist von vornherein gesichert: In kunstgeschichtlicher Vorlesung kann er Bilder sehen, in anderen kommt er für sein Examen auf die Kosten. In der Philosophie ist es anders, und ich kann daran nichts ändern, da ich die Philosophie nicht erfunden habe. Ich möchte mich aber doch aus dieser Kalamität retten und daher diese so abstrakten Betrachtungen abbrechen und Ihnen von der nächsten Stunde an Geschichte vortragen, und zwar werde ich ohne weitere Betrachtung des Ansatzes und der Methode ein bestimmtes konkretes Phänomen zum Ausgang nehmen, allerdings für mich unter der Voraussetzung, dass Sie die ganze Betrachtung vom Anfang bis zum Ende missverstehen.17

Since Kisiel 1993 there has been much fuss about Einleitung… as Cursus Interruptus supposedly caused by a complaint from some anonymous student(s) not recognizing Heidegger’s genius just when he was to explain “the formal indication.”18 The narrative of “cursus interruptus” according to Kisiel goes like this: when Heidegger had to end his reflections on formal indication he had only three hours left before the Christmas holiday. Those hours19 were not well prepared, and especially the exposition of single elements in Galatians20 is considered haphazard. The reasons to select Galatians are said to have been accidental; Dilthey writes of it and we find in it the oldest historical information on Paul. After the holiday, when Heidegger had had time to (re)consider, he is said to have given the impression that the lecture(s) on Galatians were only given as an example of an object-historical reading – an example of how not to proceed as phenomenologists.

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This seems to me as if Kisiel reads insignificance and untrustworthiness into the text. To put my position strongly: Kisiel is influenced by a theorizing misunderstanding when he expects Heidegger to have intended to give a more straightforward methodological explanation of formal indication if an accidental interruption had not occurred.21 Instead I see the “interruption” in the quote above as a deliberate and significant rupture made by Heidegger to distinguish a systematical and exegetical philosophical engagement. The “interruption” begins just when Heidegger has warned against a theoretical interpretation of time. He underlines that a question for the meaning of temporal existence must be asked of factic experience, and in the process of factic experiencing, without putting a stop to or brackets around existence. After this counter-theoretical formulation of the timequestion follows this aporetic end to part one, which Kisiel sees as a proof of an interruption from outside altering the course of the course. Heidegger starts the end by stating that philosophy has a problem because it has no object or method apart from itself. Heidegger now needs to rescue himself from “dieser Kalamität” by slinging himself into analysis of a “bestimmtes konkretes Phänomen” without “weitere Betrachtung des Ansatzes und der Methode… unter der Voraussetzung, dass Sie die ganze Betrachtung vom Anfang bis zum Ende missverstehen”22. There is undeniably a caesura in the text. Kisiel finds it originating outside “the logic of the course,” whereas I find it at least primarily originating inside it. If we look at the exact formulation then “dieser Kalamität” refers back to the problem of not having a method or an object. Not to any disturbances from outside. Heidegger’s references to himself are also noticeable. It is philosophy as he understands/grasps/determines (“auffasse”) it. But a little later he can change nothing in philosophy because he has not invented (“erfunden”) it. Furthermore, at least two other incidences in the course or ruptures in the text look similar to this one. The first says: Es ist in keiner Weise zu hoffen, dass das alles unmittelbar verstanden wird, sondern alle diese Dinge werden nur in einem beständigen Prozess des Philosophierens, beständig neu wachsend, zugänglich. Es handelt sich hier nur darum, den Ansatz für das Veständnis der Philosophie selbst zu gewinnen.23

Two pages later we have another one which is even more similar to the one causing “cursus interruptus.”

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These quotes could also be interpreted as smart ways for a young academic to tell his students: “it is not because I am a bad teacher you do not understand; you are just not clever enough (yet).” But notice how Heidegger seems to repeat himself and make extensive use of the type of de-personalized “subjects” so central to his thought. As if philosophy itself – not being a subject – were “subject” in these aporias. Although hard to render in English, Heidegger says: “It” is not to hope … , “it” even has to be prevented that the event of understanding occurs directly. “It” has to be deferred to be itself. Another similarity between these ruptures is a shift from academic lecturing to a more direct address to the students. In Kisiel’s “reasonably complete, albeit economical, English paraphrase”25 these places have fallen out altogether, so we do not know how he would interpret them, but the fact that Heidegger uses emphatic aporias more than once when changing direction at least poses a challenge to his reading. I read these ruptures as Heidegger’s equivalents to Socratic aporias. A solution to a Socratic aporia is always left unsaid. The concrete present ‘whereto’ of these aporetic pointings ‘away’ in the course remain also tacit.26 When Heidegger turns to the interpretation of Paul the week following the rupture causing “cursus interruptus,” it is true, as Kisiel observes, that he heads directly on into the letter to the Galatians. But this heading on is anything but headless. Galatians is Paul’s most dogmatically condensed letter, and when Heidegger wants to use Paul as “Anleitung zum phänomenologischen Verstehen” and does not want “dogmatische oder theologisch-exegetische Intepretation zu geben” it seems like a deliberate start by awaking a sensibility for an “ursprünglichen Weg des Zugangs” in what Luther and Lutherans made their “dogmatische Fundament”27. I do not intend to state that there is no “status interruptus,” but that it can be seen as integrated in the course both structurally and significantly as a way to destruct a theoretical gaze and marking the beginning of an exegetical way to a concrete being-there with Paul prepared through the systematic first part of the course. As the first half never got there but ended in aporia,

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the exegetical part as well as the whole course did the same. The point was not to arrive but to be able to stay on the way.

Heidegger’s description of “the most necessary” in exegetic formalization and the need forcing it into the open In GA 60, 75-86 Heidegger gets the closest he comes to a description of his method when reading Paul. The text is full of discretions and selfmodifying – almost self-contradictory – moves, as if it is forced out into the open against Heidegger’s will. He begins with a question: In welcher Weise kommt das bei der Lektüre des Galaterbriefs von uns in ganz primitiver Weise zur Kenntnis Genommene für die Religionsphilosophie in Betracht?

He answers himself: Das ist nur zu entscheiden aus dem leitenden Ziel der religionsphilosophischen Aufgabe. Deshalb „müssen wir das notwendigste Methodische kennzeichnen, und zwar in kurzer schematischer Behandlung.28

This emergent task links, according to Heidegger, the second part of the course with the first part (he names it: “der allgemeinen methodischen Einleitung”) where he famously reflected on his methodological concept of formal indication. Even though Heidegger does not use the word “formality” here, the move to the methodologically “most necessary” is a kind of formalization where method supposedly is stripped of some notnecessary qualifiers. It is not a move to any pure formality, however, but to a formality born out of the emergency (“Not”) of the circular hermeneutical nature of the task of philosophical interpretation of religion. One cannot fully disappear into a “primitive Kenntnisnahme,” where the not-necessary is also taken into account. On the other side one cannot give in to a theoretical cognition. When a “Kenntnisnahme” has taken place a need to “kenn-zeichnen” arises as an afterthought. The formality of this methodological afterthought is motivated in Heidegger’s need and norm for an explication, undetermined through theoretical rationality. The primitive Kenntnisnahme is itself not-theoretical, but it becomes negatively determined through theoretical rationality if it cannot be explicated as anything but not-theoretical. In this way the philosophically most necessary for Heidegger is also, albeit in a backward way, motivated

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and legitimated in its antagonist, which is theoretical science including attempts at a theoretical philosophy of religion. The antagonism in this commitment to this “Gegen-stand” is not critically aimed directly at “Geschichtswissenschaft.” “Only” at philosophy of religion and of history. But it is a close call: Heidegger’s philosophical need for destruction of historical knowledge runs deeply into the most remote corners of the academic discipline: … die ‘Exaktheit der Methode’ bietet in sich keine Gewähr für richtiges Verständnis. Der methodisch-wissenschaftliche Apparat – Quellenkritik nach exakt philologisher Methode etc. – kann völlig intakt sein, und doch kann der leitende Vorgriff den eigentlichen Gegenstand verfehlen.29

Heidegger concedes that modern history of religion contributes to phenomenology, but only when submitted to a phenomenological destruction. “[D]as vorliegende Material” can only be used as “Ansatz für das Verstehen” if phenomenology “diese Vorgriffsproblematik im Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte ständig im Auge behalten […].” But the historian as historian knows nothing of this “leitende Vorgriff.” And Heidegger seems to see no end to the need for phenomenological destruction. Die Vorgriffe bei der historischen Betrachtung erstrecken sich in ihren Wirkungen bis in die Quellenkritik, die Einzelheiten der Textbeurteilung, Konjekturen, Echtheitsfragen hinein… Man darf… nicht den Briefcharakter isolieren und literarische Stilfragen in das Problem hineinbringen. Sie sind nicht primär. Der Briefstil selbst ist Ausdruck des Schreibers und seiner Situation.30

It is truly a question whether or how “…Religionsgeschichte Material für die Philosophie (Phänomenologie) der Religion liefern kann.”31 The discipline “history of religion” is closer to a “rightly done” phenomenological exegetic explication of a given religious phenomenon than a historyless “phenomenological explication” transforming the “eigentliche gegen-stand” to a “nichteigentliche Dingmanigfaltigkeit” insofar as “history of religion” at least to some extent remembers the phenomenon as historical in its taking cognizance (“Kenntnisnahme”) thereof, albeit in an objectifying way. Thus, he can state: Trotz der grundverschiedenen Herkunft des [phänomenologischen] Verstehens ist sein Zusammenhang mit der Objektgeschichte ein engerer als bei den anderen Wissenschaften.32

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Three formal exegetical “principles” are now discernible, even though we have not been given many direct positive methodological formulations. 1) An antagonism to and a sense of explicative loss in theoretical “Objektgeschichte” and “Wissenshaft” is articulated first, before any positive methodological articulation. The critical response to a concrete factical forgetting or silencing has methodological primacy not just over a schematic or formal description of method but in the formal exegetic methodology itself. Thus destruction comes first. It forms the first part of the methodology, indicating that formality is not only accidentally but normatively impure in Heidegger’s exegetical indications. 2) At and as the very center of Heidegger’s antagonism lies the concrete factical self of the philosopher as well as the self in the material. Heidegger’s decisive and normative question could be formulated as: Are the selves epistemically annihilated or is the “how” of them – their Vollzug – precisely what is explicated? 3) Phenomenological investigation of a material connects closely to history both as discipline and phenomenon. At play here is not a horizontal time-related existence of life without a history (a “Bekümmerungs”-, curaor Sorge-struktur) but the explicative need for historical data, which can be destructed and reinterpreted as phenomenological material. Heidegger’s phenomenological exegetical Urwissenshaft depends tacitly on the historical science it negates. Ambivalence is also discernible towards delivering his own methodology as a system. Philosophical interpretation has to be more than just a private or irrational undertaking. Therefore Heidegger has to be able to draw out some formal-schematic guidelines that could be repeated. On the other hand: if it can be replicated then it is in danger of becoming indistinguishable from theoretical “Wissenshaft.” It seems as if we finally get some positive schematic methodological information when Heidegger says: Die Explikation des Phänomens aus dem Material vollzieht sich in bestimmten Stufen. Schematisch sind die Schritte der phänomenologischen Explikation die folgenden:

But already before the quoted promise Heidegger takes on a reservation that tends to undermine it: “‘Material’ hat einen bestimmten metodischen Sinn.”33

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We are now “reminded” that material without quotation marks is not Heidegger’s “Material” in a determined sense that has to do with his method. But we are offered no explanation of this indication. The determination of how a material is material in phenomenological/ “urwissenshaftlich”/ philosophical interpretation signifies a difference that could be compared to the later ontological differentiation. But the differentiation here only determines negatively. It is a critique in search of or lacking a place to stand.34 Heidegger now numbers two distinct steps. The first one makes the ways of entangled ambivalent closeness to “Objektgeschichte” clearer. The primary (“erste”) in a phenomenological explication is to determine the “Phänomenzusammenhang objektgeschichtlich, vorphänomenologish, als historische Situation.”35 Phenomenology presupposes here explicitly a kind of theoretical object-history. But Heidegger gives at the same time two instructions countering this: 1) As condition for this presupposition Heidegger gives that the “Grundphänomen die faktische Lebenserfahrung”36 is historical. The beginning in “objektgeschichtlichkeit” is legitimized in the historicity of factical life. 2) The prephenomenological determination of the historical situation happens already in any circumstance out of phenomenological motivations. At no point do you have a pure “objektgeschichtlich” material. In the second step of explication is “Der vollzug der geschichtlichen Situation des Phänomens zu gewinnen.” This happens through five steps (a-e). This looks like a neat building-up of a concept, but actually it is a battle in five stages, tearing down in order to get “immer individueller” and as close as possible to the “eigentümlichen historischen Faktizität.” How an explication can make anything more explicit than the phenomenon itself is only understandable according to Heidegger if we make ourselves free of any regional theory with a suffixed, emphatic, impossible and so in a sense aporetic “–unbeirrbar.” Does this mean that the phenomenologist’s goal is gnothi seauton in a private sense? Definitely not! As a specific limitation to the explication Heidegger states: “Das Grundverhalten der persönlichen Lebenserfahrung des Betrachters (Phänomenologen) ist ausgeschaltet.”37 It could seem as if Heidegger in this sentence submits himself to a scientific or

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“objektgeschichtlich” paradigm where “des Betrachters” no longer determines the phenomenological investigations, as he stated that they do on page 82. It also seems to be in contrast to the dimension of personal involvement and the sense of philosophical calling, Heidegger expresses for instance in the letter to Krebs and the letter to Löwith. But if we read the sentence in its immediate context the picture changes. Subsequently Heidegger contrasts “Explikation” and “Betrachtung.” It is not as a particular idiosyncratic person, but as an isolated observer he is precluded as private. An isolated observer observing an isolated “sache” from his private place is not Heidegger’s phenomenologist, but a person intensely concerned with his particularity is. Heidegger states: “Die Sprache der Sachbetrachtung ist nicht ursprünglich” and “der philosophische Begriff hat eine dem Sachbegriff unvergleichbare Struktur.” Heidegger remarks parenthetically that since Socrates: “die Frage nach den philosophischen Begriffen ist… nicht mehr gestellt worden.”38 To introduce a concept of life as irrational would not solve the ambiguity because it would be determined through and through by theoretical rationality. The figure goes like this: If we operate with an observer with an irrational ground to his personal/private life-experience looking at a subject-matter already made into a scientific object, where he just adds his irrational personhood, then it is not phenomenology, because an isolated (private) subject with an irrational life-experience as ultimate ground is an assumption from an already determined rationality. If an irrational component is simply added to “[d]er theoretischen, einstellungsmässigen Abstraktion,”39 then it would make the phenomenon disappear even more. But how can an explication indicate more than tacit life or the assumption of a bare irrational life? Heidegger formulates no solutions for explication here, but in this emergency he formulates three important methodological statements: 1) “Man bemerke: Die Explikation spitzt sich von Stufe zu Stufe immer mehr zu, wird immer individueller, nähert sich immer mehr der eigentümlichen historischen Faktizität.”40 “Personal” understood as private irrational doctrine, experience or horizon is not personal enough. 2) “Die Einfühlung kommt in der faktischen Lebenserfahrung vor, d.h. es handelt sich um ein ursprünglich-historisches Phänomen, das ohne das Phänomen der Tradition im ursprünglichen Sinn nicht zu lösen ist.”41 The problem of relating philosophy to a historical tradition is the exact problem left enigmatic at the end of the course. Here it is left as a riddle or emergency deposited in the concept of “tradition” how personal time can

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be linked to history without either being “de-historicized,” objectified, rationalized or irrationalized. 3) “Der Vollzug der Explikation… ist nur in einem konkreten Lebenszusammenhang zu gewinnen.”42 Only when we personally and specifically do the explication is it known, and there is no objective criterion to prove whether or not it is done right. Again we have an enigmatic localization, always calling closer to a lost closeness to the concrete individual “Gegen-stand.”

Heidegger’s reflections on his reading of Galatians Now we will return to Heidegger’s reading of Galatians. In stark contrast to Kisiel, I will argue that Heidegger’s reflections on his own reading of Galatians before and after the actual reading are of paramount importance if one seeks to understand the early Heidegger, especially his exegetic method or his reading strategy. The difference between Kisiel’s reading and mine can be conceived under the following three headlines: 1) The character of-, 2) the reason for-, and 3) the content of Heidegger’s reading of Galatians.

1) The character of Heidegger’s reading of Galatians The first thing Heidegger says, after the holiday, on the character of his reading is: In welcher Weise kommt das bei der Lektüre des Galaterbriefs von uns in ganz primitive Weise zur Kenntnis Genommene für die Religionsphilosophie in Betracht?43

Kisiel suggests that by “primitive” Heidegger means that it has been considered in an object-historical way without any relation to philosophy before by Heidegger himself. Kisiel’s line of interpretation seems strongly supported when Heidegger says: Welche Grundbestimmung geben wir dem Gegenstand der Religionsphilosophie? Der Galaterbrief hat uns allerlei durcheinander gebracht: Pauli apostolische Berufung, Vermahnung an die Gemeinden etc. Wir haben davon eine indifferente Kenntnisnahme durchgeführt, ohne Verständnis ihres leitenden Vorgriffs: um zu sehen, dass es so nicht geht, d.h. um diese Kenntnisnahme der Destruktion zu unterwerfen.44

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At first glance it looks straightforward: after the holiday he interprets his own interpretation of Galatians as an indifferent taking-notice-of (“Kenntnisnahme”) that only brought confusion or contra-diction (“Durcheinander”). But many things run counter to this interpretation. The intention of “the bringing confusion” is the very destruction of the traditional “taking-notice-of” Paul. The literal meaning of “durcheinander,” “through each other,” does not indicate a disinterested uncertainty but a plurality of struggling possibilities – like the literal meaning of “contra-dicere.” And if we combine the idea of an execution of an indifferent “taking notice” with the description of philosophical concepts at the very beginning of the course, then the yield of the reading of Galatians is seen in a brighter light. Here philosophical concepts are seen as essential and always vague (“unsicher”) because philosophy does not have an “objektiv ausgeformten Sachzusammenhang zur Verfügung” where the concepts (are made to) fit in.45 From this angle, Galatians brings us a vague, indifferent but nonetheless intense concept of the “original” Christian religiosity when Heidegger writes it together with Paul. If the reading of Christian experience “in reality” might as well have started with Thessalonians or Jesus without the primitive “Kenntnisnahme” of Galatians, then Heidegger is looking for “something” behind the thing. What if Galatians was considered in a pre-phenomenological way, leading to and already determined and motivated in a phenomenological interpretation, as we have seen Heidegger describe the first step in a phenomenological description shortly after the reading of Galatians?46 Another way to put this could be: What does Heidegger mean by “das… zur Kenntnis Genommene?” Kisiel seems to suggest that he means objecthistorical knowledge of Paul and the letter to the Galatians. I find it more convincing that he tries to give a phenomenological “Kenntnisnahme” through a disturbance of an object-philosophical pre-understanding of Paul and thus an indication of Urchristliche Religiosität through a destruction of a concrete pre-understanding of Paul.

2) The reason for Heidegger’s reading of Galatians Why has Heidegger chosen Galatians as the entrance to original Christianity? I agree with Kisiel that it has to do with the “historical information” on Paul contained in it, and with his conversion, as well as the “dogmatical information” about justification, grace and law. But it is not as if Galatians provides some kind of neutral or objective information. When Galatians is mentioned Heidegger immediately turns to Luther:

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Then he mentions a Luther-commentary explicitly and continues: “Doch müssen wir uns von Luthers Standpunkt frei machen.”48 He continues with a warning against the use of Luther’s translation of Galatians “…die allzusehr von Luthers eigenem theologischen Standpunkt abhängig ist.”49 Heidegger sees Galatians as a cornerstone in a dogmatical and objecthistorical, modern and Lutheran misunderstanding of Paul. Luther functions here as whipping-boy on behalf of modern theology. But at the same time Galatians is seen as the genuine, albeit misunderstood, primary expression of the truth in tradition. When this Lutheran-modern-theoretical interpretation has been shaken and opened up, through a provocative destructive reading of one of its main texts and events, then a phenomenological reading of the related concepts of theological dogma and historical facts regarding urchristliche Religiösität has already begun. This kind of destructive pre-understanding is exactly what Heidegger sets up as phenomenological task, when he initiates his reading of Galatians: Das Eigentümliche des religionsphänomenologischen Verstehens ist es, das Vorverständnis zu gewinnen für einen ursprünglichen Weg des Zugangs. Dahinein muss die religionsgeschichtliche Methode hineingearbeitet werden, und zwar so dass man sie selbst kritisch prüft. Die theologische Methode fällt aus dem Rahmen unserer Betrachtungen heraus. Erst mit dem phänomenologischen Verstehen öffnet sich ein neuer Weg für die Theologie. Die formale Anzeige verzichtet auf das letzte Verständnis, das nur im genuinen religiösen Erleben gegeben werden kann. Sie beabsichtigt nur, den Zugang zu eröffnen zum Neuen Testament.50

Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion has to conquer its taking-notice (“Kenntnisnahme”) from the pre-understanding in history of religion and Lutheran theology to become Heidegger’s own – just like the Paul in Galatians, Heidegger is fighting (GA 60; 68, 72 & 127). He has to invert the method of history of religion. Even though a distance is kept from theology, the phenomenologist has solely the means to open up a new way for theology and a new approach to the New Testament. So what Heidegger tries to do in this turn to Galatians is the double task of conquering a phenomenological notification (“Kenntnisnahme”) of original Christian factical life, and at the same time performing a phenomenological cognition thereof that transforms and even inverts the two neighboring disciplines, history of religion and theology, as well as

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notification (“Kenntnisnahme”) itself. The explicative act constructs the appropriate room for appropriate science and theology. Thus it is by no means arbitrary when the schematic or formal reflection on method (GA 60 75-86) discussed above comes after a first phenomenological “taking notice of” the matter and the method. It makes it clear that phenomenological matter and method are never separated, not even in an exegetical interpretation. It originates in a peculiar destructive “Kenntnisnahme” of the material with methodological intentions and implications followed up by methodological reflections informed by this “Kenntnisnahme.” This seems rather hermeneutical. But worth taking-notice-of for us is that it is not so much the general, universal or common circular structure of understanding that interests Heidegger. He seems far more interested in indicating the concrete way for him to start – how to take the first explicative step without violating the concrete experience in Galatians.

3) The content of Heidegger’s reading of Galatians At least since Kisiel, Galatians has at best been seen as a stepping-stone on Heidegger’s way to Thessalonians where Heidegger finds a kind of protocura-structure as the “phenomenological content” of Paul’s “Verkündigung.” This reading seems supported through Heidegger’s own programmatic and in this setting unavoidable double declaration on original Christianity: 1) Urchistliche Religiösität ist in der faktischen Lebenserfahrung. Nachsatz: Sie ist eigentlich solche selbst. 2) Die faktiche Lebenserfahrung ist historich. Nachsatz: Die christliche Erfahrung lebt die Zeit selbst (‘leben’ als verbum transitivum verstanden).51

If we interpret it “Kisiel-style” then it comes out like this: 1) Original Christian religiosity is “eigentlich” a particular instance of factical life experience itself. 2) Futhermore factical life is itself “eigentlich” “the historical,” so the original Christian experience is a particular vivid instance of living time. The problem in this interpretation is that it leaves Heidegger indifferent to and outside of the concrete situation. When he has gained his phenomenological insight out of it, it is left behind, violated and forgotten. What Heidegger wants from the Pauline “Situation” or the phenomenon of original Christianity is not the phenomenon itself but a general universal or at least common existential structure present in it. If interpretations along these lines are followed, then we would now know how to go on

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with a Heideggerian exegesis of Heidegger. Whatever text we would interpret, it would not interest us “as such,” but only insofar as it revealed “something” or more precisely some structure of overarching significance on some kind of stable and inter-human existential, phenomenological or ontological field.52 But what Heidegger embraces and calls for is exactly a “Kenntnisnahme” of the particular. Following Kisiel it seems unavoidable to read Heidegger’s concept of “Situation” as a particular incidence of a general experience or as a historical text revealing an a-, over- or trans-historical content “Ein Fall.” Likewise the adjective “eigentlich” ends up meaning something like “in reality” or underneath the surface, and the phenomenon sought to be explicated becomes an essence or a common in a phenomenological field where Christianity would be a disposable particularity. In the related “Anhang” Heidegger gives: Eine kurze methodische Anweisung: …[S]ie annehmend, besagt nicht: sie in philosophische Begriffe aufteilen, zugänglich machen, dabei das ‘uns heute’ Fremdartige ausschalten. Wir würden uns damit von dem, was Gegenstand sein soll, gerade wegbewegen und den ‘Gegenstand’ zu einem Fall, einer Vereinzelung des religiösen Bewusstseins überhaupt stempeln… Historiches Leben als solches lässt sich so nicht zerschlagen in eine nichteigentliche Dingmannigfaltigkeit…; und ganz eigentlich protestiert dagegen der Sinn unseres besonderen Gegenstandes.53

Kisiel seems to see Heidegger searching for that kind of “Gegenstand” – a very early example of Heidegger’s use of quotation-marks – Heidegger warns against. The warning seems to have two layers, which are not seen as conflicting but as supplementary or deepening to each other. “Historical life as such” is very hard not to think of as a “Gegenstand.” This philosophical “Gegen-stand” without Heideggerian quotation-marks is assisted in standing-against those tempting quotation-marks through the meaning of the particular theological and concrete Pauline “gegen-stand,” which “totally itself” (“ganz eigentlich”) protests “da-gegen.” That “the Christian experience” with key-concepts like revelation, incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection originally and at its core protests against universalization (Verallgemeinerung) is right out of a textbook belonging to the emerging dialectical theology – and to Paul, Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, at least as Heidegger saw them. But in the dialectical textbook you would not find an alliance between the core tendencies of Christianity and philosophy joined together against philosophical “Begriffsbildung.”

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I understand the four mentioned phenomena or modalities of the same phenomenon “Urchristliche Religiösität,” “faktische Lebenserfahrung,” “Christliche Lebenserfahrung” and “Zeit” as destructive dynamic concepts where the destruction works both against essentialization and nonessentialism. 1) Their internal reference to each other as “ground” destroys the localization of any one of them as the essence. 2) At the same time, their dynamic reciprocal reference to each other destroys attempts to render them as without any essence. If one wants to get a definitional upper hand by identifying the essence or describing a particular historic event, then the four mentioned “names” for the phenomenon or “gegenstand” destroy the attempt. They indicate four different interpretative directions in a way where they keep our epistemic desire to “have” or control it/them as object(s) at bay. The terms historical, existentialanalytic, theological and ontological could indicate the four directions. The important thing is that the phenomenon “is” all four in a way that destroys epistemic possession but nevertheless intends to leave us with a fourfold explicative knowledge in the situation that aporetically or enigmatically is held together. The specific historical “Urchristliche Religiösität” is in the medium of the existentially structured factic life. Then the “Nachsatz” tells us that this medium actually is the core being of it – but only “eigentlich” in a “Nachsatz.” In the second declaration, we have the same structure in reversed order. The existential structured factical life is essentially historical. Then the “Nachsatz” tells us that Christian experience – which for Heidegger is the origin of theology itself – “lives” the medium of time itself. That “time” as the highest form of universality only “is” as the medium of the particular experience of being Christian is even highlighted and underscored in the parentheses where Heidegger assures us that “leben” here is meant as verbum transitivum. But this “Nachsatz” to the named “Nachsatz” draws further attention to the unstable situation. A space is intentionally sought to be left open wherein the phenomenon or situation in singularis or plural can be with essence(s) without being the essence that can be possessed. Some methodological remarks at the end of § 16, where Heidegger sums up the Pauline “Grunderfahrung,” express this in-tention in relation to the concrete phenomenological exegetic reading of Paul: Bei der Betractung der religiösen Welt des Paulus muss man sich davon frei machen, gewisse Begriffe herauszugreifen … und ihre Bedeutung aus einer Menge von Einzelstellen der Paulinischen Schriften zusammenzustellen, so dass man einen Katalog nichtssagender Grundbegriffe erhält. Ebenso verfehlt ist der Gedanke eines theologischen Systems des Paulus. Vielmehr muss die religiöse Grunderfahrung

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At first sight, it could seem like a search for just another kind of theoretical essence, leaving Galatians behind. Not the one found in conceptual analysis or the formulation of a Pauline theological system, but one found in some kind of phenomenological “Wesensschau.” Then the destruction would only be preparatory and would form the making of a clearing necessary for the formulation of the right essence. If we look for signifiers in our quote pointing to interpretations in this direction of phenomenological theory, we would find the good “man,” “herausgestellt” and “vorliegende [in].” Here it is a good thing to be a “das man” and do what anybody does, taking something out of the event and placing it (isolated?) before a common gaze, according to Heidegger. From here a reading thus supported could go down either a critical deconstructive path, saying Heidegger has not yet let go of his onto-theological and metaphysical beginnings; or a path believing in phenomenological existential analysis, saying that this is not theory in the usual sense, but Heidegger who is beginning to see existential structures accidentally in a religious experience. On the other hand, we have as many pointers to the concrete and particular situation/ phenomenon/ experience. “System” and “Begriffsbildung” is “verfehlt.” One must stay in a specific experiential state and conquer an instruction for a specific kind of interpretation playing itself out here and now. This destruction could easily be seen as far-reaching as one Derrida would perform. But what if both possibilities are inherent in Heidegger’s take? What if he neither saves a privative rest for his private self nor gives himself entirely as object for existential or phenomenological analysis? The key concept here in this middle voice are “Grunderfahrung.” The Ground that is experienced can be understood as particular and universal as well as theological and philosophical. What if this ambivalence is exactly the point? Not as if Heidegger has made a mistake or is not yet mature in thought, but as if the point that he indicates and tries to keep open is a point of existence where the point/essence is the whole concrete existence and the whole concrete existence is the point/essence? Is such a highly but not completely destructive “taking notice of” really Heidegger’s take when he was reading Galatians, or is it just a structure that we impose on him?

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Does the text leave us with an enigmatic and destructed manifold phenomenon so that we reasonably can say that this text is the originary, from which the reading of Thessalonians springs as interpretative attempt, or does this reading violate a reasonable understanding of GA 60? And if not, is Galatians as origin reoccurring or forgotten? Several times Heidegger returns to his reading of Galatians both in his own notes and in the seminar (page 101, 133, 137 and 146). In all places he expresses that it was a necessary first taking-notice (Kenntnisnahme) in his reading of Paul. On p. 101 he calls it a “blosse Kenntnisnahme des Inhalts.” At the same time he sees it as a necessary first step in understanding, and when we try to follow through “das eigentliche vollzugsgeschichtliche Verstehen,” then “sie wird immer durchlaufen.” We cannot see whether “sie” refers to a type of taking notice as the one of Galatians, or to the concrete reading of Galatians. What he tries to take a first notice of (Galatians) is in some way seen as less original and authentic (than Thessalonians) corresponding to a less deep first takingnotice. But this lesser depth is not something that can be over and done with when we have arrived at the deeper level of explication corresponding to the “more original” material in Thessalonians. It stays with the interpretation as remembered. But what is it that is remembered? Are Galatians and Thessalonians two distinct phenomena in themselves or is Galatians only remembered as a less explicit and perhaps “fallen” occurrence of the same “Bekümmerung-structure” phenomenon found in Thessalonians? Nowhere Heidegger says that Paul has forgotten or is in a process of forgetting, when he writes Galatians. We also find the tendency to become “immer individueller” at the level of individual letters: “Jeder Brief einzeln in seiner Situationsstruktur? Und dann nicht etwa Generaliserung!”55 What the question mark means or whether it comes from Heidegger or indicates that his writing could not be understood by the editors is not for us to say, but nevertheless it is hard to see how this quote should be understood as anything but Heidegger expressing the tendency to become always more concrete and individual on the level of individual Pauline letters. But at the same time it is not individuality without some kind of reference to a common essence, origin or structure. Otherwise we would not have to remember Galatians when reading Thessalonians – or remember our first taking-notice when engaged in a full-fledged phenomenological explication. But what is it in Galatians that makes it necessary as a continuous beginning? Heidegger gives four clues when he looks back:

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1) Galatians has a “dogmatical” content, but it must be clear for us how this content can be understood as “glaubendens Wissen.” We are reminded that what Paul says to Galatians and Thessalonians he says now.56, 57 2) We had to begin with “so eine exponierte Position,” because we should not emphasize the historical (as objective situation)58 and forget the “eigentlichen Motivationszusammenhang.”59 3) At the next clue the text is somewhat broken. In a note the editors tell us that two words cannot be deciphered. In der Betrachtung des Galater-Briefes… im ersten Zur-Kenntnis-Nehmen des ‘Inhalts’ apostolischer [the two missing words] Paulus in einer Situation (objektiv geschichtliche Situation), und zwar sofern mitten in seiner apostolischen Tätigkeit: Kampf, theologische Auseinandersetzung. Zurückgehen in das faktische Leben und die Situation (faktische) schrittweise schärfer zu fassen.60

Again we have important quotation marks. There is no room for a content, so we theorize or look on in a disinterested way, but there is room for a phenomenological content marked by Heideggerian quotation marks. And to get to “know” this phenomenological “content” in an adequate way we must start by taking notice of it involved in a not-phenomenologicallysignificant situation where Paul’s objective relations set the agenda so to speak. From this and only from this we can start to understand the authentic situation. 4) The last reference to Galatians comes again from Heidegger’s own notes. Here the reason why we have to have Galatians and the takingnotice of it as an always recurring past is linked to the very origin (“Ursprung”) of theology and the “dogmatical” in Heideggerian quotation marks. [The origin of theology is W]as zur Sprache zwischen ihnen kam… als eigenexplikation der faktischen Lebenserfahrung [when Paul addresses the Thessalonians. This is directly contrasted to empty and detached theoretical speech. It is also:] “Ansatz zur Explikation des Eigentlichen Faktizitätswissens. (“Dogmatische”!…61

Parallel to phenomenology as original science and as the origin to science opposite to theoretical science Heidegger operates here with a nontheoretical original theology and an emphatic – due to the exclamation point – ‘dogmatical’. Phenomenology, original theology and authentic

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‘dogmatics’ in positive quotation marks melt together. Heidegger continues: So auch die anderen Briefe zu verstehen. Deshalb Galaterbrief als Ganzes vorausbetrachtet, um nicht immer zu vergleichen; und zwar so, dass in der Betrachtung sichtlich wird, wie sie gar nicht die Verstehensmittel ausgeführt hat, dass bei noch so weitgehender Explikation das Entscheidende gefehlt hat.62

We can suppose that Heidegger expected his students to be quite familiar with Galatians. Not only does he generally expect much of his listener. The text itself was – and is – central in the discussion about grace between Lutherans and Catholics as well as in the discussion between liberal theology and the emerging dialectic theological currents that Heidegger was interested in at the time. What Kisiel calls “a hastily embarked uncharacteristically unprepared abortive interpretation”63 has to be read against this background. What Heidegger aims at is not to get to a primitive first knowledge of some entirely new material. Instead he aims at a new understanding of something already (all too) well known. What should be shaken is an already established understanding of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and the dogmatic content of Galatians. Here we have to be careful not to frame it as if Heidegger left Galatians behind, forgotten. Either as something only accidentally considered, or as something deliberately destroyed on the way to the real Pauline-Christian experience found in Thessalonians, which is also left behind when it has revealed an existential structure. According to our reading, then to render “Gegen-stände”/phenomena with the ambiguity essence/no essence and with or without essence is at the core of meaning64 in our young Heidegger – as with a later Heidegger writing “Sein” crossed out but still visible. What Heidegger aims for is not an annihilation or ridicule of the text of Galatians, but an opening of an original understanding in and of the text that tends to be forgotten. He reads it in a way where destruction and construction run together. It is a continuous struggle to keep these together, like magnets with the same pole turned to each other. In this struggle, Heidegger imitates the most noteworthy characteristic he finds in Paul in Galatians. At least it is repeated three times: “Paulus ist im Galaterbrief im Kampfe…”, “Paulus befindet sich im Kampfe” and “Paulus im Kampf.”65

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Accordingly we have to re-struggle the struggle in Galatians re-struggled in Heidegger to prevent us from arriving at a fixed way and thus helping us to stay on the “dogmatical,” original theological and philosophical way.

Exegetic formalization We have seen that the methodological indication implied in the interpretation of Galatians points towards an inverted – perhaps utopian – form of history of religion and proto-theology without objectifications or theorizations. Perhaps it would be more precise to formulate this methodological or epistemic norm as “authentic-destructive” (formed from “eigentlich” and “Destruktion”) as well as “there-against” (“da-gegen”) an epistemic world of theoretical knowledge of objects, where “authenticdestructive” and “da-gegen” are explications of each other. Authentic/da, then, would mean inside the Pauline life-world insofar as it is your own and inside your own insofar as it is Paul’s. The inside-insofar-as means that no private/irrational self is/can be/must be isolated outside the explicative “Situation” of understanding. Thus, no strong division can be upheld between a “formal” philosophy and a “dogmatic” theology in this course. At this time, Heidegger thinks concretely his being Christian and philosopher at once.

Notes 1

An English translation exists (Heidegger, 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life, tr. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. USA: Indiana university Press), yet this article uses the German original text (Heidegger, 2011 (1995 (1920-1921)); Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe band 60. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), because it conducts very close textual exegesis. Therefore it would suffer intolerably from a “problem of translation.” 2 Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 87. 3 “Vollziehen” and the related noun “Vollzug-” is one of the three kinds of sense Heidegger distinguishes (the others are Gehalt- and Bezug-sinn (content- and relational sense)). It is translated as “actualizing sense” by Kisiel and as “fulfillment sense” by van Buren. 4 st 1 Thessalonians is without doubt the concrete letter Heidegger refers to in the quotation. This, however, does not automatically give the letter the hermeneutical primacy it is given in readings of Heidegger’s readings of Paul. 5 A side effect or secondary ambition is to keep the reading of the methodological first half and the exegetical second half of the course together in a meaningful way. 6 Ibid. 52. 7 Ibid. especially § 12-13 (GA 60, 57-65).

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Ibid. 59. Ibid. 63-64. 10 Here an important ambivalence around the notion of “Sicherung” (safeguarding) occurs. We have seen how Heidegger describes how other philosophers deal with historicity as “Sicherungstendenzen,” not letting the raw fact of historicity emerge. But the formal indication as a warding off this forgetfulness is itself described as a “vorhergehende Sicherung [Italics by Heidegger]” (Heidegger Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 64). This ambivalence can be taken as proof of the futility of Heidegger’s project – his very attempt of warding off the tendency to secure oneself from historicity shows itself to be a “Sicherung” in itself. To me however it indicates how seriously one should take that Heidegger’s thought cannot and will not solve problems but rather let them emerge in their concrete radicality and make them radically explicit. 11 A thorough presentation of Heidegger’s discourse on formal indication and its problems if taken as a third and deliberately weak form of commonization – the risk of saying nothing – is McGrath, S.J., Formal Indication, Irony and the Risk of Saying Nothing. In McGrath, S.J. and Wiercinski, A., 2010. A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 179-208. 12 Heidegger’s concept is “Wissenschaft” which is broader than the English term “science” including humanities as well. It is this broad academic endeavor he tries to isolate philosophy from as its origin. When henceforth I use the concept “science” it is as equivalent to the German “Wissenshaft.” 13 Ibid. 6. 14 Ibid. 8. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 65. 18 See Kisiel, T., 1995 (1993). The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 170-173. In “Nachwort der Herausgeber” Matthias Jung and Thomas Regehly support Kisiel, though with less certainty. See Heidegger Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 339. 19 Heidegger Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 67-74. 20 Heidegger’s direct close textual indications to Galatians in § 15 are too limited to make a basis for an in-depth interpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of Galatians. This however should not lead us to underestimate their significance in forcing the students to re-read the already too-well-known Galatians. 21 This reading is to my knowledge nevertheless completely unchallenged. Two recent and typical examples: 1) In Campbell 2012 this reading has developed into a matter of fact only mentioned in a note, no longer in need for further argument (Campbell, S. M., 2012. The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life – Facticity, Being and Language. USA: Fordham University Press, 233-234, (note 3)). In McGrath this supposedly course-changing interruption is seen as a demonstration of the point – that formal indication is a form of irony and as such runs the risk of 9

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saying nothing – and thus causing Heidegger to conclude the first half of the course with “a bitter remark to his students, pointing out how little information or product philosophy has to offer its paying customers, the students.” 22 Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 65. 23 Ibid. 14. 24 Ibid. 16. 25 Kisiel’s description of the task he has assigned to himself (see Kisiel The genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 529, note 3). 26 In a letter to Karl Löwith, Heidegger mentions an explicitly tacit origin or motivation to his philosophical existence/work: “Ich arbeite konkret faktisch aus meinem “ich bin”… d.h. ich lebe es – das “ich muss,” von dem man nicht redet.” (Heidegger, M., 1990 (1921). Letter to Karl Löwith. In: Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 2, Im Gespräch der Zeit. Papenfuss, D. and Pöggeler, O. eds. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 29). This formulation in a letter of a tacit origin to his thought bears a striking resemblance to Plato’s seventh letter. In Plato the origin is some kind of metaphysical truth only attainable in concrete living dialogue. Here the act of philosophizing is set to originate in Heidegger’s concrete completely individuated personhood. This explicit taciturnity held together with the aporetic ruptures in Einleitung… indicates to me that aporias and abrupt shifts are conscious elements in Heidegger’s philosophical toolbox. 27 Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, 67. 28 Ibid. 75 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 77. 31 Ibid. 77. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 83. 34 Whether or to what extent this characterization also fits the later ontological difference or we there find a clear cut differentiation between layers of investigation is beyond our scope of investigation. But the “material difference” suggests that Heideggerian differentiation is more like Nietzsche’s hammer than a tool for dissection in the phenomenological laboratory. 35 Ibid. 84. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 85. 39 Ibid. 86. 40 Ibid. 84. 41 Ibid. 85. 42 Ibid. 86. 43 Ibid. 75. 44 Ibid. 79. 45 See GA 60, 3. 46 Ibid. 83-84. 47 Ibid 67.

What Was Heidegger’s Experience in Religious Experience

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Luther was probably a more inspiring figure for Heidegger than he appears on on the surface of this course held in Catholic Freiburg, but still not so much as to interpret him as a kind of Lutheran protestant as Benjamin Crowe and John van Buren almost do. We only notice the function of Luther in the text as a whipping boy. 49 Ibid. 67-68. 50 Ibid. 67. 51 Ibid. 82. 52 This seems supported through a later – often occurring – feature, namely Heidegger’s priority to “die Sache” or “the Being question” over biographical studies. The later Heidegger is not our concern, so I will only suggest that statements like these could be read along the same lines as his rejection of the private mentioned above. 53 Ibid. 129-130. 54 Ibid.73. 55 Ibid.140. 56 Ibid. 101. 57 The quotation marks and italics belong to Heidegger. In this instance they represent that what we think of as the dogmatical content or knowledge in faith is something else in its origin in Paul and original Christianity. 58 Both the italics and the parenthesis come from Heidegger. Again it expresses that something has two layers of meaning. 59 Ibid.133. 60 Ibid.137-138. 61 Quotation-marks, parenthesis and exclamation point come from Heidegger. 62 Ibid.146. 63 Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 172 64 To speak of this ambivalence as intentional would be rude and suggest too much conscious control by Heidegger of this meaning. We want to take him and his thought far more seriously than that. 65 Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens; 68, 72 and 127.

CHAPTER NINE THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE WORKS OF WALTER BENJAMIN DAMIANO ROBERI

A reflection on the problematic relationship between truth and experience is surely a difficult task. It is even harder to attempt from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s thoughts: this is due on one hand to the complexity of this author’s reflections and on another to the vast amount of literature on this topic. Here, I will limit myself to the development of some considerations starting from the problem of historical experience, which Benjamin reflects upon in works he wrote during the 1930s. The first part of this paper will examine the way in which the notion of historical experience is irrevocably bound for Walter Benjamin to the problems of both the infinite task and the infinite regress. I will show the stratification of this topic, looking at texts such as On the Program of the Coming Philosophy, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the Theological-Political Fragment and The Arcades Project. This process of stratification will conclude in a historical experience which is both incomplete1 and undecidable. This experience must take place within a Zusammenhang, but this context proves to be a Zusammen-hang, from both a negative and positive point of view – in the first case because of the looming mythical dimension, in the second for the “mystical causality” that ties the secular order and the messianic. Two dimensions are involved in this, History and Nature. In the second part of the paper I will try and develop this point, adopting a Cartesian representation in a heuristic manner: the branch of hyperbola which Benjamin presents in his juvenile Trauerspiel and Tragedy. I will assume that the two axes of this figure represent Deliverance and Nature: interpretations have generally focused on the former rather than the latter. I will define the upper and lower bounds of History through two famous images of stars already adopted by Benjamin: the comet which passes over the lovers’ heads in the essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and the stars of

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the Eternité par les astres of Blanqui. The paper will end with some considerations about these two portraits, which will not only prove the fundamental importance of the concept of Nature, but will also begin to identify its different levels. I will only briefly outline this point, making reference to Benjamin’s description of the city of Paris.

A process of stratification The notion of historical experience, as developed in essays such as On Some Motifs in Baudelaire and The Storyteller,2 appears to have three levels: the first is the Erfahrung, located within a web of traditions and interpersonal links (as in Nikola Leskov’s tales). Secondly, the Erlebnis represents only the corruption of this experience, as a mere reaction against the shocks caused by the crowds of the big cities. An authentic, punctual historical experience, referring to the messianic arrest of the happening, represents a third level. Benjamin clearly sees the poverty of experience that characterizes his time. The homonymous text, Experience and Poverty, shows how this poorness can become a new starting point; although at the same time it is necessary to reveal the lack of value of the corrupted experience. In this sense Benjamin speaks, in a letter to Adorno, of the construction of the monad-object that converges into historical experience.3 In this way, things are able to get rid of the mythical stiffness which afflicts them. Yet one should bear in mind the link between the philosopher-historian’s intention in this sense (for Benjamin what passes for “impartial” history is in fact only the glossed version of History as written by the winners) and the truth as “[d]eath of intention,”4 as we read in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The tension between these two points shows how the authentic historical experience, i.e. the “third-level,” manifests a problematic coexistence of a fundamental constructive moment with an aporetic coordination between a change of the subject and a change of the world.5 I believe nevertheless that the distinction made by Jürgen Habermas in one of his most famous works6, between bewuȕtmachende and rettende Kritik oversimplifies Benjamin’s position: I believe a disjunction (oder) of these two is inappropriate, whilst a conjunction (und) better serves the purpose, especially regarding Benjamin’s late works. It is surely true that Benjamin’s notion of critique is profoundly different from Adorno’s: this is clearly seen in the disapproving tone in the letters of the latter (among them the famous Hornberger Brief7). For Benjamin, however, the deliverance is strictly tied with an acquisition of awareness, as happens in the awakening: the “now” (Jetzt) of the awakening is that of experience.8

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In what follows, I will try and show how the complicated connection of these two themes is nothing but the result of a constant reflection on the part of Benjamin, starting from his juvenile On the Program of the Coming Philosophy and continuing as far as his later reflections on Baudelaire. In a note on the author of Les Fleurs du mal, Benjamin observes that the spleen is the quintessence of historical experience.9 This is the microcosmic version of the eternal return:10 in this sense its only truth is that of the unmentionable secret of the 19th century. Despite the noun Erlebnis, this experience is indeed dead. The opposite of the spleen is the idéal, whose meaning could be summed up as the fulfillment of the desire in the distance: Benjamin, in his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, interprets in this way Baudelaire’s search for the correspondances of the vie anterieure. Even though Benjamin talks about the conversion of these two dimensions in Baudelaire’s poems, it is nevertheless important to notice how the first is seen as essential, from the point of view of History. Here I intend to concentrate solely on the connection that ties the notion of historical experience to that of progress. Amongst the huge mountain of notes for the unfinished Passagenwerk, Benjamin states that “[i]n the course of the nineteenth century […] the concept of progress would increasingly have forfeited the critical functions it originally possessed”:11 what is usually termed as progress seems instead to be a regress in his opinion. This is not only true in an immediate sense: for example, looking at the worsening of the workers’ conditions, Benjamin observes that the rise of prostitution as a job is contemporary to a process that makes work itself a form of prostitution. More radically, “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe [… ,] hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”12 Here the infinite regress takes the shape of the tempest that drives away the Angelus novus of the most famous Thesis IX. The problem is here not (only) represented by what waits at the end of this path, but already in every station of this via crucis: in fact the enemy, as we read in Thesis VI, “[h]as never ceased to be victorious.”13 How did Benjamin arrive at such a radicalization? Let us look back approximately twenty years earlier: Benjamin was reflecting on a possible PhD thesis topic, “Kant and History.” In his On the Program of the Coming Philosophy and in the coeval fragments, one notices how Benjamin tackles the topic of the infinite task through the mediation of Neokantism in general and particularly of Hermann Cohen’s thinking. It is immediately clear that this problem can be in no way resolved inside a linear temporal dimension. In The Life of Students, Benjamin criticizes a conception

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The neo-Kantian notion of “infinite task” (though this expression is not present in Hermann Cohen’s works) expressed the concept of unity of science15: but the latter is a higher power.16 What separates us from it, as Benjamin observes in his fragment Ambiguity of the Concept of “Infinite Task” in the Kantian School, is not an incalculable, invisible distance17 due to the rise of ever new goals. The infinite task tends instead, in a messianic way, toward a superior degree of experience, if compared with that of Kant, conditioned by the relation with the milieu of the Enlightenment. That superior experience, characterized by a messianic temporality18, will have to represent “[t]he uniform and continuous multiplicity of knowledge.”19 This experience must be the principle of the virtual totality of the pure concepts of knowledge.20 The knowledge of experience is a “[c]ontext of knowledge,” Erkenntniszusammenhang: the experience itself takes place in a “[c]ompletely different order of things.”21 Here we can already note an interaction between a connection, a context, and a superior dimension, seen as a formal coordination: science is an infinite task regarding its shape, but not its matter.22 Benjamin recalls these problems in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (though not exactly regarding experience) and moves forward. He analyzes the concept of romantic critique: its aim is the fulfillment of the artistic work. This process takes place within reality, seen as the medium of the reflection, particularly as “[a] context of relation established by thinking” (eines Zusammenhanges denkender Beziehung).23 At the same time the work is destructed and drawn near to indestructibility, moving forward to superior degrees of a qualitative development, like in Novalis’s most famous expression die Welt romantisieren. “The ambiguity, for Benjamin, concerns the question of final closure.”24 What allows this closure is the idea, seen by the Romantics as “[t]he expression of the infinitude of art and of its unity.”25 Yet we are not dealing with an infinity of the process: “despite Benjamin’s abiding reservations, Hegel’s distinction between the ‘true’ and ‘bad’ infinite is here fundamental.”26 Here the infinity concerns only the connections. These authors do not look at the idea as an abstraction, but rather in a Platonic sense, though only as “[a] priori of a method.”27 In the very last page of this work, Benjamin defines the idea as “[t]he sober light” which “[e]xtinguishes the plurality of works.”28 Yet the counterpart of the idea is represented by Goethe’s ideal, “[a]s the a priori of a correlative content”: “[i]t is not a medium […] but a unity of a different

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sort,” which reveals itself “[i]n a limited, harmonic discontinuum of pure contents.”29 The ideal too “[i]s not created but is […] an ‘idea’ in the Platonic sense.” Faced by this, “[t]he single work remains, as it were, a torso.”30 Moving from this analysis, Benjamin states that the fundamental systematic question of the philosophy of art can be formulated as the question about the relation between the idea and the ideal of Art.31

In these passages it is possible to notice two possible models of the transition from the work of art to the ideal (lato sensu) dimension. On the one hand, there is a continual and virtually fulfilled development, a genetic realization of the system:32 here the work’s transient figure becomes eternal through the critique, which proves itself to be an Umweg compliant to the transcendence of truth.33 On the other hand, we find a problematic continuity, because there is no passage from the archetype to the content, as there is between idea and form. In the first case, the individuality of the work separates it from its aspiration to the whole, in the second the work, despite its contingency, is not suppressed.34 The “fundamental systematic question” returns in Benjamin’s essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Here we are told once more that the totality of philosophy, its system, is of a higher magnitude of power than can be demanded by the quintessence of all its problems taken together, because the unity in the solution of them all cannot be obtained by questioning.

Were it not so, “[a] new question would immediately arise, on which the unity of its answers together with that of all the others would be founded.” From this it follows that there is no question which, in the reach of its inquiry, encompasses the unity of philosophy. The concept of this nonexistent question […] functions in philosophy as the ideal of the problem.35

This unity could echo Plato’s anypotheton in the Republic, which does not allow us to multiply the inquiring movement of the thought into a terrible infinity.36 A real formulation of this ideal is never actually realizable; it can only appear in the works of art: the task proper to the critic, which Benjamin represents in the famous image of the pyre and its ashes that opens this essay,37 consists precisely in letting this manifestation appear. The Ausdruckslose, however, as “moral word,” must arrest the beautiful

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semblance (Schein). Here the role played by the arrest toward fulfillment clearly emerges: the passage to a superior order, though, does not happen through Ottilie’s vegetal consumption and (only apparent) innocence, but through the instantaneous decision of the lovers in the novella The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts. The way Benjamin points to is not then that followed by the characters of the main plot, who are unable to free themselves from the chthonic forces looming over them, but that presented in the novella, seen as a redemptive counterpart to these mythical moments. It is important, in my opinion, to underline the difference between an arrest which is suffered as a result of a passive attitude, and one which appears as consequence of a decision. In this sense the problem of the infinite, formal regress that we have already met now assumes yet another nuance: it reveals its negative character, under the burden of mythical forces and transiency (also in a physical sense). A similar theme was, however, already present within the essay Critique of Violence, which ended by presenting divine violence as an interruption of the mythical circle of “[l]awmaking and law-preserving forms of violence.”38 If we want to understand how it is possible to think of a difference of orders within a mythical context, it is necessary to look at the text Fate and Character. Here Fate “[i]s the guilt context of the living,”39 Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen. In this situation the context becomes completely negative: not only do the mythical forces drive toward ruin, but life itself40 is scarred by guilt. This was already evident in looking at Ottilie’s character. Here guilt (Schuld) looms, hangs (hängt) over the context (Zusammenhang), and History reveals the dark side of its incompleteness and undecidability. Myth can only renew itself by oppressing life; divine violence is indistinguishable from that of myth. Another step is made with The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Within the Epistemo-Critical Prologue, we find once again the usual schema: truth belongs to a different order from that of the phenomena and all knowledge about them. The discussion of the problem posed in the essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities returns here practically unvaried. What is new here is that the “[f]inished form,” “[d]octrine,” “[i]s based on historical codification. It cannot therefore be evoked ‘more geometrico’.”41 As Massimo Cacciari highlights, here we are faced by the impossibility of a system spoken in the dialectic of allegorical language.42 If one wants to talk about the truth, one has to follow the indirect way (Umweg) of the Darstellung of the ideas. Truth, as we have already seen, is “[a]n intentionless state of being, made up of ideas.”43 Once more, Benjamin refers to Platonic ideas. They are an objective coordination of the

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phenomena, harmonic constellations, something already given (“[e]in Vorgegebenes”44), monads which have to be represented within empirics (that become thus a medium). The coordination of the ideas concerns the phenomena, which shall be saved in a theological sense (Rettung). This is possible through the origin, Ursprung: according to Benjamin, this is a historical as opposed to a logical category and has no relation with genesis (in Karl Kraus’s words, Ursprung is das Ziel). Benjamin defines the origin as “[t]hat which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.”45 Within each Urphänomen takes place […] a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront with the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of the actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development […] The tendency of all philosophical conceptualization is thus redefined in the old sense: to establish the becoming of the phenomena in their being.46

Ideas, then, are ein Vorgegebenes, in that they are eternal; on the other hand, they are also a historical Nachgegebenes, so to speak, as “they remain obscure so long as phenomena do not declare their faith to them and gather round them.”47 Their eternity takes life only within the closest relation to History. The ideas are constitutive, not regulative48 toward the phenomena, but – as Benjamin observes – it is not possible to simply say, in an idealistic way, “[s]o much the worse for the facts.”49 It is interesting to notice how Benjamin, in this sentence, outlines a hierarchy of the monads: “the higher the order of the ideas, the more perfect the representation contained within them.”50 What would happen if we asked ourselves: How many ideas51 are there? Of how many things? These questions are perhaps too Platonic, though. A better question would be: How many ideas, as coordination of the same phenomena, are there? We know from Benjamin that their number is finite. If we consider a possible idea of History, it has a different nuance from the common trait in all other ideas. We have already seen that all ideas are historical, and this is limited to the fact that they take life only within History. For example, the idea of the Trauerspiel is historical: the same will be valid for the idea of History. This self-reference seems to recall the great problem of the Platonic theory of ideas, as outlined in the Parmenides.52 From Benjamin’s point of view, however, the right question is not, in my opinion, “Why is the idea of History historical?” (as we already know, all the ideas refer to History), but rather “What does the historical character of the idea of History

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entail?” From a gnosiological point of view, such as that of the Prologue, it seems that the coordination of this idea is wider in comparison with others. Yet we are talking about monads: the difference lies not in a greater extent, but in a greater clarity. History becomes the place where the idea of History begins to live: this fact, moving from the Prologue to the rest of the work, radically changes its aspect. The fight for the Darstellung of the allegorist takes place within a corrupted reality, which seems condemned to sink into a waterfall despite the efforts of the king-martyrtyrant. In this sense, the infinite regress does not happen in a vertical direction, from one idea to another, but on an inclined plane. Here the only possible solution is vertical: the allegorist, who keeps on collecting fragments in a satanic way, has to be saved. He wakes up in God’s world; now he sees that evil is only apparent. The threat of destruction of corrupted reality shows how History is also the place where the phenomena that the other ideas coordinate are at stake. In this sense, even if in an overturned perspective, a simile with the Platonic idea of the Good could be made. As the latter is the source both of the being and the knowableness of the other ideas, Benjamin’s idea of History represents, so to speak, the origin-vortex that attracts the whole reality. The fight over the representation of the idea of History, of the deliverance, thus takes on a different character. It has to tackle the (apparently unavoidable) possibility of a negative conclusion of History itself. The conclusion of this process is the ponderacion misteriosa, the “squared” allegory that closes this work. This “[B]aroque theological resolution,”53 though paradoxical, is however a rehabilitation of the allegory, even in the light of the failure of this artistic genre.54 Here we notice the transition from something that cannot be questioned to something that cannot be intentionally obtained. The dependence of the Zusammenhang, which thus proves itself to be a Zusammen-hang, is particularly clear in the Theological-Political Fragment and in the review written by Benjamin of Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabendio. Both texts show the correct interpretation of this superior dimension. In the second case, “[w]hat is great” is nothing less than “[t]he fulfilment of utopia.”55 In the first text, the relationship between the secular and messianic orders cannot be read through the categories of dynamis and telos, but rather through those of interruption and fulfillment. In this sense, the Fragment represents an ad abundantiam dissuasion toward any possible Hegelian temptation due to the “aufgehoben” that we find in Benjamin’s very last lines on Lesabendio. The attitude of Benjamin toward fragments does not entail any Aufhebung.56 It is only possible to witness, and not to talk about, the fulfillment.57 The connection between the profane and messianic dimensions reveals “[a] mystical conception of

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History, encompassing a problem that can be represented figuratively.” “[T]he secular […] is a decisive category” of the approach of the “[M]essianic Kingdom”; “[j]ust as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force on the opposite path.”58 This image (which has been compared to that of an unrolled ball of wool, which Benjamin used in notes of his experiments with hashish59) can be read as an impossible parallelogram rule for the composition of forces: it would not be possible to trace the resultant vector. Here we find two orders within the same dimension, History. Benjamin thus overtakes the classic contrast between experience-immanence and truth-transcendence. Though he refers to just one dimension, this in no way simplifies the issue. It maintains instead an enigmatic depth (Peter Fenves, analyzing this problem, has adopted the category of “[m]essianic reduction”60). This seems, at least for certain aspects, to recall Taubes’s interpretation, which compares Benjamin to Karl Barth.61 However, in Barth’s words (but contrary to his thinking), the creation does not vanish in front of the redemption.62 Some themes of the Origin of German Tragic Drama re-emerge within the unfinished Arcades Project, and in the notes for the planned book about Baudelaire. One of the most obvious differences is that between the idea and dialectical image: in the transition from the beginning of modernity to the 19th century, even though intentionality plays a different role, the historicity of the idea of History becomes the temporal index of every dialectical image, which remains, up to a certain limit, undecidable. In the reflections on Paris as capital of the 19th century, and in the thesis On the Concept of History, transiency and the negative incompleteness of History become even more profound. Capitalism directs the movement of progress towards destruction. Here the danger is not represented by the destruction of all things, as in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, but by the Antichrist who appears in the Thesis. Benjamin feared that the publication of his last reflections could have led to enthusiastic misunderstandings, and he was probably right. However, it is impossible to ignore how the danger is here even higher, though more refined, when compared to baroque transiency. Now what is at stake is no longer death, but the profanation of events included in the cultural history written by the winners (“[t]he spoils” which are carried “[i]n the triumphal procession” of the “[c]urrent rulers […] are called ‘cultural treasures’”63). Baudelaire seems to identify this danger: he therefore tries to escape from the spleen, looking for the correspondances. This dimension, though, remains closed for him, le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur!: “for someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation.”64 Baudelaire finally falls

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victim to the spleen, to the Naturgeschichte, and wanders through Paris “[w]ith the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind.”65 Baudelaire’s historical experience seems thus to take place in an epoch of decadence: yet Benjamin warns against this expression, which, in his opinion, is simply the equivalent of the idea of progress (“[t]he pathos of this work: there are no periods of decline”66). However, what can be said about Benjamin’s historical experience? Can it really enter a superior level, compared to Baudelaire’s attempt, when faced by the same problems? Is it possible to awake from the dream-nightmare of capitalism? Can the Jetztzeit really prove itself to be the little door for the entrance of the Messiah, a kairos and not only an interruption? What follows below is not an attempt to provide answers to these questions, but instead the outline of a potential investigatory direction.

History and Nature As we have already seen whilst looking at Baudelaire, History suffers an unclear, indistinct relation between historical events and Nature: is it possible to separate these two elements? I think that a figure adopted by Benjamin himself could prove useful: I refer to the branch of hyperbola that, in the short essay Trauerspiel and Tragedy, represents the law of the first of these two artistic genres. These are Benjamin’s words: “the mourning play is mathematically comparable to one branch of a hyperbola whose other branch lies in infinity.”67 I see this image as useful, for two main reasons. Firstly: the other branch, which (like Benjamin) I am not going to consider, is not irrelevant, but belongs to a different order with respect to the dimension of guilt context, Schuldzusammenhang, which is now in question. Secondly: this kind of Cartesian representation allows an analysis of the problematic lack of distinction between History and Nature through the notion of the limit. This is possible despite the difficulties experienced by Benjamin in understanding the infinitesimal calculus: “as soon as I have understood it for two or three hours, it disappears again from my head for about two or three years.”68 A heuristic employment of this category allows a reflection on the difference of orders looking at this curve trend. As the function tends toward infinity, the relation between its two elements, History and Nature can, on the one hand, avoid the problem of the lack of distinction. On the other hand, the result is not a complete disjunction between the two. This curve trend has to be considered in relation to Benjamin’s dialectic of the Umschlag, as it appears in a beautiful image, The Sock, of Berlin Childhood around 1900.69 When Benjamin was a child, one of his favorite games consisted in looking for a

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treasure in a sock, delving deep into it with his hand before turning it inside out, thus discovering the identity of form-container and content. However, I do not mean to attribute equal importance to Deliverance and Nature: it is necessary to remember what Benjamin writes in The Task of the Translator: “[i]n the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of History rather than that of Nature”; the former is indeed “[m]ore encompassing.”70 Here I just would like to underline how, looking at the problem of a superior dimension, it is important to consider these two elements which are always mixed up within an inferior context. In this sense, the idea behind the use of the notion of limit is strictly related to that of threshold (Schwelle). Most importantly, the use of the notion of limit permits a move typical of Benjamin: the reconnaissance of the extremes. Moreover, this would resolve the difficulty considered by Habermas.71 In fact, it does not seem to me that in Benjamin’s thought the messianic arrest of happening seizes the place formerly occupied by redemption. The latter does not change ex parte obiecti. Within the context of History, however, the infinite regress assumes quite different characteristics compared to those of the infinite task, and thus cannot but assume the form, ex parte subiecti, of the arrest. I propose the assignation of the x-axis to Nature, and the ordinate to Deliverance. Obviously, I am not interested here in the relation that normally occurs between the independent and dependent variables of a function. The crucial point is to try and understand how Nature and Redemption (as I have tried to demonstrate before, the idea of History) delineate the space represented by History’s midway world. Two images of stars taken from Benjamin’s writings can represent these limit values, in my opinion. Taking the x-axis therefore as the lower limit, with the stars described by Blanqui in his L’eternité par les astres. The comet that passes over the lovers’ heads in Goethe’s Elective Affinities (interpreted by Benjamin at the end of his essay) will represent the upper limit. Why these two specific images? As I have already mentioned, Benjamin interprets stars as the fulfillment of a desire in the distance. Hope, in the famous Denkbild of Benjamin’s One-way Street, based on Andrea Pisano’s image on the portal of Florence’s baptistery, cannot achieve her object but has, nevertheless, wings. “Nothing is more true,”72 says Benjamin. The comet of Goethe’s novel could then represent the desire of deliverance in the fleeting, and perhaps unique, moment of its possibility. On the other hand, Blanqui’s stars are, so to speak, the tremendous fulfillment of a desire to escape from the 19th century. In fact, Benjamin notices the ambivalence of the Eternité par les astres, which represents both a charge and an act of resignation.73 The former, it could

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be said, opens the gates of his prison to Blanqui, the Fort de Taureau (Blanqui “[w]rites this book in order to open new doors in his dungeon”74). The latter, however, reveals the doors of other, metaphysical prisons, similar to those engraved by Piranesi.75 Here is displayed, as highlighted by Gianluca Cuozzo, the unconscious side of History.76 For these reasons a naturalistic redemption, the temptation represented by a Nature both naturans and genitrix77 cannot be the result of an escape. Moreover, on the opposite side of the political spectrum with respect to Blanqui, we find the possible risk of a regression into a ‘primordial’ conception of History, by authors such as Klages.78 What kind of Deliverance does Benjamin imagine in these two cases? Regarding the comet, what is decisive is an awakening “[n]ot to a beautiful world but to a blessed one”:79 beauty does not simply seize the place of hope as its weak echo.80 Within a world quite similar to that depicted by Kafka in his novels, though, this awakening seems out of reach: in The Castle we read that “[t]he stars up there” provide little help “[a]gainst the stormy wind down here below.”81 Moreover, according to Blanqui’s reflections, comets are simply an enigma, devoid of any real importance within the universe. History here completely collapses on its natural dimension:82 “for Blanqui, History is the straw with which infinite time is stuffed.”83 The only point that matters here is the eternity of the machina mundi.84 However, it is important to point out that the counterpart of this collapse of History into Nature is not, in the other case, a disappearance of Nature within History. Benjamin notices that a relation between a Nature no longer exposed to human exploitation, and released humanity, is still to be identified. This is the direction of Fourier’s reflections, at the opposite extreme of a ‘gratis-existing’ Nature (criticized in the 11th thesis On the concept of History).85 Both these options try to escape from what Benjamin, in his second Exposé to the Arcades Project, defines as a “[r]eifying representation of civilization […] according to which the course of the world is an endless series of facts congealed in the form of things.”86 These facts are not fixed, according to Benjamin, who believes that every moment holds in itself the chance to cast new light on some part of the past: Vergangenheit and Gewesen, the past and “[t]he way it really was,”87 typical of historicism do not coincide88. Within this conceptual space “[e]xperience always has a setting in which it is occasioned as experience”: the “[B]enjaminian realism” is thus a “[c]ounter-realism.”89 Benjamin, opening this Exposé, quotes a sentence from Maxime du Camp, “History is like Janus; it has two faces. Whether it looks at the past or at the present, it sees the same things.”90 Even though this figure has two faces, unlike the Angelus novus,

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his gaze is not directed towards the future, but rather to the present. Benjamin remains loyal to the Bilderverbot regarding the state of the world after the revolution: this is not the crucial point, in fact [t]he activity of a professional revolutionary […] does not presuppose any faith in progress; it presupposes only the determination to do away with present injustice.91

Moreover, it is true that History always sees the same things, but not in the sense meant by the “reifying representation.” This vision, in fact, ultimately coincides with the idea of the eternal return. Here Benjamin thinks about the pile of ruins that causes the tears of the Angelus novus, patient commentator of the difference.92 This Janus-faced figure could be thus considered to be a transitional model between Blanqui’s universe and the most famous image of the 9th Thesis. To try and think of Deliverance from a Benjaminian point of view means, then, to develop a reflection between these two options – on the one hand, a comet that is out of reach, on the other hand an escape into a universe made on perennial catastrophes, whose only pause is the thermal death. Benjamin gives credit to this vision of the universe exposed by Blanqui: “[w]ith gloomy irony,” he “[d]emonstrates what a ‘better humanity’ would be worth in a Nature which can never be better.”93 This, in my opinion, confirms my selection of this option as the lower limit. In either of these two options, however, the city of Paris in the epoch of Baudelaire no longer experiences a real presence of the stars, and not only because of the introduction of gas lights. Here the sky has become a mere “[s]plenetic cupola”;94 within which the stars are only “[a] picture puzzle (Vexierbild) of the commodity. They are the eversame in great masses.”95 The citizens, in their dream-world, are not aware of the enormous pressure that burdens them, unless when they sense the shivers that shake this “[l]andscape built of sheer life,”96 in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words. A strong sense of transiency pervades the great cities, represented by Paris. The most tremendous and immediate form of destruction could be possibly due to a catastrophic natural event. Benjamin speaks of this possibility in two of his radio conferences for children about the destruction of Pompei and Ercolano and about Lisbon’s earthquake, which reveal the dark side of the micro-narrations of a discreet follower of the Enlightenment.97 These two texts seem to me significant for at least two reasons: the first obviously contains the image of the volcano, which will be recalled by Benjamin – not coincidentally – in his reflections on Paris. In the text about that terrible earthquake, this event strikes the city of Lisbon, probably the capital of the 18th century. In both cases, what

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seemed to be an eternal peace between Man and Nature reveals itself as only apparent. It is as if the city is in front of a last judgment: on a wall buried by the ashes of the eruption we can read these disquieting words: “[S]odom und Gomorrha.”98 The catastrophes looming over the city do not only refer to the destructive development of the technique, but first and foremost to the petrified overlapping of History and Nature that essentially characterizes the city. However, this situation is not due simply, in my opinion, to a return of the Naturgeschichte of The Origin of German Tragic Drama.99

Concluding remarks This chapter has set out to show, in its first part, the different moments of Benjamin’s thinking that converge in the problematic notion of historical experience. I have then begun a reflection of what could be viewed not only as a way out of these difficulties, but possibly as something more: namely, a new global reading of this author. An attempt at orientation within the vast amount of Benjaminian reflections, though, defeats its own initial purpose, since it would need further development. This is obviously not possible here. However, I would like to conclude by stressing once more that the concept of Nature in Benjamin’s thought does indeed present various layers,100 and it would be advisable to try and analyze them separately. Let us think, for example, of the Nature of the TheologicalPolitical Fragment, “[m]essianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away,”101 or the chthonic Nature of the essay on Goethe, or the Nature to which Karl Kraus points at (criticized by Benjamin). More radically, we would have to tackle the relation between Nature and Original Sin. What kind of relation do all of these layers have with the presence, within Benjamin’s thought, of two models of deliverance, judgment and apocatastasis? However, if it is true that reflecting and exploring or digging deep are similar tasks (to employ one of Benjamin’s own metaphors), then in this initial analysis beginning with the problem of the experience of History I have only just touched the surface.

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Notes 1 See also MacPhee, G. 2000. “On the incompleteness of history: Benjamin’s arcades project and the optic of historiography.” Textual Practice no. XIV: 579589. 2 For a general introduction to the notion of experience see Weber, T. 2000. “Erfahrung.” In Benjamins Begriffe, edited by M. Opitz and E. Wizisla. Frankfurt am Main: Surkhamp. 3 See Benjamin, W. 2006b. Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge–London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 108. 4 Benjamin, W 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by J. Osborne. London–New York: Verso, 36. 5 Weber, “Erfahrung,” 237. 6 Habermas, J. 1972. “Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik. Die Aktualität Walter Benjamins.” In Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, edited by S. Unseld. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 7 Regarding the Hornberger Brief, see for example Agamben, G. 1978. Infanzia e storia: distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia. Torino: Einaudi 1978, 115-131 and Agamben, G. 2012. Introduction to Charles Baudelaire. Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato, by Walter Benjamin (edited by G. Agamben, B. e C.Härle). Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 7-18. 8 Cuozzo, G. 2009. L’angelo della melancholia: allegoria e utopia del residuale in Walter Benjamin. Milano: Mimesis, 154. 9 See Benjamin, W. 1974a. Gesammelte Schriften. Band I-3. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1151. 10 Benjamin, W. 1989a. Gesammelte Schriften. Band VII-2. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 766. 11 Benjamin, W. 2002. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge–London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 476. 12 Ibid. 473. 13 Benjamin, W. 2006b. Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge–London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 391. 14 Benjamin, W. 2004. Selected Writings. Volume 1, 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge–London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 37. 15 See Tagliacozzo, T. 2013. Esperienza e compito infinito nella filosofia del primo Benjamin. Macerata: Quodlibet, 305-307. 16 See Benjamin, W. 1985. Gesammelte Schriften. Band VI. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 51. 17 See ibid. 53. 18 See Tagliacozzo, Esperienza e compito infinito nella filosofia del primo Benjamin, 352. 19 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 108.

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See Tagliacozzo, T. 2013a. Introduction to Conoscenza e linguaggio–Frammenti II, by Walter Benjamin (dited by T. Tagliacozzo). Milano: Mimesis, 17-103 (here 38). 21 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 95. 22 See Benjamin, W., Gesammelte Schriften. Band VI, 51. On these topics see also Deuber-Mankowsky, A. 2000. Der frühe Walter Benjamin. Jüdische Werke, Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung. Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8. 23 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 144. 24 Comay, R. 2004. “Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism.” In The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 138. 25 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 179. 26 Comay, “Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism,” 135. 27 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 179. 28 Ibid. 185. 29 Ibid. 179. 30 Ibid. 181. 31 Ibid. 183. 32 See Cresto-Dina, P. 2002. Messianismo romantico: Walter Benjamin interprete di Friedrich Schlegel. Torino: Trauben, 45. 33 See Carchia, G. 2000. Nome e immagine: saggio su Walter Benjamin. Roma: Bulzoni, 18. 34 See Desideri, F. and Baldi, M. 2010. Walter Benjamin. Roma: Carocci, 53. 35 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 333-334. 36 See Desideri, F. and Baldi, M., Walter Benjamin, 77. 37 Regarding the essay on the Elective Affinities see Moroncini, B. 1984. Walter Benjamin e la moralità del moderno. Napoli: Guida. 38 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 251. 39 Ibid. 204. 40 On this topic, it is of course impossible not to mention: Agamben, G. 2005. Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi. 41 Benjamin, W., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 27. 42 See Cacciari, M. 1980. “Di alcuni motivi in Walter Benjamin.” In Critica e storia. Materiali su Benjamin, edited by F. Rella. Venezia: Cluva, 43. 43 Benjamin, W., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 36. 44 Benjamin, W. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften. Band I-1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 210. 45 Benjamin, W., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45. 46 Ibid. 45-47. 47 Ibid. 35. 48 See Tiedemann, R. 1965. Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 20. 49 Benjamin, W., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 46. 50 Ibid. 47-48.

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51

For an introduction to Benjamin’s Epistemo-Critical Prologue see Menninghaus, W. 1980. Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 79-95. 52 For two general introductions to this problem see Meinwald, C. 1992. “Goodbye to the Third Man.” In The Cambridge companion to Plato, edited by R. Kraut. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Fronterotta, F. 1998. Guida alla lettura del Parmenide di Platone. Roma - Bari: Laterza. 53 Buck-Morss, S. 1991. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades projects. Cambridge – London: The MIT Press, 173. 54 Lindner, B. 2000. “Allegorie.” In Benjamins Begriffe, edited by M. Opitz and E. Wizisla. Frankfurt am Main: Surkhamp, 61. 55 Benjamin, W. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften. Band II-2. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 620. 56 Cresto-Dina, P., Messianismo romantico: Walter Benjamin interprete di Friedrich Schlegel, 61. 57 Benjamin, W., Gesammelte Schriften. Band II-2, 620. 58 Benjamin, W. 2006a. Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935-1938. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge–London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 305. 59 Regarding this comparison, see Lavelle, P. 2008. Religion et histoire: sur le concept d’experience chez Walter Benjamin. Paris: Cerf, 294-295. 60 Fenves, P. 2011. The messianic reduction. Walter Benjamin and the shape of time. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 3. 61 See Taubes, J. 1997. La teologia politica di San Paolo. Translated by P. Del Santo. Milano: Adelphi, 143. 62 See Barth, K. 1967. Der Römerbrief. Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 90-91. 63 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 4, 391. 64 Ibid. 335. 65 Ibid. 343. 66 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 458. 67 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 57. 68 Benjamin, W. 1998a. Gesammelte Briefe. Band IV, 1931-1934. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 290 (translation of the author). 69 See Benjamin W., Selected Writings. Volume 3, 374. 70 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 255. 71 See Habermas, “Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik. Die Aktualität Walter Benjamins.” 72 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 471. 73 Concerning the relationship between Benjamin and Blanqui, see for example Abensour, M. 2013. Les passages Blanqui. Walter Benjamin entre mélancolie et revolution. Paris: Sens&Tonka. 74 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 111. 75 Ibid. 95.

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See Cuozzo, G. 2015. Utopia e realtà. Tra desiderio dell’altrove, ecosofia e critica del presente. Forthcoming. 77 See Cuozzo, G. 2005. “Storia, messianismo e natura in Karl Löwith e Walter Benjamin.” Annuario Filosofico no. XXI: 413-431; here page 431. 78 Benjamin has, however, some points in common with Klages: see for example Wohlfarth, I. 2002. “Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros. A tentative reading of Zum Planetarium.” In Benjamin Studien 1. Perception and Experience in Modernity, edited by H. Geyer-Ryan, P. Koopman and K. Ynterna. Amsterdam–New York: Rodopi, 74-76. See also Boffi, G. 1999. Nero con bambino. Antropologia impolitica di Walter Benjamin. Milano: Mimesis. 79 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 1, 355. 80 See Carchia, G. 2000. Nome e immagine: saggio su Walter Benjamin, 47. 81 Kafka, F. 2009. The Castle. Translated by A. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 106. 82 See Desideri, F. 2005, Afterword to L’eternità attraverso gli astri, by LouisAuguste Blanqui (translated by G. Alfieri). Milano: SE, 2005, 79-95 (here 84). 83 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 364. 84 A different opinion can be found in Desideri, F., Afterword to L’eternità attraverso gli astri, 92-95. 85 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 4, 394. 86 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 14. 87 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 4, 391. 88 This is one of the main topics of Gentili, D. 2002. Il tempo della storia: le tesi Sul concetto di storia di Walter Benjamin. Napoli: Guida. 89 Benjamin, A. 2013. Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 31-34. 90 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 14. 91 Ibid. 339. 92 See Cacciari, M. 1992. L’angelo necessario. Milano: Adelphi, 85. 93 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, 362. 94 Ibid. 233. 95 Ibid. 340. 96 Ibid. 417. 97 See Schiavoni, G. 2001. Walter Benjamin: il figlio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale. Torino: Einaudi, 179. 98 Benjamin, W. 1989. Gesammelte Schriften. Band VII-1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 220. 99 Regarding this topic, see for example Gurisatti, G. 2010. Costellazioni: storia, arte e tecnica in Walter Benjamin. Macerata: Quodlibet, 106. 100 This has been highlighted in Hanssen, B. 2000. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkeley: University of California Press. 101 Benjamin, W., Selected Writings. Volume 3, 306.

CHAPTER TEN THE ROLE OF CIPHERS AND FANTASY IN KARL JASPERS’S WORK: HERMENEUTICAL AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL ASPECTS DANIELE CAMPESI

The main aim of this chapter1 is to highlight the fundamental role of symbolic language in Karl Jaspers’s philosophy by analyzing two closelylinked concepts: cipher and fantasy. By defining his metaphysics of ciphers as a hermeneutics of “presence and absence” in which the indirect language of Transcendence plays the leading role, the purpose of this inquiry is to show that the liaison between ciphers and fantasy has not only symbolic but also hermeneutical and phenomenological implications. The following analysis will show this in various ways, as will be explained in the main three sections (subdivided into five parts): a) firstly, by a brief introduction concerning the existence of ciphers; b) secondly, by examining the ciphered language of Transcendence, underlining the importance of some hermeneutical turning-points; c) thirdly, by the ciphered dialectics of presence and absence, identity (or unity) and difference, proximity and distance of Transcendence; d) lastly, by highlighting the role of fantasy both from a phenomenological (here the relationship between fantasy, givenness and faith will be discussed) and from a metaphysical standpoint, in this case stressing the relationship between fantasy and the role of art as the “eye of possible Existenz” and the privileged path to Transcendence (e). The third part, the longest and which explains from an eminently theoretical point of view the symbolic world of ciphers, occupies an important mid-position, as it connects the initial hermeneutical analysis of ciphers with the final phenomenological one on fantasy, within a substantially metaphysical framework.

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Section One General framework: The world of ciphers The theory of ciphers is the leading theme of Jaspers’s metaphysics. Jaspers deals with it in the third volume (Metaphysics) of his Philosophie, precisely in the fourth chapter, the so-called Reading of Ciphers (Lesen der Chiffreschrift). The chapter, the last one in his principal work, is divided into four parts: a) the existence of ciphers; b) the world of ciphers; c) the speculative interpretation of ciphered writing; d) the vanishing of existence, and Existenz as a fundamental cipher of Transcendence (the being of foundering).2 As the core of Jaspers’s metaphysics, the concept of cipher “gives the key of facticity, of Dasein, which becomes the appearing or rather the manifold language of Transcendence.”3 The investigation of the world of ciphers (i.e. the Orientierung in den Chiffren) is the authentic key point in his metaphysics. Furthermore, the metaphysical cipher, as a speculation concerning being, is the outlet for formal transcending, the first metaphysical step in theoretical consciousness after its existential elucidation: it leads conscience to the awareness of Transcendence once it has overcome the intellectual knowledge of consciousness-at-large and has become both consciousness-as-such (Bewußtsein überhaupt) and possible Existenz (mögliche Existenz). It is possible to speak of the metaphysics of ciphers in two different ways: on the one hand, as Tilliette underlines, focusing on the way ciphers are the language of Transcendence, heard and produced by possible Existenz; on the other hand, stressing the fact that they are only the language of Transcendence, precisely because of the fact that Transcendence-in-itself keeps its existence hidden. In fact, through the language of ciphers, Transcendence indirectly communicates with Existenz, maintaining its internal obscurity, equivocality and muteness. Moreover, according to Tilliette, Jaspers’s theory of ciphers originates from “the idea of the hidden God (Dieu caché). God is absent, extraneous, untouchable. He is the One, infinitely far, indefinitely distant, and, at the same time, in existential proximity […]. He is not Transcendence to invoke, a Person to pray to. Transcendence is invincibly walled up; we can only grasp its marks, not yet its being, and always ambiguously.”4 The abyss of Transcendence is too deep, like a distant force which in this world addresses its speech only to those Existences which are “ready” for its announcement. Ciphers take shape as “neighboring beings, between the eternity of Transcendence and temporal being.”5 Indeed, ciphered language is inseparable from temporal existence (Zeitdasein), since it is

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both historical and instantaneous. Dufrenne and Ricoeur, two of the former and most influential critics of Jaspers’s philosophy, define all of Jaspers’s theory of ciphers as a sort of “circular movement” “which starts from original ciphers, the language of being, goes through mythical mediation and the language of men, which is properly philosophical, and then goes back to the immediate presence of Transcendence within its original ciphers.”6 This circularity solves the twofold difficulty of unifying Transcendence and immanence and reconciling ineffable Existenz with “clarifying” reason (Vernunft), as Jaspers shows in the 1935 lecture Vernunft und Existenz. It is exactly by that kind of movement that the immediacy of the former language and the readability of the latter can coexist: this will be the main subject of the next section, a hermeneutical analysis of the languages of Transcendence.

The language of transcendence: Hermeneutical remarks As everyone knows, the relationship between Existenz and Transcendence is the principal, leading concept of Jaspers’s philosophy. This is especially true in the Metaphysik, which is both the third part of his 1932 work Philosophie and the last step in his philosophical journey, which, starting from a “philosophical world orientation” (philosophische Weltorientierung) containing the idea of philosophy overcoming the scientific view of the world, goes through the so-called “elucidation of Existenz” (Existenzerhellung), in which man finds he is essentially Existenz and freedom, and ends with “metaphysics,” in which Transcendence manifests its being to Existenz through the symbolic language of ciphers, or metaphysical symbols. On the one hand, Existenz, as he states, is the never-objectified source of my thoughts and actions. It is that whereof I speak in trains of thought that involve no cognition. It is what relates to itself, and thus to its transcendence.7

On the other hand, due to its constitutive historicity, Existenz is always related to Transcendence in a special, specific way, that is in a hermeneutical situation, in which one can find circular movement between the original manifestation of Transcendence and the language of metaphysical symbolism which has already taken shape. The latter is the horizon in which the experience of Existenz occurs:

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Chapter Ten Whatever Existenz experiences as its transcendence will be brought to present lucidity by what it hears from its past. No more than I invent and make my own language do I invent and make the metaphysical symbolism, the language in which transcendence is experienced.8

Let us now consider the structure of the hermeneutical circle arising from the original language of Transcendence and developing through its historical symbolization. Although the relationship between Existenz and Transcendence is a concrete, singular, unrepeatable one, the manifestation of Transcendence, i.e. its reflection in objectivity, implies the universality of language. The attempt to objectively reflect transcendence is firstly achieved by mythology, through an “overflowing, ever-changing wealth of tales, figures, and interpretations, by the unfoldment of transcendence that pervades mundane knowledge and accompanies it.”9 It is secondly fulfilled by theology and metaphysical philosophy. Theology “tries on the ground of historically fixed revelation,”10 taking the form of knowledge which is like a systematic exposition of the sole truth. Metaphysics, in turn, attempts to express the reality of transcendence by thoughts that reach the ultimate origins and limits of existence, turn somersaults, and require present fulfillment by a historic Existenz.11

More important, metaphysics also seeks to appropriate (aneignen) and to comprehend the contents of mythology and revelation, which are initially “alien” to metaphysical concepts.12 A peculiar relationship may arise between mythology, theology and philosophy:13 each of them are in mutual opposition, although they have meaning only when referring to each other and in relation to Existenz (through the mediation of historicity, a concept that, in reading Jaspers, can never be disregarded). The latter has “the objectivity of tradition”14 as the condition for its freedom, but at the same time always assimilates and gives life to handed-down symbols.15 Not objects, but symbols are in fact the contents of metaphysical thought:16 We call the metaphysical objectivity a cipher because it is the language of transcendence, not transcendence itself. It is not a language to be understood or even heard in consciousness at large. This kind of language 17 and the manner in which it accosts us are for possible Existenz alone.

Existenz can hear the voice of the Transcendence only in an equivocal (vieldeutig) manner and primarily when Transcendence manifests itself in

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the form of the following three languages: the “direct language of transcendence,” which “will be heard by an individual, at a singular historic moment”;18 the “second language,” that of palpable transmission from Existenz to Existenz, detaches the content from the original hearing and makes transferable – as a narrative, an image, a form, a gesture – what seemed to be incommunicable.19

Finally, the “third language,” that of “philosophical communication” and “metaphysical speculation,” which aims to learn what is actually “incognoscible”:20 this happens “when our thinking takes aim at this merely palpable language and penetrates it to the source.”21 It may be possible to show the hermeneutical aspect of ciphers through the following comparative analysis of those languages, which is explainable through a critique of objectivity: An object that is such a phenomenon must be evanescent for our consciousness, since it is not extant being but the language of transcendent being for the being of freedom.22

This means that what vanishes as an object for consciousness at large takes on value and meaning for Existenz, while becoming a cipher, an evocation of the existence of Transcendence: this is properly what we can call “the transcending movement” of Existenz.23 Here we have a kind of hermeneutical “circle” between the metaphysical reading of ciphers and the elucidation of Existenz. Interpreting ciphers is the elucidation of the ways leading Existenz to Transcendence; on the other hand, it can be outlined only beginning from the elucidation of Existenz, since the origin of transcending is in the real search for Transcendence carried out by Existenz; transcending objectivity categories, i.e. the experience of the foundering of thought, and assurance of the presence of Transcendence “in cipher writing”24 can assume their own importance and weight only through the elucidation of Existenz. Metaphysics, which begins from the elucidation of Existenz, is a “symbolic thinking” (Denken im Symbol).25 The “metaphysical symbol” (metaphysiches Symbol) is quite different from a “sign.” That is the first main distinction. Whereas a sign is an image or representation of something that could in turn be taken as an object, the “metaphysical symbol is the objectification of something nonobjective in itself.”26 Therefore, a metaphysical symbol cannot be “interpretable” (deutbar), because it cannot be translated in terms of empirical or conceptual reality:

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Chapter Ten To understand a symbol does therefore not mean to know its meaning rationally, to be able to translate the symbol; what it means is that an Existenz experiences in the symbolic intention this incomparable reference to something transcendent, and that it has this experience at the boundary where the object disappears.27

According to Jaspers, the metaphysical symbol can be defined more precisely as a cipher, since the notion of a symbol is often employed in the meaning of sign or similitude, i.e. as “interpretable symbol.” On the other hand, the latter conception of symbol shows its validity only from consciousness in a very broad sense, so that its meaning could refer to something else, to an entity in the empirical world or to an intellectual concept. On the contrary, a cipher expresses the unity of a mundane existence and Transcendence, so that “it is impossible to separate the symbol from what is symbolized .”28 Conceived as such, the metaphysical symbol would be knowable by intuition rather than interpretable.29 The appearance of Transcendence through the reading of ciphers does not yet occur in the form of objectivity. It occurs instead in an “inner act,” i.e. in a “decision” (Entscheidung), whereby Existenz emerges from the dispersion of existence, concentrates on itself and establishes a dialogue, a kind of question-answer dialectic with Transcendence.30 Precisely in this question-answer process, Transcendence gives Existenz its first language, the “direct language” (or language of being) which is present only in the absolute consciousness of Existenz in a specific, unrepeatable historical instant. Reading the first language demands an experience. It is not the abstract thought but the cipher in historic, present particularity that reveals being.31

The interpretation of that original language of Transcendence carried out by Existenz can be described as a “metaphysical experience” (metaphysisches Erfahrung), which in the world of phenomena and nature, of history and subjective existence, can lead to the interpretation of the ciphers of Transcendence.32 This experience is the core of initial, immediate language: Transcendence is knowable only within reality, as only by starting from it is man able to respond to the historical appeal of Transcendence itself. Human experience, as the source of empirical knowledge and the ascertainment of Transcendence, develops gradually, i.e. from mere empiricism to the existential experience. The latter type of experience, once facing the abyss of Transcendence, can be characterized as interpretation of the first language, therefore not as intellectual understanding or rational ascertainment, but, beyond this, as a

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transparency of being in the Dasein.33 It is neither “verifiable” nor changeable into something which is universally valid for everyone, for it is instead an authentic Nichtwissen, filled once again by actual sensible reality, considered not as the content of existence, but as a cipher,34 that is, the place where Transcendence is manifested. The metaphysical experience exclusively addresses the cipher, conceived as concreteness of the peculiarity of the historical present and not as abstract, universal meaning; in fact, the more universal the experience of Transcendence is, the more it loses its effectiveness. As Silvia Marzano argues, this experience is nothing but the unmediated, original and unutterable encounter of Existenz and Transcendence; as she writes, “every truth, every faith […] is born, and has to be read, as an answer resembling an appeal, from the encounter of Existenz and Transcendence.”35 We can also add that the metaphysical experience of the first language aims to reveal the irreparable “lack” (Mängel) of every sort of rational certainty, in order to proceed, as “gift” and “grace,” beyond (in the sense of Jaspers’s notion of “über hinaus”) all objective knowledge. First language communication, despite the unavoidable loss of the existential content of Transcendental manifestation resulting from language generalizations, still maintains traces of that original sense. That generalization converges into the “second language,” which moves away from its origin and “takes its place beside the language of being.”36 It is in the echo of that transcendent language – audible only in the immediacy of the present moment – that languages are created, images and thoughts intended to convey what has been heard.37

This is the language of myths and revelation, a language that has an indelible historical content and, as Jaspers will confirm in his polemical controversy with Bultmann,38 could not ever have been interpreted from a rationalistic point of view,39 but reveals its meaning only by maintaining the characteristics of transcendental ciphers. This can happen only in an existential experience (existentielle Erfahrung), by the manifestation of the eternal and transcendent in a temporal and “fading” figure which Existenz recognizes as true. Jaspers subdivides the second language, which is the first form of metaphysical language, the other one being that of the third language, into three parts: a) “discreet myths,” expressed in ancient mythologies; b) “revelation of a beyond,” as related by religious revelation; c) “mythical realities.”40 Here we cannot dwell on each of them, but only on the last one, which is the most interesting from the standpoint of our enquiry. In fact, the language of metaphysics can be manifested as mythical reality

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when one is able to grasp the inseparability of reality and Transcendence; in other words, reality is not the simple empirical reality of things we can explore – rather, its reality encompasses everything explorable – nor is it transcendence 41 without empirical reality.

This comprehension of reality allows the mutual approach of each single existence through communication, thanks to participation in a transcendent relationship with the other, which can be described as authentic “metaphysical love.”42 Finally, when thought reflects on this language, in which intuition and imagination still prevail, trying to penetrate its origin, a third language arises, that of metaphysical speculation,43 whose content has been outlined by Jaspers as follows: When a thinker interprets the cipher language for himself, he obviously cannot know transcendence as the Other. Nor can he, in existence, expand world orientation as the knowledge of existence. However, obeying his own formal law, he thinks necessarily in objectivities.44

In fact, by means of the language of philosophical speculation, he reads the original cipher script by writing a new one: he conceives transcendence in analogy to his palpably and logically present mundane existence. His thought itself is a mere symbol, a language that has now become communicable.45

In this way, the third language interprets Transcendence as “metaphysical objectivity” (metaphysische Gegenständlichkeit).46 But even this metaphysical objectivity, like the mythological one, is such only in an analogical sense, as it refers to the contents of original ciphered language, i.e. the language which keeps the memory of Existenz’s experience of Transcendence. The cipher is the word of Transcendence, which can be heard only by that Existenz which remains itself by living with authenticity and responsibility.47 Therefore, the thought of the cipher of Transcendence is absolutely subjective and existential thought. As Jaspers argues: When I am reading ciphers, I am responsible, because I read them only through my self-being whose possibility and veracity appears to me in the way I read the ciphers. I verify by my self being – without having another yardstick than this very self being, which I recognize by the transcendence of the cipher.48

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Section Two Symbolic dialectics of “presence and absence” The first question we shall ask ourselves is why Jaspers’s philosophy of existence can be interpreted as a “hermeneutics of limits.” The reason why we speak of it as hermeneutics is the following: like hermeneutics, philosophy applies itself to the same facts that science also investigates, but instead of interpreting them as known objects, its task is to interpret these facts as ciphers which refer to a further horizon of meaning. The cipher changes the way we look at objectivity: from mere Dasein it becomes metaphysical objectivity, since it is “transfigured” by the nonobjective, ciphered language of Transcendence. In this sense, philosophy is no longer an “explanation” because its first task is rather interpretation and not merely a rigorous description of the world. Everything can speak as a cipher but at the same time can express the Absolute which always transcends its peculiar manifestations, that is, every kind of objectification (in fact, no ciphered language can ever achieve Transcendence itself, but can only, so to say, “mirror” it in the worldly Dasein). That is also the meaning of what Jaspers calls “immanent Transcendence”: if on the one hand its meaning seems to be quite contradictory from the viewpoint of traditional metaphysics, whose logical intellect does not consider any other option outside metaphysical dualism or monistic pantheism, on the other hand it emerges only by the rediscovery of the ancient meaning of symbolon. Originally, symbolon was that stone earthenware that, once broken, testified to the bond between two people or families who were about to separate: that is also the meaning of the Platonic tessera hospitalis. After the absence, after the interrupted intimacy, their reconciliation made manifest a bond that had not been fully broken. As is known, we find this notion in Plato’s Symposium: it outlines the proper character of love as the symbol of unity binding all men together, as all coming from the same origin and all involved in the same quest: the original unity that had once been shattered. That is the reason why every man is a symbol, just as Plato writes: “hékastos oûn emôn éstin anthrópou symbolon.”49 Similarly, Jaspers speaks of love as something that heals from division (das Verbindende), and in the unity achieved discloses being (Seinsoffenheit): love is what arises from the division of beings from the One conceived as openness to being.50 This last aspect has a strong analogy with ciphers and symbols: they are expressions signifying unity coming from disjunction, something aiming at an origin (Ursprung), showing itself only through its withdrawal:

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Lying between existence and Transcendence,52 the cipher is like the symbol of a distance; it is not the distance existing between the object and its symbolic replication, but the distance which places itself between being and what Transcendence makes present.53 Here the symbolic function of the cipher does not express a mere similarity of relations, as happens in allegory, but underlines a real, effective relationship between presence and absence, i.e. between what being is in itself and what is revealed in presence as its sign. This real dialectic between distance and “intimacy-through-distance” can be accessible only if man is not conceived as consciousness-at-large, whose knowledge is only related to the world of objects, but rather if he is thought of as Ex-sistenz, that is to say as something exceeding the level of objectivity in order to encounter that symbolic distance which outlines a new and deeper meaning of Dasein and of the world in general. It could never have been achieved by consciousness-at-large, because it is a metaphysical meaning, which only consciousness-as-such can contemplate. The latter, in fact, embraces (umgreift) both absence and presence, and then composes (syn-ballein) proximities from an unfathomable distance. Here the cipher seems to be a gift from the Being,54 not a creation planned by conscience55. Conscience indeed originates as consciousness-as-such and, thus, as a conscience of “absence and presence,” because the Being draws back in the act of showing itself and withdraws in announcing itself: that is why it is immanent Transcendence.56 If it were just mere Transcendence or mere immanence, as in the case of metaphysical dualism or monistic pantheism, we would not have had any other consciousness save the consciousness-at-large which knows everything about existence and nothing of Transcendence; we would not have any cipher as a presence referring to an absence, a language of something beyond, of an afterlife (Jenseits) which announces in the immanence of this world.57 Therefore, if one would keep the sense of a symbolic conscience, which allows us to overcome the immediacy of mere presence, then, as Jaspers states, the afterlife as a totally different reality has to collapse as a mere illusion.58 In other terms, the cipher belongs neither to the world of the afterlife nor to the unchanging Dasein, to the field of immanence or to that of Transcendence; its value lies in the fact that these contrasts, resulting from dualistic metaphysical theory, have to be overcome. The cipher is not just finitude nor does it imply only a

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transcendent metaphysical viewpoint, but represents one within the other and vice-versa, just like the tessera hospitalis, which unifies differences without deleting their otherness (Einheit ohne Identität). This is also the meaning of Jaspers’s statement: Once immanence and transcendence have become completely heterogeneous, we drop transcendence. With transcendence and immanence conceived as downright otherness for one another, they must – if transcendence is not to go down – evolve their own present dialectics for us in the cipher, as immanent transcendence.59

In the cipher, proximity and distance (Nähe und Ferne) coexist60: in this way, the cipher has the function of safeguarding the ontological difference according to which existence is not the Being, even though it is precisely in existence that the Being announces itself and, like immanent Transcendence, reveals its own being while transcending immanence. At the same time, it manifests its own further presence that is nothing but its absence. In other words, the cipher is always a part, but announces the whole; it affirms unity while always maintaining differences. This duplicity of the symbolic character of the cipher, of its paradoxical unity, has to be maintained; neither only its difference nor only its identity can be stressed. Stressing only the difference would mean going back to those ontological expressions which had already been overcome by periechontological reflection; stressing only the aspect of identity would mean falling into a misunderstanding or rather a reversal of the meaning of ciphers: in fact, it would move towards its own objective solidification (starrwerden) or, better, its restriction (Erstarrung). In order to avoid these theoretical deviations, which tend to resolve reality as absolute Transcendence or unchanging immanence, Jaspers invites us to preserve the symbolic character of the cipher, which permits us to see (it means, in Jaspers’s language, quer zu sehen) identity within differences and vice versa. Unlike what happens in allegory, in fact, which always refers its meaning to something else (àllos agoreúo), in ciphers, the symbolic meaning is only rendered through the literal meaning itself, or better, the literal meaning does not hide a meaning that could only be shown by another one. This is precisely the reason why, as we have already mentioned, it is impossible to separate the symbol from what is symbolized.61 Ciphered writing shows itself to be a reference which does not move from symbol to symbolized, from the symbolic to the literal, but from present meaning to further participation in meaning. For this reason, one can never say that in ciphers the difference between Transcendence and

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immanence is lost. Distinction is not lost, for the unity manifested in every cipher is both reference and absence: absence of an absolute meaning, of the unconditional Being which the “object-cipher” expresses and recalls, manifests and hides at the same time. Indeed, Jaspers writes that in symbols appearance and being are unseparated. […] Being shows itself by simultaneously veiling and revealing itself in symbols (in Symbolen zugleich verschleiert und offenbart). The interpretation of the symbols is the presence of the Being of reality.62

If then the cipher preserves both identity and difference, we can comprehend why, according to Jaspers, man can achieve symbolic consciousness: this occurs because he is structurally within the difference, as he is originally defined, as Ex-istenz, by the transcendence of being. Jaspers finds a kind of countercheck of this assumption in modern thought, especially at the apex of Hegel’s thought, where every difference between the finite and infinite disappears, so that freedom of the Spirit can express itself only in the complete adequacy of its single contents. Its future means its death, its fulfillment is the final step in philosophy, due to the total coinciding of the finite and infinite, so that Transcendence is irreparably dissolved into immanence: Whereas the idealist remains in himself, in respect to all things and achieves the alleged absolute freedom to which, for example, Hegel’s philosophy misleads him, but which at the end still leaves him actually without foundation, the man who understand symbols encounters essential reality in them. Their interpretation is reality itself. The question is how I experience it.63

If, in opening my thought to being, I experience reality as a perfect identity between being and beings, then there is no possibility of the arising of a symbolic consciousness; if thought is however the thought of being, but in its difference from beings, then immanence reveals Transcendence and, along with Transcendence, Existenz and symbolic consciousness. In this sense, Jaspers writes that The object which is a symbol cannot be held fast as an existing reality of transcendence; it can only be heard as its language. Existence and symbolic being are like two aspects in the one world that shows itself either to consciousness at large or to possible Existenz. If I see the world as cognizable with general validity, as empirically given without signifying anything as yet, it is existence. If I grasp it as a parable of true being, it is a symbol.64

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Thus the symbolic dimension assumes noteworthy importance in relation to the self-dimension (das Selbstsein), so that in the interpretation of ciphers one could never perceive Being apart from his own self, because that interpretation is possible only in virtue of Existenz Entscheidung, which is not pleased with the factual world, but aims at a transcendent reference.65 Such an ethically responsible moment achieves fulfilment only on periechontological-existential66 grounds, so that in identity difference cannot be disregarded, just as in presence the reference to that absence, in which the proper sense of presence itself is maintained, cannot be deleted. The profound meaning of ciphers can be expressed in this dialectical duplicity of presence and absence, which is nothing more than the very meaning of platonic tessera hospitalis, witnessing a belonging that is at the same time an aspiration towards an origin which is not entirely intelligible. This is due to the fact that “we do not live directly in Being; therefore truth is not our definitive possession; we do live in temporal being; therefore truth is rather our path.”67 As a temporal being, man cannot overcome the singularity of his conscious act, of his time determination, of the perspective of his situation. No doubt he can consider the absolute as the subject of his search, but always beginning from his situation, from his own being here and now (hic et nunc) and not somewhere else. This fact, which cannot be transcended, does not allow us to arrive at the incommensurability of being, to draw away from the negativity of man’s own incomplete perspective: When transcendent being comes into the presence of an Existenz, however, it does not do so as itself, for there is no identity of Existenz and transcendence. It comes to mind as a cipher, and even then not as an object that is this object, but athwart all objectivity (quer zu aller Gegenständlichkeit), so to speak.68

If then man cannot escape his precise perspective, and cannot think or speak without objectifying, he can see the absolute, which is not reducible to any sort of finite perspective or objectification, only by “seeing,” so to say “obliquely,” “through” (durch), because we can speak only in objectivities. There is no non-objective speech or thinking. Yet in each object, as well as in the subject, there are supraobjective and supra-subjective overtones.69

The resounding voice is that of immanent transcendence:

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Section Three Fantasy and ciphers: Phenomenological remarks and existential significance As they are profoundly linked to a symbolic meaning, ciphers play a precise phenomenological role, as already stated. According to Jaspers, the reading of ciphers can be carried out only if possible Existenz leaves the anonymous intellectual ground of consciousness-at-large and turns to the realm of fantasy, which in Jaspers’s thought shows both cognitive and existential features. In this respect, the task of ciphers is to set thought free from the narrowness of scientific objectivity. Nevertheless, Jaspers does not separate fantasy from objective facts, as the former has a fundamental cognitive function which allows it to overcome the level of objective experience. Here we find the relationship between fantasy and the cipher: fantasy can grasp the being which does not lie behind actual reality (in this case, fantasy would become fanciful imagination) but appears through ciphers, showing itself to fantastic intuition. In these terms, theoretical consciousness thus has a close relationship with fantasy. Exactly by maintaining the nexus between fantasy and givenness, the former has the function of showing something while hiding the whole, which is also the condition allowing something to be shown. For consciousness-at-large, reality is transformed into the object of world orientation; but in reality, which is not yet rationally resolved, fantasy grasps being by not presupposing it behind facts, but as a cipher essentially manifesting fantasy itself, understood as a faculty lying beyond every intellectual category.71 An object’s givenness, to which consciousness-at-large refers in its scientific world orientation, is something that from a phenomenological point of view can be approached only by the intervention of a “perceptive faith” originating precisely from fantasy; the latter, on its part, has the function of giving rise to a new and further sense of givenness by providing it with symbolic depth. Perceptive faith is somehow the “phenomenological medium” by which fantasy can interpret reality, grasping a different sense of objectivity for the whole. The sense of givenness lies not in the facts themselves, even if it is valid and has a cogency from Dasein and consciousness-at-large’s point of view: its sense

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lies rather in the intrinsic limit of all unchanging objectivity, a limit that implies a reference to a further horizon of meaning, i.e. to Transcendence, which always hides, as a non-objective and unattainable absence, behind the plainness of actual facts. Indeed, while fantasy shifts rational thought away from mere factual immediacy (presence), perceptive faith allows us to see what lies beyond givenness, in order to grasp the meaning of what actually appears. There is no longer objectivity as the totality of facts, established once and for all: understood as such, objectivity would remain empty and deficient, a simple phenomenal appearance without any kind of relation to Existenz, as in a sort of existential deepening; taken as a presence that recalls an absence, givenness would become a ciphered “manuscript” of Transcendence.72 That is the reason why this “fantastic faith” reads objects as ciphers, thus manifesting its transcendent function from a perceptive, metaphysical, ontological viewpoint. Therefore, interpreting the world as ciphered writing means assuming a different attitude which, when facing things, does not dwell within the limited space of their appearance in order to plan and organize facts (the purpose of science), but overcomes fact, moving towards that absence which in Dasein leaves its mark as a cipher but never appears in itself (the aim of philosophy): The being of which we have immediate experience is nothing but one phenomenon among others, whereas the being that we know through appearance cannot be defined in itself.73

On this basis, fantasy can also be seen as the only way to enter the communication between Existenz and Transcendence. In fact, Jaspers defines fantasy as the “eye of possible Existenz.”74 Thanks to fantasy, it is possible to see the being within reality, without which it would be conceptually resolved: I cannot know what being is, the way I know existence. I can read the cipher of existence only if I do not go beyond its symbolic character.75

Only by means of fantasy is it possible to interpret reality authentically, using concepts not given by worldly orientation as such, but rather as ciphers. What fantasy develops is like “viewing existence in transparency.” The reality of ciphers, grasped by the action of fantasy in consciousness-as-such, is characterized by the fact of being at the same time “given” (gegeben) and “made” (geschaffen): the cipher is given, because it is not a product of mere subjectivity, as it is still within existence; it is made, because it does not exist in an objective, binding and

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universally valid way, but only in connection with possible Existenz as an expression of its proximity to being in intuitive fantasy.76 While given being shows that the cipher is not a subjective individual invention, its having been made implies the direct involvement of Existenz, thus preventing its solid objectification and vague universalization. Therefore, the cipher takes shape both as objective, since being resounds within it, and as subjective, for the self of individual Existenz is reflected within it. Since outright, objective knowledge of the cipher is impossible, Existenz can only dive deeply into the cipher, whose truth can be found in the concrete vision, in each historic fulfillment it brings; which is realized in a gradual historical form. […] To read ciphers means to know about being in a sense that makes existent being and free being identical, so that in the deepest view of my imagination, there will, so to speak, be neither the one nor the other, but the ground of both.77

If on the one hand, by means of consciousness-at-large, one can only see and interpret the Existenz–Transcendence relationship as a mere antithesis, on the other hand the reading of ciphers through the eye of Existenz makes it possible […] to have a sense of completion, a temporal fulfillment, for a vanishing moment. Imagination lets an Existenz find peace in being; the cipher transfigures the world. All existence becomes a phenomenon of transcendence; in this loving imagination whatever exists, is viewed as a being for its own sake.78

Whenever the cipher is seen through the eyes of fantasy, it seems to fade, as it cannot be objectively limited by a mere perceptive cognitive act: indeed, any kind of static possession would be nothing but an obstacle to a more authentic comprehension of Transcendence.

Fantasy and art as ciphers of immanent transcendence As Dufrenne and Ricoeur state, since mythical language (i.e. the second language, as we have seen) tends to mix with the original one and myth as man’s language, it ceases to be a story and one is confronted with a work of art. Art is something on the path leading myth towards the original ciphers. [Art] is man’s only language that is perfectly appropriate to the language of being itself; this latest metamorphosis of the fabulous is also the highest mediation of ciphers.79

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Jaspers defines art as transmission, by intuition and not speculative thoughts, of the interpretation of ciphers, which lets the cipher “speak”: through artistic intuition our contemplation of art becomes an eye […] to gaze upon transcendence.80

The realm of art is like a world situated between (zwischen) a mystical conception, in which the cipher sinks into Transcendence, just like the real presence of Existenz in temporality; in artistic intuition, Existenz interprets the ciphered writing of being keeping as possibility, without any mystical vanishing into the undifferentiated One, but keeping the tensive dialectics of subject–object separation.81 In this sense, art is an “Intermediate Realm.”82 Furthermore, artistic intuition causes a kind of satisfaction in the individual’s fantasy such as to set the individual (as “Einzel”) himself free from the misery of existence, leading him to the fullness of Existenz and consciousness-as-such. Art is a “non-compelling” fantasy which only creates potential possibility without arriving at any real dimension. In fact, Jaspers writes that “in the noncommitment of art lies potential commitment.”83 This dimension, found by means of fantasy, is an a-rational dimension rather than an irrational one, since it is a peculiar faculty that cannot be entirely circumscribed by an objective viewpoint, but is not even a mere contraposition or an absolute denial of objectivity. If art does not consider itself linked to the seriousness (Ernst) of life, all truth will disappear, aesthetic images become existentially empty and meaningless, and art itself will become its own oblivion. On the contrary, if artistic language temporarily suspends reality, then it will become possible to look at reality freely from the viewpoint of Existenz. Reality itself is more than art, since in reality an Existenz is tangibly present as itself and in earnest about its decision. But reality is also less than art, because it comes to speak only in the echo of the cipher language acquired by way of art.84

Only by using the tenets of metaphysics can art be authentically conceived of as the reading of ciphers: only due to it can man note the difference between works of art, as the language of Transcendence, and those things without any depth which are belonging to reflected consciousness. This is the way man can seriously approach art. The artist perceives something that lies beyond empirical reality and intellectual elaborations, and aims

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for existential, historical and irreplaceable uniqueness, where it speaks the voice of a transcendence that has been grasped by a historic Existenz […] In art, the cipher either comes to visuality as a transcendent vision or becomes visible in reality as such, as immanent Transcendence.85

In the former meaning, Jaspers sets mythical figures, which take on their own features through the works of artists: if, at the beginning, these figures appear as real obscure symbols of uncontrolled forces, they later become portraits (though still defective) of gods, in which divinity is still understood as an intuitive object.86 In the latter meaning, in which the cipher becomes visible as immanent Transcendence, art ensures that the empirical world itself becomes a cipher. Moreover, if in its transcendent vision art requires adoration and dependence from the individual, as immanent Transcendence it is based only on individual independence.87 The great artists of the past worked within these two visions: They did not drop the mythical material; they carried it over into reality, which their own freedom let them rediscover in transcendence. This was the way of Aeschylus, of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Rembrandt. To them, the original connection of myth and reality became an enhanced reality, one that could always be seen and shaped only once at a time.88

With regard to the relationship between philosophy and art, Tilliette defines Jaspers’s philosophy as a “poetic philosophy,” despite the risk of aestheticism that such a definition involves. As the French thinker states: “Actually the nuance of Jaspers’s philosophizing is fit for such contamination. Artistic language, which is indivisible and does not permit itself to be reduced to myth or speculation, tends to become the secret source of philosophizing.”89 In addition, Dufrenne and Ricoeur underline the trait of “intuitive mediation” characteristic of art, which “extracts Existenz from the harshness of the empirical world,”90 since thanks to phenomenological-perceptive fantasy, it sets Existenz free as a possibility. In this respect, art can prepare us for the reading of ciphers, opening the way to another dimension of reality: “Art leads us towards ciphers, since it itself gives rise to ciphers.”91 One has true art if the artist sets everything free from objects and universal forms, that is infinite ideas. The task of the “genius” consists of discovering the meta-physical forces lying behind ideas,92 in which the voice of Transcendence can resound; a true artist is then a witness to immanent Transcendence, which no longer resides in mythical figures but in an authentic transmutation of reality;93 the world,

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becoming “transparent” by now, is also “purged” of all myths as, by means of the work of art, it can become the place “giving hospitality” to immanent Transcendence.

Notes 1

Some immediate lexical and terminological distinctions used in the chapter: Existenz (Existenz); Dasein (existence). Note, we refer to the Dasein as the whole of empirical reality, and being/s when we refer to particular aspects of the Dasein itself. If there is not a substantial difference between “Dasein” and “objectivity” (Gegenständlichkeit), we use the latter; Bewußtsein überhaupt (consciousness-atlarge); absolute Bewußtsein (consciousness-as-such). There are some terms that differ a bit from the original German, as, for instance: Existenzerhellung (Elucidation of Existenz); Scheitern (Foundering); Umgreifende (Encompassing). In this regard see The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1957), edited by Schilpp P. A., New York, Tudor Publishing Company, in particular XVI-XXIV, i.e. a glossary of Jaspers’s terms prepared by L. B. Lefebre; see also the Translator’s Note to the American translation of Volume I – Philosophical World Orientation – of Jaspers’s Philosophie. Cf. Jaspers. 1969. Philosophy, vol. I, Ashton E. B. (trans.). Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, xiii-xxi. 2 See Jaspers, 1971, Philosophy (vol III). Ashton E. B. (trans.). Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 113-208. 3 Tilliette, X. 1959. Karl Jaspers. Metaphysique des chiffres. Théorie de la verité. Foi philosophique, Paris, Aubier, 160. 4 Ibid. Note that Jaspers’s idea of hidden God is closely linked to his claim of the biblical verse “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness” of Exodus, 20:4-6 (cf. Jaspers, K 1954. Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Manheim R. (trans.), New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 48). Thus the hiding of God is related to the impossibility of any human representation. For a more comprehensive study of Jaspers’s conception of God see Lichtigfeld, A. 1957. The God-Concept in Jaspers’ Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, edited by P. A. Schilpp, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 693-702. The possibility to speak of a negative theology in Jaspers’s work has been investigated by Werner Schüssler through a really interesting approach: cf. Schüssler, W. 1992. “Der absolut transzendente Gott. Negative Theologie bei Karl Jaspers?.” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Karl JaspersGesellschaft no. V: 24-47. 5 Tilliette, X. Karl Jaspers. Métaphysique des chiffres. Théorie de la verité. Foi philosophique, 161. 6 Dufrenne, M., Ricoeur, P. 1947. Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’Existence, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 287. 7 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. I), 15. 8 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol III), 19. 9 Ibid. 24. 10 Ibid.

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Ibid. Ibid. 13 On the dialectical structure of this relationship, see Hersch, J. 1936. L’illusion philosophique, Paris, Alcan. 175. See also the brief introduction to the philosophy of Jaspers (cf. ibid. 148-86) of her famous abovementioned study. 14 Cf. Jaspers, Philosophy (vol III), 26. 15 Ibid. 26-27. 16 Ibid. 15-16 17 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 113. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 15 23 This ‫ދ‬metaphysical transcending‫ ތ‬has been criticized by different Catholic thinkers, who claimed, instead, a Thomistic metaphysics based on “analogy.” See Lotz, J. B. 1940. “Analogie und Chiffren. Zur Transzendenz bei Jaspers und in der Scholastik.” Scholastik no. XV: 39-56; Welte, B. 1949. Der philosophische Glaube bei Karl Jaspers und die Möglichkeit seiner Deutung durch die thomistische Philosophie, Freiburg, Karl Alber; Fries, H. 1952. “Karl Jaspers und das Christentum,” Theologische Quartalsschrift no. CXXXII: 257-287. 24 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 32. 25 Ibid. 15-17. 26 Ibid. 16. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. It seems possible to find great affinity between Jaspers’s concept of the symbol and that of Schelling. Cf. the analysis by Tilliette, X. 1977. “Schelling: la mythologie expliquée par elle même.” In Le mythe et le symbole, edited by Breton S. & Dubarle D., Paris, Beauchesne, 39-55. 29 On the difference between deutbare Symbolik und schaubare Symbolik, see Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 128-129, 146-147. 30 Cf. ibid. 132. 31 Ibid. 115. 32 Ibid. 130. 33 Cf. ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Marzano, S. 1974. Aspetti kantiani del pensiero di Jaspers, Milano, Feltrinelli, 189. 36 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 115. 37 Ibid. 38 Cf. Jaspers, K., Bultmann, R. 1954. Die Frage der Entmythologisierung, München, Piper. For a more detailed analysis on the Jaspers-Bultmann dispute see also Fahrenbach, H. 1956. “Philosophische Existenzerhellung und theologische Existenzmitteilung. Zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Karl Jaspers und Rudolph Bultmann.” Theologische Rundschau no. XXIV, H. 1: 106-135 and Donadio, F. 12

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1991. “Il problema del mito nel dialogo Bultmann-Jaspers.” Studi filosofici no. XIV-XV: 251-265. 39 As Flynn rightly argues: “We gain access to Transcendence indirectly and not by means of rational argument” (Flynn, T. 2006. Existentialism. A very short introduction, Oxford, University Press, 58). 40 Cf. Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 115. 41 Ibid. 116. 42 Ibid. 117. 43 Cf. ibid. 117-119. Something similar has been described by Hersch, L’illusion philosophique, 177. 44 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 117. 45 Ibid. 46 Cf. ibid. 118. 47 See Jaspers. 1967. Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Ashton E. B. (trans.). Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 93; see also Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 131-132. 48 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 132. 49 Plato, Symposium, 191d. 50 Cf. Jaspers. 1947. Von der Wahrheit, München, Piper, 991. 51 Ibid. 37 52 Cf. Jaspers, Philosophy (vol III), 120. 53 Cf. ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Cf. ibid. 119-122. 57 Cf. ibid. 9. 58 Cf. ibid. 10. 59 Ibid. 120. 60 Ibid. 121. 61 Cf. ibid. 124ff. 62 Jaspers. 1959. Truth and Symbol. Wilde J. T., Kluback W., Kimmel W. (trans.). New York, Twayne Publishers and London, Vision Press : 56, 57. 63 Ibid. 56. 64 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 16. 65 Cf. ibid. 132-133. 66 As everyone knows, the periechontology is the theory that Jaspers expounds starting from Vernunft und Existenz (1935), and then more broadly in Von der Wahrheit. However, in his Philosophy he critically compares ontology and ciphered writing, in order to overcome the former and so establish the difference between philosophy as ontology – which implies dogmatic and static possession of being and therefore, from Jaspers’s standpoint, a sort of “surrogate” for authentic knowledge, aiming on the contrary at the experience of Transcendence – and philosophy as ciphered writing, opening the way to a constant and gradual approach to the being, like a sort of elucidation of Transcendence (as Umgreifende). The latter is precisely the conception of philosophy that Jaspers

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calls periechontology: it is a prima philosophia (as Jaspers defines it), not yet in the sense of ontology, which is rather scientific systematics of beings, i.e. consideration of beings that “forgets” being, but as consideration of being that “lets beings be” (cf. Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 158-61). With regard to being, Jaspers introduces the concept of Umgreifende: being is no longer the object of scientific knowledge, but the presence in the reading of ciphered writing; it is being as the comprehensiveness of all its determinations. It is not Parmenides’ Being, which leaves out every determination, but instead Anaximander’s ʌİȡȚȑȤȠȞ, which includes them all. In particular, on this theme, see the second lesson in Vernunft und Existenz (1935), cf. Jaspers. 1955. Reason and Existenz, Five Lectures. Marquette Studies in Philosophy, No 11. Vandevelde P. (intro.), Earle W. (trans.). New York, Noonday Press, 51-76 (1997. Marquette University Press, Paperback Reprint Edition); the first chapter (“The Being of the Encompassing”) of Existenzphilosophie (1937), cf. Jaspers. 1971. Philosophy of Existence. Grabau R. F. (trans.). Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 15-30; the third chapter of (“Das Umgreifendes, The Comprehensive”) of Einführung in die Philosophie (1950), cf. Jaspers. 1954. Way to Wisdom. An Introduction to Philosophy, 28-38. On the same theme, also see Knauss, G. 1957. “The concept of the ‫ދ‬Encompassing‫ ތ‬in Jaspers’ Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, edited by P. A. Schilpp, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 141-75. 67 Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 1. 68 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 120. 69 Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 71. 70 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 120. 71 Cf. ibid. 133-134. By the way, Umberto Galimberti notes an interesting theoretical comparison both between Jaspers’s concept of fantasy and Kant’s Einbildungskraft (productive imagination) and Husserl’s notion of Fiktion (fiction). Cf. Galimberti, U. 1990. La terra senza il male. Jung dall’inconscio al simbolo, Milano, Feltrinelli, 90. This confirms the presence of a transcendental and phenomenological root in Jaspers’s treatment of fantasy. 72 Cf. Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 108. 73 Ibid. 37. 74 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 133. 75 Ibid. 76 Cf. ibid. 134. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 154 79 Dufrenne, M., Ricoeur, P., Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’Existence, 302303. On the theme of art in Jaspers’ thought see Pfeiffer, J. 1957. “On Karl Jaspers’ Interpretation of Art.” In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, edited by P. A. Schilpp, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 703-717. 80 Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 168. 81 Cf. ibid. 168-169. 82 Cf. ibid. 168. 83 Ibid. 169.

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Ibid. 170. Ibid. 171. 86 Cf. ibid. 87 Cf. ibid 171-172. 88 Ibid. 172. 89 Tilliette, X., Karl Jaspers. Théorie de la verité. Métaphysique des chiffres. Foi philosophique, 181. Probabily Tilliette is trying to outline a comparison between Jaspers and Schelling in the light of their common interest for art: Jaspers himself writes that art is “the organon of philosophy, as Schelling put it” (Jaspers, Philosophy - vol. III -, 168). 90 Dufrenne, M., Ricoeur, P., Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’Existence, 303. 91 Ibid. 92 Cf. Jaspers, Philosophy (vol. III), 171. 93 Cf. ibid. 172. 85

CHAPTER ELEVEN EXPERIENCE AND TRUTH IN THE WORK OF GADAMER SILVANA BALLNAT

In what sense and in what manner can one reach back behind the knowledge thematized by science?1

This question guides Gadamer’s analysis of truth in his efforts to uncover the experiences of truth and knowledge that occur outside the fields of the methodologically oriented sciences. For him, it is a safe assumption that the “practical life experience of every one of us accomplishes this reaching repeatedly.”2 Not only do we have experience of truth in our everyday lives, but we can also gain insight into what others hold to be true by entering into dialogue with them. These two assumptions, realistic and dialogic, characterize Gadamer’s project of hermeneutical truth. The realistic thesis states that there is truth independently of science and method, whilst the dialogic thesis posits a “method” for achieving and articulating knowledge and truth. The word “method” appears above in quotation marks because of its very qualified meaning, which I will expand upon later. His project of disclosing truth beyond the natural sciences led Gadamer to organize his book Truth and Method3 in an apparently peculiar way, insofar as it does not consider familiar topics pertaining to truth, although it does claim, at least by means of its title, to analyze the widely discussed relationship between truth and method. Keeping his genuine concerns in mind – those of retrieving (Wiedergewinnung) and extending (Ausweitung) the question of truth for philosophy, the arts and humanities – I will examine the connection between his general concept of experience as it is elaborated in the phenomenological analysis at the end of the second part of Truth and Method, and his understanding of truth as it unfolds in a variety of different papers through his critique of methodological

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reduction, his deployment of Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia, and his own contribution to the understanding of truth as a dialogic concept. Gadamer draws a sharp contrast between his own understanding of the problems of truth and experience and the widely held understanding that is dominated by ideas taken from the sciences, which are characteristically methodological in nature. Just as he argues against the idea of a methodologically conceived truth, so he argues against the reduction of the notion of experience to that which is capable of fulfilling the demands of the natural sciences. In doing so, he develops the notion of experience to a level of generality that allows it to serve as an epistemologically relevant concept, while still applying to phenomena that do not submit readily to methodological control, such as those pertaining to the arts, history, and intersubjectivity in the Lebenswelt. In opposition to Bacon’s understanding of the role of method in scientific experience, according to which it is the method that provides experience with its epistemological character, Gadamer shows how method can be inhibiting or sterile with regard to human affairs, and even how acting unmethodologically may lead to creative results and stimulate the production of further knowledge. This means that Bacon’s conclusion that everyday experience is unfruitful regarding its epistemological dimension is fundamentally incorrect. It may be true that no-one would argue for the absolute co-extension of method and truth, but nevertheless it is also true that the indivisible relation between knowledge (truth) and phronesis in everyday experience has been progressively devalued in favor of institutionally regulated ways of establishing truth and generating knowledge. Our continuous education in these institutionalized forms of knowledge has engendered an elementary disbelief in our personal capacities for thinking and saying what is true or false, right or wrong. Even in the most simple situations in life, we rely on institutions to tell us how things are: we do not feel capable of reasoning for ourselves, since we are continually told that correct reasoning is only possible in controlled situations such as those prevailing in the laboratory. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a reconsideration of the connection between the notion of lived experience and the problem of truth. Such an appeal to a concept of Lebenswelt-experience as capable of bringing forth truths is the essence of Nicholas Davey’s evaluation of hermeneutics’s contribution to epistemology: Gadamer’s rejection of methodology challenges received, regulatory frameworks of institutional knowledge. He reinvokes the value of experientially acquired wisdom (paideia).4

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The concept of the twofold structure of experience Gadamer’s analysis of the phenomenon of experience renders the concept of its twofold nature of essential importance for other areas of inquiry that are central to his work, such as language, universals, dialogue and, in the present case, truth. Yet given the fundamental role that this concept plays in his overall hermeneutical project, there is a surprising lack of sustained examination and broader interpretation of it in the secondary literature. In what follows, I will illustrate how the idea of the twofold structure of experience shows certain arguments in Gadamer’s work in a better light, arguments regarding truth and method in everyday life and in the humanities. Whilst some of these arguments are only implicit in his work – such as his not saying anything about truth-criteria and yet insisting on talking about truth in a non-skeptical manner and without any methodologically relevant assertions – some of them are developed more explicitly, notably the attempt to develop theoretical stances about truth in humanities from the suggestive Heideggerian notion of truth as uncovering (Unverborgenheit) or disclosure (Erschloßenheit).

Experience of things and of others The twofold structure of experience that Gadamer identifies is not reducible to the experience of things; it is also constitutional of our experience of other human beings, and both our experience of objects and experience of others is hermeneutical experience, with its features of finitude, historicity, openness, holism, and language-dependency.5 In both our experience of things and of others, we engage as historically bounded Beings-in-the-world, and thus the two kinds of experience are understandable as participating in linguistically structured traditions whereby a world is handed down to us. In both cases we are essentially open, in that we can only have those experiences by investing our expectations, which can be refuted at any moment of the ongoing experience. The refutation of expectations is a consequence of the resistance that things and other subjects exercise on us during experience. However, there is a fundamental difference between the resistance exerted by another subject and that exerted by things. While the object exerts an influence on our imagination in such a way that we are unable to think of it in an arbitrary manner, the other is characterized by the ability to say “no” (Neinsagenkönner). The other is a subject, which by definition is someone who is capable of acting counter to or in cooperation with us. Behaving (sich verhalten) is more complex than the straightforward

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Being-there of things, because behaving involves multiple ways of entering into relations with subjects, who are simultaneously exercising the same mutual capacity for entering into relations, whereas the simple Being-there of objects presupposes a principally one-sided decision about the nature of the relationship that is currently occupying my attention. For instance, it is possible to make use of an object in a variety of different ways: you can examine it, you can worship it, you can use it to aesthetize your surroundings, with all of these possible usages potentially making your life more enjoyable and ordered. The resistance exerted by the object is essentially limited by the fact of its being there: either it corresponds to your demands or it does not. In contrast, the experience of other subjects is “party-dependent,” as Charles Taylor puts it.6 They are as much engaged in making their decisions about their relation to you, as you are about your relation to them. As a consequence, both parties have to involve the possible reactions, motivations, and expectations of the other in their own decision-making process, yet without possessing any direct knowledge of them. Notwithstanding these differences, the experience of both things and other subjects is characterized by holism, openness, historicity, finitude, and language-dependency as already noted. Hermeneutical experience is the lived experience of human beings in the world.

Four philosophical sources for the analysis of experience Gadamer develops his concept of experience by orienting himself in relation to four philosophical positions, those of Bacon, Husserl, Aristotle, and Hegel.7 He is interested in what characterizes human experience as against dehumanized or, in his terms, objectified experience, which he regards as being the result of a controlled process. According to Gadamer, both Bacon and Husserl attempt to develop a notion of human experience that is detached from the life-world of human beings, in that they try to eliminate the influence of various prejudices (Bacon) or of natural comportment (Husserl). In spite of their obvious differences, these two thinkers share the assumption that the epistemological subject has the ability to achieve an absolutely controllable position of knowledge. Such an assumption is deceptive in at least two ways: firstly it promotes modern subjectivity, which remains unreflective concerning its own conditions (Bacon), or even worse it erroneously assumes that the subject is itself the source of its own conditions (Husserl). Secondly, this assumption points to a misleading concept of experience understood as a result and not as a process, which

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eventually leads to the identification of scientific experience with proper experience, as the only valid form of experience for the attainment of truths. In complete contradiction to their original emancipatory intention of making human beings masters of their knowledge, these two philosophical positions characteristic of modern subjectivism in fact yielded a new slavery in our age of rapid technical and technological development: they weakened our trust in the epistemological validity of our corrigible and convertible experience, with the corollary that scientific and science-like institutions were bestowed with the monopoly on the acquisition of truth, by virtue of the fact that only they possess the requisite methods and techniques for the mastery of controllable processes. Institutionally attained knowledge is nowadays considered to be more valuable than paideia. Thus, the first theoretical opposition that Gadamer establishes in his analysis of experience is between objectified and process-like experience, or between dehumanized experience understood as a product of an absolute epistemological subject as opposed to lived experience. The realistic assumption of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is that behind the sciences there is a valid experience of truth. The question then is in what terms is it possible to grasp this lived experience through which one arrives at truths? Both Aristotle and Hegel attest to the dialectical, process-like character of everyday experience. By means of the metaphor of the fleeing army that he finds in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics,8 Gadamer elucidates four moments crucial to the concept of language-dependent experience.9 The metaphor of the fleeing army tells of a battle in which a sudden change takes place, whereby not only one or two soldiers but the whole army, which was just one moment ago in chaotic flight, apparently spontaneously stops running away, and reforms into a unified, organized whole. The fleeing soldiers build an army again. In this image it is possible to identify four specific features that are particularly instructive for an understanding of human experience. Firstly, there is the basically anonymous process-like character of experience, which the image indicates in the fact that no one is able to single out the relevant individuals who are responsible for rallying the fleeing soldiers. Secondly, just as one soldier alone could not rally the army, the occurrence of numerous individual actions is necessary to the dialectics of experience. This moment represents the positive aspect in the twofold structure of experience and is designated accordingly as “positive experience.” Thirdly, the metaphor shows that the relevant facts of the fleeing and rallying of the soldiers are necessarily not at our disposal. No

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one is able to say when and why the chaotic soldiers stopped fleeing nor who was responsible for establishing command, i.e., for the innovative construction of an army out of the chaotic mass of fleeing soldiers. In a similar manner, we do not have our experiences at our disposal and we cannot manipulate life experience like a scientist in a laboratory. Fourthly, without the continuous rallying of individual soldiers out of which emerges an army which is obedient to command, it is impossible to recognize any innovation at all here. One grasps this innovation suddenly, which is to say, it is impossible to identify the stage at which the chaotic retreat was transformed into an organized unit. The sudden character of innovation represents the negative aspect in the twofold structure of experience, and is characterized as “negative experience.” Here we see how inappropriate it is to take “negative” as an ethical term. The qualification of experience as negative merely means that things are not as we thought they were. This negativity involves the turning over, refuting, or negating of the previous state of affairs. Aristotle uses this metaphor to illustrate how epagoge takes place, how we learn something from experience, how individual cases bring forth knowledge of the particular that contributes to knowledge of the general (logos). Gadamer employs the image in order to illustrate how we learn from experience, albeit that the knowledge to which we come is not the theoretical knowledge of the sciences (logos), but the practical knowledge (phronesis) of life experience. In contrast to theoretical knowledge, practical knowledge deals with experiences of truth in the Lebenswelt. With regard to the negative, overcoming aspect of linguistic experience, Aristotle’s notion of epagoge is merely suggestive. Therefore, Gadamer turns to Hegel’s conception of negation as reversal. As a negative aspect of the structure of experience, the notion of “reversal” refers to the insight that things are different to how they used to be seen. In contrast to the repeated fulfillment of the same expectations that constitutes positive experience, reversal brings about enlightenment by revealing something to be false that we used to think of as true. In Gadamer’s work, the emphasis is placed upon the negative aspect in this process of repetition (iteration) and reversal, not because it is the motor of further development up to the point of absolute knowledge of spirit as it is for Hegel, but because it provides support for an anti-subjectivist account of human experience insofar as the insight, or the reversal, is necessarily out of the control of the experiencing subject. The reversal happens to the subject and surprises it. Consequently, Gadamer’s hermeneutical concept of experience incorporates an essential feature of finitude that the dialectical movement of spirit in Hegel’s phenomenology lacks.

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Positive and negative experience On the basis of this staged confrontation with the four philosophical positions, Gadamer develops a concept of the twofold structure of experience. With regard to the positive aspect of experience, he explores the way in which traditions bequeath prejudgments in the form of questions, orders, structures, and answers, all of which provide us with expectations in our linguistic experience of the world. They are confirmed as expectations via repetition. “It is true, of course, that part of the nature of experience is to be continually confirmed; it is, as it were, acquired only by being.”10 But human beings are not caught hopelessly in the repetitiveness of their traditions. Living in a changing world, they inevitably experience the refutation of their expectations. However, such a reversal does not amount to the simple erasure of their expectations. Reversal must always be thought as a concrete negation. We are able to recognize something as a negation only insofar as we already have expectations. As a result, the epistemic import of the negation is twofold: Firstly, it makes us more conscious of what we were expecting in the first place and why, and this aspect of negation justifies the claim that negative experience explains positive experience. Secondly, negation is itself manifest only in light of what we held to be the case in the first place. Adopting the terminology that Hegel uses to determine the dialectical movement of spirit,11 Gadamer describes the mutual belongingness of the old expectations and their surprising negation in an illuminating process of experience as follows: We know better now, and that means that the object itself ‘does not pass the test’. The new object contains the truth about the old one.12

Negative experience, illumination or enlightenment, enables us to grasp the state of affairs, or the thing in its So-being; we get things clear. But here it is of great importance to notice the constitutive role of positive experience in the possibility of negative experience: the expectations are only identified as such in retrospect, that is to say, after they have been refuted. During the course of negative experience we only experience the truth in the context of the falsity of our previous expectations. Expectations are recognized and acknowledged as expectations only once they have been disappointed. In this sense we are only able to recognize the truth of positive experience by virtue of the experience of its reversal. Negative experience contains the truth of positive experience: it does not cancel it.

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Such mutual belongingness of repetition and reversal does not permit the idealization of either of them.

Mutual belongingness: Negative experience as truth of positive experience The hermeneutical concept of experience is a concept of lived experience. It emphasizes the linguistic nature of experience by virtue of which lived experience has epistemological significance. It is characteristic of this type of knowledge that it does not fulfill logical criteria: through lived experience one does not get to the logos. Lived experience yields practical knowledge (phronesis) as a result of the world-disclosing dimension of language. Consequently, lived experience has epistemological significance because it is language-dependent, both in its positive and negative aspects. The hermeneutical concept of experience is also dialectical. Dialectical experience means dynamical experience, and the basis for this dynamis is opposition. However, once again this opposition is not of a logical but of a metaphorical nature, opposition understood as conflict and heterogeneity. Gadamer’s description of experience as a process suggests that dialectical experience cannot be conceived as a method since it is not controllable, and it ought not to be regarded as a system because it is not a closed and completed process. This dialectical concept of experience seems to contradict the thesis that the experience of truth has the character of an event, a thesis which Gadamer adopts from Heidegger. How is it possible to understand the experience of truth as both process and event? It seems natural to assume that experience as process and experience as punctuality are mutually exclusive. However, this apparent contradiction is resolved when we recognize that these contrasting descriptions of experience are directly related to its twofold structure. Positive experience is continuous, whereas negative experience is punctual. They do not exclude each other, but rather are mutually enabling. The affirmation of expectations lends to experience its continuous character, and yet this is still not sufficient for the processual character of the experience, which depends upon negation. Experience only becomes dynamic with the disconfirmation of expectations. Negative experience, i.e., the refutation of expectations, lends to experience its event character. Although they initially seem to be in conflict, the continual does not hold without the punctual. And the other way around: the punctual aspect of negativity does not hold without the continuous aspect of iteration. Both of them lend experience its corrigibility. It is precisely the corrigibility of experience that grounds its

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openness, without which experience is not thinkable as a process. This circularity is a hermeneutical one, and does not amount to a logical deficiency, but pertains necessarily to phenomenological analysis. Thus according to this view it is not the case that processuality and punctuality refer to contradicting explanations of truth. Rather, they are mutually explainable. Thus are we to understand the mutual belongingness of negative and positive experience in Gadamer’s claim that the truth of the positive experience contains the truth of the negative experience. If the negative experience represents the event character of the experience of truth, then the event or surprising character of truth allows us to grasp truth as disclosure, enlightenment, Lichten. But without something being refuted we do not get surprise. We are at the same time illuminated by the light we get on the things we thought we knew, and by the knowledge about the things we already had. It is not until they are refuted that we become conscious of our expectations as such. We do not always explicitly know that we have them, but they exert an essential influence on our thinking, acting, and feeling. They constitute our practical knowledge, phronesis, and afford experience its epistemological relevance: positive experience orients our actions and the negative experience is an insight (in the important sense). As a consequence of negative experience, expectations are brought to consciousness and one comes to see how things are. Negative and positive experience explain each other mutually. They belong to each other and cannot be treated as different species of experience.

Experience of truth in everyday life The connection between the concepts of experience and truth as argued for in this chapter appears as an essential one when considered alongside the Heideggerian thesis that truth is something which we live with, that discloses itself to us in the course of our experience of the world. Heidegger’s famous ontological claim is that “Dasein is ‘in the truth’.”13 This claim does not have ontic significance in the sense that Dasein lives only in truth. Its meaning is more fundamental, in that disclosure belongs to being as its essence. Being shows itself. Disclosedness in general belongs essentially to the constitution of being of Dasein. […] The discoveredness of innerworldly beings is equiprimordial with the being of Dasein and its disclosedness. Thrownness belongs to the constitution of being of Dasein as a constituent of its disclosedness.14

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If this is so, then we cannot demand a proper philosophical answer to the skeptic’s question, “Why do we assume truth?” just as we do not have a proper philosophical answer to the question, “Why am I here?” In the same way that we are thrown into the world, and have to take this as necessary to the human condition, so it is necessary to consider truth as fundamental; its necessity is not provable. However, Gadamer does not follow Heidegger in all his arguments regarding the Being-in-the-world of human beings. He does not accept the restriction of community (Being-with-others, Mitsein) to the mere cancellation of authenticity. According to Heidegger, Falling prey belongs to the constitution of being of Dasein. Initially and for the most part, Dasein is lost in its ‘world’. […] Absorbing oneself in the they signifies that one is dominated by the public way of interpreting. What is discovered and disclosed stays in the mode in which it has been disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.15

This claim is often read as being illustrative of Heidegger’s negative interpretation of inter-subjectivity. He fails to appreciate the other as a condition of the possibility for our “being in truth.” For Heidegger, the idea of truth as communion (Miteinandersein) remains undeveloped because it presupposes positive acknowledgment of others, an idea which is missing in his work.

Inter-subjectivity and truth In Gadamer’s work, the situation is quite different. He makes absolutely clear that there is no truth without inter-subjective aspects of togetherness: What we grasp with great difficulty and astonishment about truth is that we cannot speak the truth without any address, without an answer and therewith without the commonality of a hard-won agreement.16

In attempting to dispel any relativistic conclusions, Jean Grondin comments that truth has an inevitably dialogic character: There is no truth independent of the questions and expectations of human beings. [Therefore] hermeneutical truth takes the form of a response.17

It is relative to the hermeneutical horizon of the interrogatory human being. “Relativity means here that the truth can be recognized as such only because it enlightens us, it illuminates us.”18

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However, the passage quoted above from Gadamer’s “What is Truth?” does not merely reiterate the Heideggerian motif of lightning (Lichtung); instead it develops it in an interpersonal direction, which is characteristic for Gadamer and untypical for Heidegger. Gadamer’s emphasis on the way in which truth involves addressing things or persons – or even being addressed by things and persons – characterizes truth as something vivid, something that we live, that we experience in our being-together. Hence, for Gadamer truth has an essential everyday character, and correlatively he suggests that truth is not to be treated as a purely academic pursuit by reducing it to a feature of propositions. Truth is something that we unavoidably experience whenever we talk, act, or think. Truth is not a merely logical or philological matter, and ought not to be treated as a feature of knowledge, sentences, or the like. For Gadamer, this is an abstract and empty notion of truth. On the contrary, hermeneutic truth is something to which we do ascribe features. If this thought is developed further, truth appears itself not as a property, but as an absolute subject, and we do in fact tend to articulate this idea in everyday language, for example: “the truth hurts,” “truth is wonderful,” “truth opened her eyes,” or “the truth motivated me to do that.” In all of these examples we give linguistic expression to our everyday experiences of truth and its impact on our lives as if it were a subject. However, for Gadamer it is important not to overemphasize the character of truth as subject, but to articulate a non-academic concept of truth as an everyday experience of rational human beings. Truth is not solely an academic, speculative matter; it is something that we experience. Furthermore, when, as in the passage cited above, he writes that we speak truth not without agreement, Gadamer also seeks to emphasize the dialogic nature of truth in order to avoid the dangers of subjectivism and arbitrariness. Hermeneutic truth obtains its validity from interpersonal acceptance and dialogic insight into what others hold to be true.

The dialectical and event-character of truth In conclusion to our discussion of Gadamer’s relation to Heidegger’s thesis of truth as aletheia, it is instructive to turn to Robert Dostal’s analysis of the differences between Gadamer and Heidegger regarding the punctual and the processual character of truth.19 Whilst, according to Dostal, Heidegger’s notion of truth has a religious character in that it involves a momentary flash of insight, he claims that Gadamer’s notion of truth is conversational and dialectical in that it is based upon the special comportment (Haltung) of human beings in their inter-subjective

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communion (Miteinandersein). However, for Dostal this represents only a very slight difference, because he recognizes that ultimately Gadamer’s notion of truth has a generally Heideggerian character.20 He concludes that Gadamer’s concept of truth is characterized by a peculiar circularity between logos (language) and nous (intuition), between insight and understanding, between dialectical mediation and momentary intuition. Human beings experience truths through understanding and insight at the same time. Therefore, insight and understanding are two aspects of the same experience of truth. In the reading developed in this chapter, these two aspects are grounded in Gadamer’s analysis of experience as both positive and negative. Whilst the repetition involved in positive experience gives our experience of truth its mediated processual character, negative experience furnishes it with its insightful, momentary character. Experience of insight and mediated understanding is Gadamer’s dialectical solution to the question of how we experience truth in our everyday lives or, for example, in the arts, i.e., in fields where clearly defined methods are of less importance. In the course of his analysis, Dostal engages with another crucial aspect of Gadamer’s thought.21 He reflects on the role of memory or recognition in Gadamer’s texts, and brings it into an essential connection with the experience of truth. According to Dostal’s account, memory for Gadamer is not a distinctive mode of experience relevant merely to the arts, but also has relevance for our everyday experience of truth. Once again, we see a central argumentative role for Gadamer’s claim that negative experience contains the truth of positive experience. Refutation makes us conscious of what we already know practically. It gives us the impetus to recall what we already know via repetition, and yet according to Gadamer recognition is not only Platonic anamnesis, mere déjà-vu, but is rather a “letting something more about the known object appear.”22 In short, it is increase of being (Zuwachs an Sein). Thus mediation and intuition are mutually dependent. We cannot gain a proper insight into how things are without unrelenting effort: positive experience is the condition of negative experience. Here it is important to stress once again that positive and negative experience are not two different kinds of experience. They are integral aspects of the double structure of experience that makes human experience dialectical and intuitive at the same time. It would be mistaken to suppose any inconsistency here, since Gadamer’s standpoint does not involve appeals to nonlinguistic intuitionism. Language and intuition, logos and nous, constitute a whole that cannot be ruptured. Consequently, experience is

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linguistic, but is not reducible to language. That the experience of truth is linguistic means that human understanding is oriented towards disclosures; that it is not reducible to language means that those disclosures are not reducible to human understanding. Insofar as disclosure exceeds understanding, human understanding is limited. Gadamer proposes a version of Heidegger’s aletheia that extends truth understood as an event over the discursive inter-subjective dialogic processes that take place between finite human beings.

The methodological and ontological concepts of truth Gadamer’s critique of the methodological concept of truth does not mean that he ignores its epistemological relevance. With his alternative understanding of truth he attempts to initiate a discussion about the possibility of an ontological concept of truth. In contrast to the methodological concept, the essence of the ontological concept grasps truth in terms of growth of being instead of growth of knowledge. However, the ontological concept of truth does not discredit the methodological concept, but relocates it. The methodological concept of truth, if understood with Gadamer as oriented towards technical change in the sciences, is not the only imaginable one, although it was the only one that was seriously discussed during 20th-century debates on knowledge and the growth of knowledge. It is common to describe this concept as methodological because it is concerned with controllable ways of attaining scientific knowledge that consequently confer legitimacy upon their results. According to Gadamer, a problem arose when the knowledge gathered in this methodological way was proclaimed to be the only plausible one, with the result that the claims to truth and knowledge of other spheres of understanding were dismissed – even branded as meaningless or senseless – because they did not fulfill methodological criteria. In contexts such as religion, philosophy, the arts, or issues of worldview, it is possible to pose many questions and give answers that are forbidden by science in that [i]t discredits them, i.e., it declares them meaningless. For only that which satisfies its own methods of discovering and testing truth has meaning for science.23

For Gadamer, in this scenario the scientist adopts the position of an intolerant zealot, and he poses the question: “Is science really, as it claims for itself, the last court of appeal and a sole bearer of truth?”24 In the context of the problematic relationship between science and truth25 that

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characterizes our age, Gadamer tries to make sense of the idea that there are realms of understanding in which it is meaningful to talk about knowledge and truth although they do not conform to the criteria demanded for the methodological acquisition and verification of knowledge. According to him, even if they were to try to conform, they would falsify their own knowledge, because methodological procedures for arriving at truth simply cannot produce proper results in these realms. The reason for this is that the experiences of things and other people that occur in these areas are not repeatable on demand, and, what is worse, actually following scientifically valid methods could even lead to the destruction of any possibility of getting to the truth. If truth is understood as a change, it is possible that sometimes a person could acquire epistemologically valuable results when not following a method, but allowing him or herself to be governed by the unforeseeable. Gadamer advocates the non-methodological concept of truth, but the preceding analysis shows that both the methodological and nonmethodological concepts have epistemological relevance, since both of them involve a change of something: the former a change of knowledge and the latter a change of personality. We might call them respectively the scientific and the humanist concept of truth. This shows how the methodological concept of truth is not simply dismissed, but relocated in the ontological concept of truth, because change ultimately represents an increase of being.

Experience of truth is dialogic rather than methodological If it is in fact possible to arrive at truths in the fields of philosophy, the arts, the humanities, and in the context of the Lebenswelt by “methodological means,” then it is through dialogue or conversation. However, this claim is to be understood in a very restricted way, and for several reasons. Method is by definition a describable way for achieving posited goals. In contrast, there is no recipe that describes how to guide a proper dialogue since its question–answer structure does not allow of any formula for asking questions. Secondly, method is something that one can use to manipulate. Once again, there is a difference here because, according to Gadamer, dialogue is essentially a situation that cannot be placed at anyone’s disposal, since a dialogue tends to develop its own life and direction, the end or goal of which is not predictable as it would be in a situation amenable to methodological control. Gaetano Chiurazzi argues rightly that the target of Gadamer’s critique is modern subjectivism and

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not the objectivism that sciences aim for. Dialogue has nothing essential in common with experiment. Whilst an experiment involves the constitution of a controllable realm where it is not nature that imposes its course, but rather the human who imposes its sovereignty on nature,26

a dialogue is not controllable by any one of the dialogue-participants, since one party can always put the claims of the other in question. There is one further reason for understanding dialogue as the only possible way of arriving at truths, which Gadamer elaborates phenomenologically. Scientific research is a process in which propositions are posited and tested methodologically. According to Gadamer’s explication, each of these propositions is motivated, and this motivation has the logical form not of a proposition but of a question, which one can only grasp or recognize by understanding the situational horizon of the proposition. He writes: “Now I maintain that the ultimate logical form of such motivation of every proposition is the question. It is not the judgment that has logical priority but the question.”27 We cannot understand the truth of a proposition if we do not understand the question to which it is an answer, and in this sense the implied question has logical priority over the answer. Therefore, a researcher is only a true researcher if he or she is able to see questions, and not merely to formulate propositions, because it is always possible to misunderstand one’s own propositions if one does not understand the questions to which they respond as answers. “Seeing questions means, however, to be able to break through that which controls our entire thinking and knowing.”28 Seeing questions does not involve successful manipulation with methods or rules, but rather having the kind of openness that one acquires through negative experiences. There is no recipe for seeing questions, just as there is no recipe for acquiring everyday experiences. Rethinking the nature of propositions as answers to particular questions does not just change the research project, but also changes the researcher in the first place. This is why it is more appropriate to describe truth as a change of a person rather than as a change of knowledge. Question-and-answer represents the logical structure of dialogue, and it emerges that the logical structure of scientific research is reducible to that of the dialogue.

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Truth as a change of person: the transformational aspect of truth While considering the nature of knowledge in the humanities Gadamer suggestively points out that, “What we know historically is, in the final analysis, ourselves. Knowledge in the human sciences always has something of self-knowledge.”29 A change of personality occurs most often as a result of negative experience. Negative experience, or the experience of refutation that reveals our finitude, is the uncontrollable aspect of human experience that nevertheless provides experience in general with its epistemological significance. This is certainly not an absolutely new concept: Karl Popper tends to combine the verification theory of knowledge and truth with a theory of falsification. However, in spite of their terminological similarities, the concepts of falsification and refutation are different in their intention: whereas falsification is a methodological aspect of Popper’s theory of scientific truth and knowledge, Gadamer identifies refutation as that aspect of our experience that makes it unpredictable. Negative experience is essentially uncontrollable and therefore unsuitable for methodological idealization – just like verification, which idealizes the repeatability of positive experience. According to Chuirazzi,30 the hermeneutical conception of truth is a transformational one, both because truth is an “experientially-notindifferent property,” and because truth makes a difference in human experience in that it “produces something new.” By producing something new, truth has an effect on reality, transforming it, and bringing about an increase of being. This transformation of being and our awareness of it amounts to a change of personality, which Chuirazzi refers to as a transmutation (Verwandlung). The essential formative character of this notion of truth is indicative of its intrinsic connection to Bildung or, after McDowell, “the second nature.” Consequently, hermeneutical truth is indebted to the humanistic theory31 of truth, which is defined in opposition to methodological theories of truth. In this connection Brice Wachterhauser sketches out a “roughly unified theory of hermeneutical truth”32 that possesses distinctive features, and he makes a general statement about the contextualized nature of truthclaims. In his interpretation of Gadamer he writes: “truth-claims in the human sciences only have meaning when ‘applied’ to concrete subjects,”33 and he goes on to identify four features of hermeneutical truth: historicity, holism, pluralism, and anti-skepticism. Although Wachterhauser uses slightly different terminology, these four correlate with those features of historicity, holism, dialectic (openness and finitude), and linguisticality

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that were elaborated above in the discussion of Gadamer’s concept of experience.

Conclusion Understanding and Event was the first title; Truth and Method came later. Truth is not intended to suggest a theory of truth that is to be developed in the course of argument. Rather, combined with and Method, it points to the fact that following the methodological procedures characteristic of the natural sciences is not the only way to truth. We also have experiences of truth in other domains of acting and thinking, such as the arts, the historical, and everyday life. On the other hand, it is quite possible to notice similarities between some of Gadamer’s formulations and those belonging to other, well-established theories of truth. However, it is precisely because Gadamer’s concept of truth is more extensive than these others that the impression of similarity arises. For instance, as Jean Grondin notices, Gadamer’s discussion of the controlled fusion of horizons is reminiscent of the consensus theory of truth; the correction of prejudices about an object in pursuit of better adequacy recalls the correspondence theory; his demand for the internal coherence of an interpretation reminds us of coherence theory; and it is possible to hear an echo of the pragmatic criterion of truth if one recalls that hermeneutical truth always emerges as a response to the questions of Dasein, which give it revealing orientations for acting and thinking.34 Therefore, it is clear that the various aspects of truth prioritized in these or other theories do not stand in contradiction to the hermeneutical understanding of truth. It is only the exclusivity of their focus and their claims to a monopoly on the criteria of truth that Gadamer places in question. Hermeneutics argues for a primordial experience of truth, which we have had before we ever come to use a method. The essence of this experience is enlightenment, of casting light upon some state of affairs: Aletheia as Lichtung, as disclosure. Although Aletheia is prepredicative, it is not prelinguistic, because our Being-in-the-world is understanding, and understanding has a dialogic character. However, the claim that truth is linguistic ought not to be confused with the claim that truth is a feature of sentences. Of course truth can also be regarded as a feature of sentences, but that is a derived function, which ultimately has its ground in positive and negative experience. On the other hand, the seeing of truth is an event, during which one comes to understand things in the world as they are. As Heidegger writes, ‘true’ primarily means discovering (Entdeckend-sein), secondarily it means being discovered (Entdeckt-sein).35 If this holds, then

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even the most soundly derived logical inferences could be false if they fail to uncover the subject matter. Therefore, philosophy involves putting something in the space of reasons rather than merely providing arguments for it: disclosing instead of arguing.

Notes 1

Gadamer, H-G. 1994. “What is Truth?” In Hermeneutics and Truth, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 38. 2 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 38. 3 Gadamer, H-G. 1989. Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marschall. London, New York: Continuum. 4 Davey, N. 2006. Unquiet Understanding. Albany New York: State University of New York Press, 5–6 (author’s emphasis). 5 For more on this topic see my Das Verhältnis zwischen den Begriffen ”Erfahrung” und ”Sprache” ausgehend von Hans-Georg Gadamers ”Wahrheit und Methode”. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2012. 6 Taylor, Ch. 2002. “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes.” In Gadamer’s Century. Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, edited by Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 7 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 340–355. 8 Aristotle. 1949. “Posterior Analytics.” In Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics. Translated by W.D. Ross. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, II, 19, 100a. 9 Gadamer works with this example both in his analysis of experience acquisition in Truth and Method and in the analysis of language acquisition in “Man and Language.” 10 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 348. 11 Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 55: “Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience (Erfahrung).” 12 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 349. 13 Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 212. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, 212. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 213. 16 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 46. 17 Grondin, J. 1990. “Hermeneutics and Relativism.” In Festivals of Interpretation. Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Work, edited by Kathleen Wright. Albany New York: State University of New York Press, 48. 18 Grondin, “Hermeneutics and Relativism” (author’s emphasis).

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Dostal, R. 1994. “The Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and Sudden Lightning.” In Hermeneutics and Truth, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser, 47–68. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 20 Dostal, “The Experience of Truth,” 47. 21 Dostal, “The Experience of Truth,” 65. 22 Chuirazzi, G. 2011. “Truth is More Than Reality. Gadamer’s transformational Concept of Truth.” Research in Phenomenology 41:60–71, 67. 23 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 35. 24 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 34. 25 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 35. 26 Chiurazzi, “Truth Is More Than Reality,” 61. 27 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 42. 28 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 42. 29 Gadamer, H-G. 1994. “Truth in the Human Sciences?” In Hermeneutics and Truth, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 29. 30 Chiurazzi, “Truth Is More Than Reality,” 71. 31 Wachterhauser, B.R. 1986. “Must We Be What We Say? Gadamer on Truth in the Human Sciences.” In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany New York: State University of New York Press, 220. 32 Wachterhauser, B.R. 1994. “Introduction: Is there Truth after Interpretation?” In Hermeneutics and Truth, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 8. 33 Brice R. Wachterhauser, “Introduction,” 6. 34 For more on this topic, see: Grondin, J. Hermeneutische Wahrheit? Zum Wahrheitsbegriff Hans-Georg Gadamers. Weinheim: Beltz Athäneum, 1982, 196. 35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 211.

CHAPTER TWELVE FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE NICOLAI VON EGGERS

This chapter is an attempt, in the wake of the renewed interest in structuralism and French thought of the 1960s and 1970s, including the newly published selection of texts from Cahiers pour l’analyse (Concept and Form), to re-evaluate Michel Foucault’s work, his critical history of thought and his notions of subject and subjectivation. The article pushes Foucault, as far as I believe is possible, in the direction of structuralism in which the subject is, if not an effect, then at least emerges as a certain function in language. The subject, once emerged, distances itself from language but at the same time retains a tense relation to language. The subject is therefore not reduced to language; the subject is what distances itself from its place in language. The subject is, in this way, sutured to language, sutured to its discourse or, in the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, suture is “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse.” This suture is what Foucault in one of his last articles renders as experience. Consequently, the topic of the present article will be Foucault’s concept of experience. The concept of experience plays an important strategic role in Michel Foucault’s thought. It has a central place in Foucault’s vocabulary from the beginning to the end; from the compound limit experience explored in the 1960s in texts on Bataille and Blanchot, “A Preface to Transgression” and The Thought from the Outside, to the 1978 interview with Duccio Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, and in Foucault’s two last books from 1984, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. The concept of experience bridges, or at least is an attempt to bridge, a tension which lies at the core of Foucault’s thought: the relation between the subject and what we could call the Other. A relation that is between power-knowledge structures such as mental asylums, psychiatry, sexuality, prisons, the institution of confession, etc., and the subject, understood as that subject which is subjectivated by this or that particular Other. In other words,

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there is an Other to the subject, which defines this subject as this specific subject – the criminal is subjectivated by forensic psychiatry and the prison, as well as the bourgeois child (subject) is identified in the bourgeois order (Other) through its sexuality. It is not easy to locate the concept of experience in Foucault’s thought and to pinpoint exactly where in the structure it fits. Strictly speaking, experience does not adhere to the subject (which is nothing but a product of certain power-knowledge structures, the one who is called upon to reveal the truth about himself), but nor does experience adhere to the Other (the power-knowledge structures). In Foucault’s thought, experience is not experience as experienced by a transcendental subject, but nor is it experience as experienced by some sort of Hegelian spirit. Rather, and it will be the aim of this chapter to validate this point, experience is what sutures the subject to the Other. Or, to put it more succinctly, in Foucault’s thought experience is the very name of the suture of subject and Other. In his article “Suture,” Jacques-Alain Miller defines suture as “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse,”1 and I believe we can say that in Foucault’s thought, experience is the name of that which sutures the subject to those words, also uttered by the subject itself, that defines the subject as this very subject, that is, “the chain of its discourse.” In order to understand how the subject is sutured to the Other, we must first understand how the subject is divided from the other in the first place. In doing so, I will start by discussing the definition Foucault makes of his work as a “critical history of thought” and how he then, in relation to this definition, defines subject and object. I then move on to exemplify these definitions through a reading of The History of Madness, which leads me to a discussion of Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s reading of Descartes. Derrida invokes the Hegelian notion Entzweiung, which I devote a rather long section to, as I see the notion as a key to understanding Foucault’s overall endeavor. Finally, from the Hegelian notion Entzweiung, I return to Foucault’s critical history of thought and the role the concept of experience plays herein. Where others have investigated Foucault’s notion of experience in different phases of his work,2 I will mainly focus on one of Foucault’s latest texts, the article “Foucault” written under pseudonym for the Dictionnaire des philosophes (1984), because we find here one of Foucault’s most succinct philosophical expositions of important categories such as subject, object, and experience. Huisman originally commissioned François Ewald to write the entry, but it is authored by one Maurice Florence, a pseudonym for Michel Foucault who, on Ewald’s request, submitted a working paper he had drawn up while writing on the

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Introduction to what would become the final two volumes of The History of Sexuality. Without subheadings, in quick succession, “Florence” runs through a number of central themes of Foucault’s entire work: the notion of subject, the notion of object, the notion of truth, the subject as object, different principles of method, and finally the important categories of power and government. The text argues that what Foucault has been trying to do so far is to write a “critical history of thought.”3 Thus, when thought is defined as “the act that posits, in their different possible relations, a subject and an object,” a critical history of thought will investigate “the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified.”4 In other words, no subject, nor any given object, exist prior to the act of thought through which one divides into two. The subject as well as the object are results of acts of thought, and the critical history of thought does therefore not, in Foucault’s words, try to grasp “the empirical conditions, that may, at a given moment, generally have enabled the subject to achieve knowledge of an object already given in reality or in the real.”5 Why? Because the object is never already given in the real, that is, in its prethought condition. Strictly speaking, the object arises as this specific object through an act of thought. It may be that some noumena is out there, waiting to be grasped, like the dying animal slowly embedded in limestone before the advent of human beings and natural science. However, the fossil will only obtain object-form, i.e. will only be signified as fossil, once the thought act is there to grasp it, and to grasp it as that specific object known as fossil. Another issue arises from this process, which does not have to do with the status of the object (of knowledge), but with that of the knowing subject. Not only the object but also the subject is posited as this specific subject through the act of thought. The problem is to determine what must be the subject, to what condition he is subjected [soumis], what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject for this or that knowledge. In short, it is a matter of determining its mode of ‘subjectivation’ for it is evidently not the same whether the knowledge in question has the form of an exegesis of a sacred text, a natural history observation, or the analysis of a mental patient’s behavior.6

The subject cannot be simply determined generically as subject. The subject is always, in a way, a knowing subject, that is, a subject with a certain relationship to his world. In this way, the subject as this or that knowing subject, is posited through the act of thought which posits the

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object and the subject knowing the object at the same time. Foucault here points to three examples – exegesis, observation, and analysis – which are easily identified as forms of explicitly scientific knowledge. The monk assumes the subjectivity of monk through his monastical praxis and reading of the Bible. That is to say, the monk, as a form of subjectivity, is only possible through a certain knowledge of the world: that God has revealed the Truth in the Bible, and that he has created humans in order to glorify him by reading and rereading his book. The monk, as a form of subjectivity, is posited in the same moment in which the object (God, Bible, world as revelation, life as glorification) is posited. The monk, as he posits the object, posits himself as a certain form of subject with a necessary relation to that object. Exegesis is the form of knowledge mediating subject and object in this way. This same structure, though with a different filling, is found in natural history’s observation and in psychoanalysis: an object and a subject are created in their necessary relation through forms of knowledge. The scientific forms of subject–object relations described here form the object of an archeology of knowledge. But Foucault’s argument is not limited to scientific forms of knowledge. As he makes clear in his History of Madness, the new psychiatric knowledges emerging around and constructing itself in relation to what is perceived to be a mad person, also has consequences for the everyday phenomenological understanding of the madman’s speech. In the Renaissance, the madman’s speech had an oracular function – he was able to speak the truth about an inherently mad world – whereas during the 17th century, the madman’s speech is increasingly interpreted in the negative. It signifies a loss of rationality, which then has to be (re)constructed by a doctor through an act of transference (corporeal, medical, speech therapeutic, etc.). Thus, everyday practices surrounding people considered mad changed. Foucault opens his book on madness with a phenomenon depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s Narrenschiff, which depicted the praxis of putting the local madmen on certain ships that would then sail around the rivers of Europe. The madman, if intolerable, was exiled. However, every now and then the madmen would inevitably dock at the town harbor and expose the madness of the world. In contrast, in the 17th century the madmen were increasingly confined. First in prisons and then in mental asylums where they were studied and treated. Thus, the everyday experience of the madman had schematically speaking changed from seeing in the madmen a proof of a carnivalesque world to which we are all submitted to a private pathology of a man sadly deprived of reason and knowledge of the truth – a knowledge which was increasingly related to productivity and work in

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the emerging capitalist modes of production. It is in this way that not only the object (madness) but also the knowing subject (the villager, the doctor, and even the madman himself who would, as Foucault notes in the History of Madness, increasingly begin to speak the language of medical science) are posited in their necessary relation through the act of thought. It is not difficult to see in this relation a kind of master–slave dialectic in which knowledge about the world – but also about the two selfconsciousnesses (reasonable and mad) – are produced through a violent submission of the one, which installs a constant tension between the two. The reasonable person becomes aware of himself as reasonable through a violent submission of the mad in which the mad, by force, is made aware of himself as mad. In fact, and this is Foucault’s reading of Descartes and his age, reason only becomes reason through the act in which it excludes something defined as the opposite of reason: certain behaviors, gestures, and attitudes. Reason needs madness. Reason emerges as reason through madness in the same way that the master needs the slave and can only be defined as master by virtue of the slave. In Foucault’s interpretation, reason only emerges together with its evil twin, madness, and it exists and sustains itself through a repeating exclusion. Reason is what repeatedly defines itself and is defined via negativa as not mad. Reason and madness are mutually defined by an act of thought, which at the same time posits the subject and the object, the reasonably thinking subject and the object of madness. Something or some-one is immanently divided. Some-one only exists as one of two, as in the asymmetrical relationship between the master and the slave or the sensible and the madman. To put it in the terms of Maoist dialectics, one divides into two. In his critique of Foucault’s History of Madness, Jacques Derrida notes the Hegelian undertones of Foucault’s analysis of madness. He therefore proposes to have recourse to Hegel’s notion of Entzweiung, usually translated as split, break, or rupture. But literally it means out-two-ing, an act in which one divides into two. According to Derrida, the decisive accomplishment of Foucault’s book is the unresolved tension between madness and reason, which forms the backbone of the book’s progression from the 15th to the 19th century. However, Derrida claims that Foucault’s argumentation is itself split between two rival narratives: one that attempts to tell the history of madness itself before being submitted to (scientific) reason, and one that admits that there is an eternal struggle between reason and its Other (in the form of madness).7 Thus, says Derrida, if Foucault will admit that it is not possible to write a history of madness in itself but only to write a history of madness as the other of reason, then Derrida’s

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lecture “Cogito, and the History of Madness” will in some ways only repeat what Foucault has already said. This is the first element of Derrida’s critique, which especially aims at the 1961 Preface to the History of Madness. Foucault seems to have accepted Derrida’s critique on this point as he removed the 1961 Preface in the 1972 edition and would write in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “We are not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might be, in the form in which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, obscure, scarcely articulated experience,” and added in a footnote: “This is written against an explicit theme of my book The History of Madness, and one that recurs particularly in the Preface.”8 Derrida was clearly right on this point, as Foucault himself conceded, and we shall not be preoccupied with this mistaken reading of the relationship between madness and reason for the rest of this text. But once it is accepted that madness does not exist as such before the act of reason, that madness as everything else cannot exist as “an object already given in the real,” to put it in Foucault’s vocabulary of 1984, how then can we understand the relation between reason and madness, between thought and its Other? This is where we come to the second element of Derrida’s critique. Foucault had argued that even though there had always existed a relation between madness and reason in Western thought, from the 17th century (the age of Descartes) madness becomes the direct Other of reason or Truth, which is clearly different from the Renaissance in which madness possessed a form of oracular truth. Western rationalism, of which Descartes is the paradigmatic case, defines itself negatively in relation to madness. Reason, in other words, is defined as not mad. Unlike Derrida, however, Foucault does not see this decision to make madness the other of reason as an act performed by philosophy. In Foucault’s reading, because Descartes draws upon a preliminary exclusion of madness, which was already performed in the broader socio-economic conditions of Descartes’s surroundings, Descartes does not really go through the valleys of philosophical doubt until he arrives at the secure spot of reason, the Cogito. On these grounds, Descartes is nothing but a symptom of his age. When Descartes begins to write, one is already divided into two. In other words, rationalism does not conquer madness, thereby asserting itself as rationalism. Rather, rationalism simply occupies the space cut out for it by a broader movement in which immoral and unproductive behavior is confined, condemned, and disciplined. Rationalism emerges on the grounds of a decision to put the social lives of average people under much stricter control as a result of centralization of power and economic interests. Derrida opposes Foucault’s reading on the grounds that Descartes (and

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rationalist thought) actually does go through the dangers of madness and supposes the maddest idea of all: that some evil demon could have tricked me into thinking that 2 + 2 = 4, whereas it actually equals 5. But in this case, Derrida writes, the cogito is still assured: “Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.”9 And he continues: “Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin.”10 The point Foucault misses, according to Derrida, is that Descartes is not out to define reason as opposed to unreason, meaning as opposed to nonmeaning. Descartes wants to force thought back to its very starting point, that is, to the point were difference between meaning and nonmeaning, awake or asleep, reasonable or mad, disappears. It is the zero point of thought, a point of indifference from where every thought act must commence and whereby every thought act divides one into two. This is why Descartes’s work is called Meditations on First Philosophy, and this is why, as Derrida says, “[w]hether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.” The cogito marks the beginning of thought, and this beginning will always take the form of a kind of cut in which one divides into two. Unlike Derrida’s first critique, Foucault is not willing to concede to the second. This is made clear in his Appendix to the 1972 edition of History of Madness, “My Body, this Paper, this Fire.” Here, Foucault maintains his original reading of Descartes and elaborates on it by pointing to Descartes’s vocabulary in the original Latin version, which Derrida himself had invoked to criticize Foucault. Foucault focuses on two sentences in Descartes’s discussion of madness. First, says Descartes, “[h]ow could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, except by comparing myself to certain deranged people (insani),” and continues his line of reasoning in the following manner: “[b]ut just a moment: these are madmen (sed amentes sunt isti), and I should be no less extravagant (demens) if I were to follow their examples.”11 Insani, as Foucault points out, is a medical term describing the victims suffering from the vapors of the black bile and which therefore renders them incapable of rational thought as their thoughts are literally blurred, whereas amentes and demens are juridical terms signifying “a whole category of people who are incapable of certain religious, civil and legal acts; the dementes do not have all their rights in matters of speaking, promising, committing themselves, signing, bringing legal actions, etc.”12 In other words, Descartes first gets the idea that he could compare himself to madmen

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(insani); but then he reminds himself that these people are mad (amentes) and if he was to compare himself to them, he would be demens and his words would lose any meaning, as he cannot then, juridically and philosophically speaking, witness his own thought. There is no point in doing the test of thinking that one is mad, for in so doing, the discourse would lose all credibility and Descartes’s treatise would have been, so to speak, an invalid document. The important thing for us here is that through a thought act the object of madness and the rational thinking subject are posited in one and the same act – regardless of whether this thought act is inherent to philosophy as Derrida claims, or, as Foucault claims, it belongs to a form of juridicomedical thought, which preconditions Descartes’s philosophy and upon which Descartes bases his system. The overlap between Foucault and Derrida, given in the formula one divides into two, is as Derrida points out a Hegelian operation. Here, Derrida is out to find some common ground between himself and Foucault. The issue is therefore to reach the point at which the dialogue [between madness and reason] was broken off, dividing itself into two soliloquies – what Foucault calls, using a very strong word, the Decision. The Decision, through a single act, links and separates reason and madness, and it must be understood at once both as the original act of an order, a fiat, a decree, and as a schism, a caesura, a separation, a dissection. I would prefer dissension, to underline that in question is a self-dividing action, a cleavage and torment interior to meaning in general, interior to logos in general, a division within the very act of sentire. As always, the dissension is internal. The exterior (is) the interior, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung.13

Let us look a little closer at this notion, Entzweiung. As already noted, the term means split or break. A. V. Miller’s 1977 translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit renders Entzweiung as sundering or selfsundering, ein entzweites as a sundered moment, and Entzweitseins as dividedness. Terry Pinkard translates Entzweiung as estrangement. Derrida prefers to call it (in French) dissension, which curiously does not correspond to Jean Hyppolite’s famous French translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit. But literally, and this is central to Hegel’s argument, it means an out-two-ing: an immanent division of one into two, which only retrospectively posits the one. Entzweiung is a form of division in which the division has, so to speak, already taken place. One can think of it as in the image of Aristophanes’ spherical creatures from Plato’s Symposium. Between lovers there is a sense of division. It feels as if in some unidentifiable past, those who are now two were once one. In

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Aristophanes’ tale this takes the image of a bizarre circular creature with four legs and four arms that whirled around on the surface of earth. But the one was at some point divided into two, ending its oneness and instead creating a tension or necessary and erotic connection between the two parts. If this division is immanent, we can say that one divides into two. However, it should be noted that the idea or fantasy of the one is only posited retroactively by the ones that are already divided into two. Entzweiung, as can be seen in The Phenomenology of Spirit, has nothing to say about the one but is always related to the facticity of the two, to the division. The concept Entzweiung plays a central role in the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness, that is, from chapter three to chapter four of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Even though the concept and its derivatives (entzweites, Entzweien, Entzweitseins etc.) appear every now and then throughout the book, it is for the first time rigorously invoked at the end of chapter three and at the beginning of chapter four, where it plays a crucial role in explaining the culmination of consciousness and the opening of self-consciousness. The concept Entzweiung thus cuts across the two spheres of consciousness and self-consciousness, which are often sharply separated in readings of the Phenomenology (the most famous example being that of Alexandre Kojève). Entzweiung is, in a word, a common structure for both consciousness and self-consciousness, and it thus relates to the phenomenology of spirit as such. At the end of chapter three, Hegel discusses the culmination of precritical metaphysics. Pre-critical metaphysics has succeeded in creating what Hegel calls an “inverted world,” that is, a conceptual and metaphysical construction of single-substances operating according to their own laws. In this system, there is no room for a critical subject positing the world and being active in its construction, as there would be in Kant’s critical thought. What we today would term human beings are therefore completely dissolved into the metaphysical play of being as such. In this way, pre-critical metaphysics is the attempt to create a world of pure being in which the laws of being are immanent and revealed to being itself. One can here think of Spinoza’s monism or Leibniz’s monads: the monads have no windows but each monad reflects in itself the laws of the world and thus the system as such. In the climax of single-substance thought, differences, such as Descartes’s dualism, disappear. Everything is substance or monad or whatever single-substance. It is not just that there are no differences, it is that, strictly speaking, difference is not. By the looks of it. Because, as Hegel sees it, what initially appears as a metaphysics without true

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difference is, on a closer look, only a displacement of difference from the difference between matter and form or res cogitans and res extensa, to the difference between singular beings such as substances or monads. In Hegel’s words, when the self-same essence relates itself merely to itself, [i]t related itself to itself in such a way that this is an other to which the relation directs itself, and the relating to itself is in fact the act of estranging [das Entzweien], that is, it is that very selfsameness which is inner difference. Those items that have been estranged [Diese Entzweiten] exist for that reason in and for themselves. Each is an opposite – an other in such a way that with him the other is immediately expressed. That is, it is not the opposite of an other, but rather merely the pure opposite, and in that way it is thus in itself the opposite of itself. That is, it is not an opposite at all but instead exists purely for itself, a pure selfsame essence, which has no difference in it.14

It is hard not to think of monads here. The monad exists in and for itself. It is selfsame essence without any difference in it. The whole world is reflected in the inner of the monad, without the monad having to open itself and confront itself with the otherness of a world. The monads have no windows, as Leibniz puts it. Difference is therefore not between a monad and its other, because every other is a monad just like the monad itself. The other is the same, so to speak. Instead, as Hegel states, between monads exist a form of pure difference. The monads are all the same, in some way, but they are not one. There exists an immeasurable number of ones and between them is pure difference. The dualism of Descartes, which operates with an opposition between res extensa to res cogitans, is sublated into a one-substance theory in which every singular occurrence of the one is separated from an-other one, not by some other form of being, but by a kind of nothingness, a pure opposite. As we can see, Hegel is not focusing on the positive content of Leibniz’s and Descartes’s metaphysics. He strips the argument of any concrete reference in order to zoom in on the structural operation of opposition or difference, and on how structural opposition transforms itself or is transformed. In other words, it is a description of how one form of Entzweiung (dualism) is sublated into another form of Entzweiung (single-substance theory), and how this process of Entzweiung takes place at the heart of a given form of philosophy (in this case single-substance metaphysics). Let us continue to follow Hegel’s argument in §162 of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus, we neither need to ask such questions nor need we regard the distress over such questions as philosophy, nor do we even need to hold that these

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questions are ones that philosophy cannot answer – [such as] how difference or otherness is supposed to come out of this pure essence. For the estrangement has already taken place [denn ist schon die Entzweiung geschehen], the difference has been excluded from what is selfsame and set to one side; what was supposed to be selfsameness is thus already one of the estranged moments [was das sich selbst Gleich sein sollte ist also schon eins der Entzweiten] much more than it would ever be the absolute essence itself. That what is selfsame estranges itself [das sich selbst Gleiche entzweit sich] means that it, as what is already estranged, as otherness, likewise thereby sublates itself. The unity, about which it is commonly said that difference cannot come out of it, is in fact itself merely one moment of estrangement [Moment der Entzweiung]; it is the abstraction of simplicity, which stands in contrast to difference. However, since it is an abstraction, that is, it is only one of the two opposites, it thus has already been said that the unity is itself what is doing the estranging [daß sie das Entzweien ist], for if the unity is itself a negative, is an opposite, then it is simply posited as what has opposition in it.15

Let us attempt to unfold Hegel’s line of thought. First, Hegel explains, one should not ask how difference or otherness comes out of a theory of pure essence, that is, one-substance metaphysics, since difference or otherness are not deduced or derived from the theory of one-substance. Instead, it is already there, it has already happened when one plunges into onesubstance theory. One cannot have a system of one-substance without pure difference. Difference, or otherness, is always already there. When one thinks one can bypass the problem of difference or otherness in dualist thought by posing a theory of one-substance, one sees that the outcome is a displacement of the former dualism. Not between matter and thought, or matter and soul, but between one-substance and difference, or between self-sameness and difference. In Hegel’s words, “the difference has been excluded from what is selfsame and set to one side.” Thus, difference is turned into an abstract principle of pure difference between self-same entities – e.g. monads and the empty distance between them. It therefore turns out that “what was supposed to be selfsameness is thus already one of the estranged moments [eins der Entzweiten].” Substance, or the monad, is already one of the out-two’ed (single-substance and difference). Here, and this is the second element of Hegel’s deduction, we should pay attention to Hegel’s play with words, which it is impossible to translate into proper English: “was das sich selbst Gleich sein sollte ist also schon eins der Entzweiten.” What was supposed to be equal to itself (translated as “self-sameness” by Pinkard) turns out to be only one of the out-two’ed, of the split out elements of self-same and other, of one and difference. The English word self-sameness or even self-same does not

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quite get Hegel’s expression, which literally means to be equal to one self. This expression contains an element of alienation or mediation, since if something is equal to somethings it must mean that this thing is not completely self-relying or self-containing. Instead, it is only itself by comparison to something else, which turns out to be equal to itself. To get to one (the self-same essence of substance or monad in one-substance theory), we have to hold together one and one, and thus the split is already introduced before we can count to one, and we are once again caught in the logic of Entzweiung. In other words, the out-two-ing springs from the one, from the will to a metaphysics on oneness. This argument is underscored in Hegel’s choice of words, when he says that “[d]ie Einheit, von welcher gesagt zu werden pflegt, daß der Unterschied nicht aus ihr herauskommen könne, ist in der Tat selbst nur das eine Moment der Entzweiung; sie ist die Abstraktion der Einfachheit.” Pinkard’s translation has that “[t]he unity, about which it is commonly said that difference cannot come out of it, is in fact itself merely one moment of estrangement; it is the abstraction of simplicity.” But more literally it could be translated as “the Oneness, about which it is commonly said that difference cannot come out of (/ that difference cannot spring from it), is in fact merely the one moment of the out-two-ing; it is the abstraction of the single-ness.” In other words, what is Oneness (unity) is in fact always one of two – a limited view of something split or a repression of something broken. What seems to be all-encompassing reason (unity) in the case of Descartes’s thought, turns out to be only one of two, reason and madness. That is, what appears to be unity is in fact dissension, what appears to be Oneness is always only one moment (ein entzweites) of the already out-two’ed. However, and this is the third element of Hegel’s argument, even though one-substance metaphysics operates with self-same substances and with pure difference, this does not mean that it is not still a one-substance theory. Since difference is not a substance, there are no other substances than the one (substance, monad). Difference is, so to speak, purely negative. In other words, the inherent crack in one-substance metaphysics should not make us return to dualism, as one-substance metaphysics is clearly a progression from dualism. Instead, we need to move forward by sticking to the form of division (Entzweiung) appearing at the core of onesubstance metaphysics. How can we then account for difference from within one-substance theory itself? As difference cannot come about from outside of substance, from outside the windowless walls of the monad (for then something from the

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outside would be able to enter the monad, like light or a reflection, that would disturb the self-containment of the monad), difference must come about from within substance itself. Difference is, therefore, not only something which happens between substances, but must adhere to substance itself. Hence, pre-critical metaphysics is not wrong in focusing on the one-substance of being, but it is wrong in its attempts to exclude difference from the one-substance and consequently in its attempts to gloss over the split at the core of being itself. “[T]he unity is itself what is doing the splitting [Entzweien],” as Hegel puts it. The splitting is, in other words, immanent to unity, or to thinking in terms of oneness (Einheit). One divides into two. When trying to think Reason with a capital R, one will find madness at the core of the argument. Or, in the case of Foucault, when one tries to think Madness with a capital M, one gets insistently caught in the logic of reason – medical, juridical, philosophical or whatever. What Hegel effectively shows in §162 is that sublation and Entzweiung are not mutually exclusive. Rather, sublation is always the sublation of Entzweiung in that one form of division, or one way of splitting, is transposed into another, which is in itself structured around the very division on which it is based. The attempt to overcome the structural difference (Entzweiung) of dualism by proposing a one-substance metaphysics, only manages to draw the difference between soul and matter into being itself. One-substance is now what is different from itself and that which posits difference as such. What happens in Spinoza’s attempt to solve the untenable Cartesian dualism is that the difference between soul and matter is sublated into the difference between substance and difference. And this act, like Descartes’s act of thought, is itself an introduction of a division: “Coming-to-be-in-selfsameness is likewise an out-two-ing,” as Hegel puts it. It is thus not surprising that we find the same structure operative in the positing of self-consciousness. Here, self-consciousness emerges out of a process in which a division is primordially posited between different selfconsciousnesses, and, as Hegel explains, self-consciousness both recognizes itself in the Other and is only recognized by way of the Other. The Other as self-consciousness is identical to the I. Whereas knowledge in both dualism and one-substance theory essentially had the form of knowledge of an alienated other, knowledge in self-consciousness can only emerge by way of the Other. Or, to be precise, knowledge is always in the Other, it is always out there, where the I also is. The way the I gets to know itself is thus by way of the Other. The subject, the I, is thus a result of the process of Entzweiung, the process in which one divides into

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two: something or some-one divides into self-consciousness and selfconsciousness, mutually acknowledging each other and thereby themselves. Let us now return to Foucault’s article from Dictionnaire des philosophes. As we have already seen, Foucault defined his critical history of thought as a critical history of the acts “that posit, in their different possible relations, a subject and an object,” and it is consequently an investigation of “the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed and modified.”16 As Foucault makes clear, this investigation may equally analyze the relations between subject and subject, and the conditions under which a subject is posited in relation to an (other) subject. Thus, in all forms of knowledge, a subject is posited in relation to some subject or object, and only through this necessary relation does the subject emerge as this or that subject. The subject’s knowledge of him- or herself as this or that subject is already mediated through the Other, and thus points towards an immanent split in the subject. In Hegel’s words “[c]oming-to-be-in-selfsameness is likewise an out-two-ing,” which in this case is to say: getting to know yourself is likewise a division between Other and Other-as-self, between alienated words and those words that pertain to me. In the emergence of the subject, it is the Other (the world or language) itself that is split. In the becoming of the subject, one divides into two: the world divides into Other and Other-as-self (Other and subject). The name which Foucault gives to this division, or to the knowledge of this division, is experience. Let us take a key passage from Foucault’s article in Dictionnaire des philosophes: [O]ne must be careful: refusing the philosophical recourse to a constituent subject does not amount to acting as if the subject did not exist, making an abstraction of it on behalf of a pure objectivity. This refusal has the aim of eliciting the processes that are peculiar to an experience in which the subject and the object ‘are formed and transformed’ in relation to and in terms of one another. The discourses of mental illness, delinquency, or sexuality say what the subject is only in a certain, quite particular game of truth; but these games are not imposed on the subject from the outside according to a necessary causality or structural determination. They open up a field of experience in which the subject and the object are both constituted only under certain simultaneous conditions, but in which they are constantly modified in relation to each other, and so they modify this field of experience itself.17

The different forms of discourses, the different power-knowledge structures and games of truth, open up different fields of experience. These fields of experience are the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of subject to

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be formed in relation to a certain kind of object. Even though experience may be how a subject experiences himself and others, in doing so he is already part of a field of experience, which is so to speak out there, outside the subject, but which nevertheless conditions the subject and makes him or her this specific subject. The experience of an other as this specific other and the experience of one’s self as this specific self is always already conditioned by the field of experience from which subjects and objects are out-two’ed. A field of experience is therefore the one that divides into two (object and subject, Other and Other-as-self). It is because of this split that the topic of truth-telling (parrhesia, confession, etc.) takes up such an integral part of Foucault’s work. What truth-telling adds to language is precisely the subject. In truth-telling, whether it be the parrhesia of Greek philosophy, the confession of a sin in Christianity, the confession of a crime in court, or the sexual desires disclosed in psychoanalysis, truth-telling is the modality of language from which the subject emerges. It is in other words a function of language from which language divides between Other and Other-as-self. The subject, in Foucault’s work, is defined as the emergence of subjectivity out of language, and, as we can read in the quote above, the name for this emergence of a subject in relation to an Other is experience. In this way, a critical history of thought is “a history of ‘subjectivity’, if what is meant by the term is the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself.”18 Truth-telling is the experience of one-self as a subject (in the medium of an Other in the form of language). Like Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Foucault attempts to write a history of the displacements of different forms of Entzweiung, and the way in which this effects the production of subjects and experience. As Robert Pippin has noted, the method Hegel invented for writing the Phenomenology, and what would be known under the name of phenomenology, was first called by Hegel “a science of the experience of consciousness.”19 However, there is also a huge difference between the works of Hegel and Foucault that should not be underestimated. Where Foucault focuses on the facticity of subjectivation and the genealogical sources for explaining contemporary forms of subjectivation, Hegel chases absolute knowledge. Where Foucault attempts to write a history of the present (as he also labeled his work), Hegel wants to tease out a dialectical necessity and thereby the progress achieved in moving from one mode of experience to another. Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, as Pippin summarizes it, consists of “imagining possible models of experience […] primarily experience of objects and of other subjects […], and then demonstrating by a series of essentially reductio ad absurdum arguments

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that such an imagined experience, when imagined from the point of view of the experiencer, really could not be a possible or coherent experience, thus requiring some determinate addition or alteration to repair the imagined picture, and so a new possibility to be entertained.”20 Foucault, on the other hand, rests solely on the facticity of modes of experience in an attempt to catch the present, without relying on any form of dialectical and metahistorical progression. Thus, where modes of experience in Hegel’s Phenomenology implode under the weight of their immanent contradictions, in Foucault’s work it is exactly on the grounds of these immanent contradictions that a mode of experience is being sustained by force. Or, in line with Foucault’s vocabulary, the immanent contradiction of modes of experience are sustained by power. For Foucault, the fantasy of a divisionless and frictionless mode of experience, as in the form of the Hegelian absolute, is meaningless and ultimately dangerous. What remains instead of the chase for absolute knowledge is a critical engagement with the existing modes of experience and resistance hereto, which may again spur new modes of experience. In the above quote, Foucault formulates this argument in relation to discourses. The discourses, as he writes, “open up a field of experience in which the subject and the object are both constituted only under certain simultaneous conditions, but in which they are constantly modified in relation to each other, and so they modify this field of experience itself.”21 The discourses, or as we might say the Other, when dividing itself into two – Other and Other-as-self (subject) – not only out-twos the subject and its Other, it also opens up for modification and transformation of language and modes of experience. As Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality 1, “[w]here there is power, there is resistance and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”22 Resistance to identification is immanent to the division in which the subject and its Other are posited at the same time, which is to say that subjectivation to a discourse, or to a set of discourses, is never complete and never coherent, never without splits and lacks. The subject is always incompletely and paradoxically identified by the Other, and the subject thus always has an incomplete and paradoxical identification of itself via the Other (via discourse), which forces the subject into a struggle with the Other: “I am not what you say I am.” In this way, experience is always also experience of lacks and divisions, which is reflected in the fact that the subject always lacks the words for describing itself. There is in this way a necessary relation between subject and discourse. Subject is what is given through discourse and yet the subject is not exhausted through discourse (as representing the entire set of power-

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knowledge structures). There is always something more or something less to the subject than what can be identified by the Other. The subject is what is at the same time signified (or named) and yet not completely signified in discourse. We all have our names, which are given to us by an Other (our parents) and installed in the signifying chains of language before we are able to speak or comprehend language. And yet this name, given by an Other and installed in the Other (in discourses) is the signifier of the subject. In other words, this signifier that defines the subject is already overwritten by all sorts of discourses (sex, religion, class, sexuality, nationality, native tongue, race, job expectation, etc.) before the subject itself assumes speech. Once speech is assumed, however, the subject is the one who has the ability to say “not me,” “I am not that.” Where there is power, there is resistance. These discourses are in Foucault’s theory the fields of experience through which the subject is able to experience itself and its world. The subject is sutured to the Other, to the discourses, if only because there is a division between subject and Other. The subject is not exhausted in the Other, but it only exists in a necessary relation to the Other. Through an Entzweiung. This division is sutured because the relation between subject and Other is full of tension, paradoxes, and antagonisms. It is an open wound, which is provisionally stitched up. And yet, at the same time, the subject’s relation to himself is always mediated via the Other as the subject only knows himself in words given out there. He is only himself by way of discourse, and he is only himself by taking distance from discourse, that is, through resistance. Foucault’s critical history of thought is thus a history of how this division is experienced in different fields of experience, how the subject is sutured to the Other. Unlike Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, there is no dialectical progression from one field of experience to another, but only a displacement. This displacement is not the result of a logical outcome, but can only be determined through contingent struggles. Any given field of experience is upheld through force in order to secure certain power relations, and the only way to break a given field of experience is through resistance. Foucault’s critical history of thought is thus a mapping out of structural forms of domination known as fields of experience in order to mobilize resistance against them. But in order to do so, one must understand in what way experience works, in what way the subject is sutured to the Other.

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Notes 1

Miller, J.-A. 1978. “Suture.” Screen no. XVIII:24-34, 25 See Gutting, G. 2002. “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience.” Boundary 2 no. XXIX:69-85; Jay, M. 2006. Songs of Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press; and Lemke, T. 2011. “Critique and Experience in Foucault.” Theory, Culture, Society no. XXVIII:26-48. 3 Florence, M. 1984. “Foucault.” From http://www.puf.com/Auteur:Michel _Foucault. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. (translation modified). 7 Derrida, J. 2005. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Brass. London and New York: Routledge, 39. 8 Foucault, M. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 47. 9 Derrida, ”Cogito and the History of Madness,” 68. 10 Ibid. 11 Foucault, M. 2006. History of Madness. Translated by J. Khalfa. London and New York: Routledge, 559. 12 Ibid. 13 Derrida, ”Cogito and the History of Madness,” 45f. 14 Hegel, G. W. F. 2014. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by T. Pinkard. Bilingual edition from: http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spiritpage.html, §162. 15 Ibid. 16 Florence, “Foucault.” 17 Ibid. (my emphasis). 18 Ibid. 19 Pippin, R. 2010. Hegel on Self-consciousness. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1. 20 Ibid., 1f. 21 Florence, “Foucault.” 22 Foucault, M. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 95. 2

PART IV. PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS: NEW FIELDS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN BETWEEN REALISM AND IDEALISM: TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE AND TRUTH IN HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY1 SIMONE AURORA

Between Realism and Idealism According to their basic and standard formulations, philosophical realism and idealism can be defined in the following way: philosophical idealism implies that objects and the physical world exist only as an appearance to or expression of mind and consciousness, or as somehow mental in its inner essence; philosophical realism, on the other hand, implies that objects and the physical world exist independently of mind and consciousness and of the way in which these latter experience the former. In relation to this, there is a long-standing, and nevertheless still open, controversy within the phenomenological tradition, concerning the question whether Husserl’s phenomenology represents a form of idealist or realist philosophy; Husserl himself, although in the vast majority of the cases (at least after the so-called transcendental turn of the 1907 lectures on “The idea of the phenomenology”2 and the development of the “transcendental reduction” introduced therein) defines his own position as a “transcendental idealism,” but seems not to be satisfied with this definition, to the point that sometimes he describes his own philosophical position in terms of a form of philosophical realism. If, for instance, in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl writes that “phenomenology is eo ipso ‘transcendental idealism’,”3 in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he claims nevertheless, with reference to his own position, that indeed “[t]here can be no stronger realism than this.”4 This, at least “alleged,” uncertainty of Husserl’s view, has led to a deep discordance among Husserl’s pupils and critics, since the very beginning of what Spiegelberg has called “The phenomenological movement” and

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then within the general reception of Husserl’s work. If authors like Eugen Fink, which – although he specifies and clarifies the particular meaning of the term “Idealism” within Husserl’s phenomenological approach and rejects the charge of subjectivism – claims that “phenomenological idealism is a constitutive idealism which essentially contains the world within itself by returning to constitutive origins”5 and that “[t]he world in its entirety, formerly the universal theme of all philosophy, can, through the reduction, be known as the result of a transcendental constitution: it is expressly taken back into the life of absolute subjectivity,”6 we can also find authors like Roman Ingarden and the supporters of the so-called phenomenological realism of the “Göttingen circle,”7 who think that Husserl, “whose standpoint was that of realism at the time of the Logische Untersuchungen, showed a distinct inclination towards transcendental idealism since the Ideen I,”8 and try then to demonstrate that this idealistic turn would be incoherent with the original meaning of the phenomenological program and therefore it should be refused. Moreover, there are authors like, for instance, the young Jean-Paul Sartre, who assert that Husserl’s phenomenology implies a radically realist position9 or, more recently, authors like Dallas Willard, who absolutely deny the idealistic nature of Husserl’s phenomenology in its entirety. In the final pages of his 1937 essay The Transcendence of The Ego, Sartre writes, with reference to the idealist readings of Husserl’s phenomenology, that “[…] nothing is more unjust than to call phenomenologists ‘idealists’. On the contrary, for centuries we have not felt in philosophy so realistic a current;”10 and Willard, for his part, states in a paper presented in 2011: “I have been unable to accept the view that Husserl ever became an idealist.”11 In order to try to solve this controversial matter, I think that two crucial points of Husserl’s philosophical position should be considered. Firstly, almost every time Husserl speaks about the idealism/realism issue, he is very cautious and careful to distinguish his own use of these terms from the one typical of the philosophical tradition. This is also true of the quotations we considered at the beginning of this paper: in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl does write that “phenomenology is eo ipso ‘transcendental idealism’,” but then he adds, “though in a fundamentally and essentially new sense,”12 while in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, he claims, with reference to his own position, that “[t]here can be no stronger realism than this,” but only, he goes further, “if by this word nothing more is meant than: ‘I am certain of being a human being who lives in this world, etc., and I doubt it not in the least’.”13 Furthermore, in Ideas I, after a sentence which seems to vigorously support the idealistic option by affirming that “[t]he existence

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of a Nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness, since Nature itself turns out to be correlate of a consciousness: Nature is only as being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness,”14 Husserl observes in a related marginal note: “That will be misunderstood.”15 The second point which should, in my view, be taken into account, is that Husserl’s phenomenology is, although original, a form of transcendental philosophy, that is of a philosophy which focuses its attention on the relationship between the experiencing subjectivity and the experienced objectuality and that postulates a somehow necessary correlation between the level of subjectivity and the level of objective world, although with various possible emphases. It is not by chance that J. G. Fichte, a prominent spokesperson of transcendental philosophy, writes, with reference to his own position, that this coincides with “a critical idealism, which might also be described as a real-idealism or an idealrealism.”16 I would then suggest that, in a similar way, Husserl’s proposal is neither realist (in the common philosophical sense) nor idealist (in the common philosophical sense)17 but, in opposition to these categories, can be defined as simply phenomenological or as transcendental-phenomenological, in a specific sense which my line of argument should finally point out.

The Intentional Object In order to understand in which sense the transcendental-phenomenological model provided by Husserl represents an alternative both to realism and idealism, and so to reappraise the alleged incompatibilities between a first and a second Husserl, we must now consider the meaning of the phenomenological correlation between consciousness and object, between mind and world; we must then examine what is probably the most important notion of Husserl’s phenomenology, that is the notion of “intentionality.” In paragraph 36 of Ideas I, Husserl writes that “[u]niversally it belongs to the essence of every actional cogito to be consciousness of something,”18 and then that intentionality is “the property of being ‘consciousness of something’.”19 Already in the first Logical Investigation (in the first edition of 1901) Husserl wrote that all objects [Gegenstände] and relations among objects [gegenständliche Beziehungen] only are what they are for us, through acts of thought [Akten des Vermeinens] essentially different from them, in which they become present to us, in which they stand before us as unitary items that we mean [als gemeinte].20

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In the very next sentence, which is inexplicably missing in the English translation of J. N. Findlay, Husserl claims that “for the pure phenomenological account, there is nothing else but this web of intentional acts [für die rein phänomenologische Betrachtungsweise gibt es nichts als Gewebe solcher intentionaler Akte].”21 The relationship between consciousness and object is, according to Husserl, always intentional, that is to say that objects are objects only insofar as they are objects of a consciousness. Generally speaking, then, objects are always intentional objects, namely they are always constituted by the activity of a consciousness, by its intentional acts: If I am perceiving a tree, for instance, this tree is constituted by that peculiar intentional act represented by my perceptual act. The aim of the phenomenological analysis would be, then, to study the different structures of these intentional acts and of the different objects these relations constitute. The different interpretation of the meaning of this constitution is probably one of the main sources of the controversy about Husserl’s alleged idealism. Consciousness, indeed, seems to be the condition of possibility of single objects, so that the existence of objects seems to be completely dependent on the existence of a constitutive consciousness, just as world, the totality of objects, seems to be completely dependent on subjectivity, this understood as the potential totality of intentional acts. This view, however, would not do justice to the transcendental nature of Husserl’s phenomenology and, moreover, would not explain his already mentioned prudence regarding the use of the term “idealism.” Husserl’s understanding of the intentional relation is, indeed, more complicated and a more careful consideration of its nature could shed some light on the question just arisen. As a first consideration, it is important to emphasise that, according to Husserl, the intentional activity of consciousness is always directed upon something that is pre-given, that already exists, somehow, before becoming object of the intentional consciousness. In a very late work, which was posthumously published in 1939, Experience and Judgement, Husserl writes that consciousness pre-supposes that something is already pre-given to us, which we can turn toward in perception. And it is not mere particular objects, isolated by themselves, which are thus pre-given but always a field of pre-giveness, from which a particular stands out and, so to speak, “excites us” to perception and perceptive contemplation. We say that what excites us to perception is pre-given in our environing world and affects us on the basis of this world.22

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So, in contrast to what we said before and according to this quotation, it seems to be undeniable that, somehow, objects exist independently from consciousness and world independently from subjectivity. As a second remark, it must also be said that, according to Husserl, world and objects are not only generically pre-given, but they are always pre-given in a specific way. Namely, they are pre-structured, they possess a well definable, clear-cut and precise structure, which is able to influence, for its part, the nature of the intentional relationship. Again in Experience and Judgement, Husserl writes that “[e]very active apprehension of an object presupposes that it is pre-given. The objects of receptivity are pregiven in an original passivity with their structures of association, affection, etc.”23 One more time, Husserl’s own words seem to allow different interpretations.

Evidence as Experience of Truth

This very famous image, also known as the “Boring figure,” can perhaps be of some help to a better understanding of the structure of intentionality and of the nature of the relationship between consciousness and object. First of all, it must be said that this image represents an object of perception. It is, then, constituted by that peculiar intentional act represented by the perceptual activity of consciousness. So, as we have seen, as an intentional object, it must be something which results from a process of constitution, something which is constituted; at the same time, it is something which must be, in some sense, pre-given. As is well known, this image is an example of an ambiguous image, to the extent

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that, dependding on the reelative point of view, it reepresents either an old woman or a young womaan. So, in pheenomenologicaal terms, one must say that, dependding on the inntentional act involved, connsciousness co onstitutes either the inntentional objeect “old womaan” or the inteentional objecct “young woman.” N Nonetheless, one o must also o say that thhis constitutio on is not arbitrary, buut is co-determ mined by the structure of tthe image itself: I can constitute thhe intentionaal object “old woman,” tthe intentional object “young wom man” and maany others, am mong which the intention nal object “example off ambiguous im mage” or simp ply the intentiional object “ink blot,” but I cannnot constitutte the inten ntional objectt “orange ju uice” or “locomotivee” at least not as intuitively or analogicallly given. 2

1

3

Indeed, if onne modifies, even e if only liittle, the struccture of the im mage, one can make itt more likely that the imag ge represents an old wom man (as in figure numbber 3) or, on the contrary, that the imaage represents a young woman (as iin figure numbber 2). Indeed, tthe image is pre-given p as a structured w whole but, nev vertheless, it is only thee intentional act a which is ab ble to “work” this pre-given n material to constitutte a new, moore complex, structure, nnamely the in ntentional object. Therre is no neutrral level or baasic stage of tthe given: thee given is always invvolved in ann intentional relationship .24 It is im mpossible, continuing w with our exam mple, to determ mine definitivvely whether the t image

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represents an “old woman” or a “young woman”: the structure of the image simply implies the possibility to constitute a finite number of intentional objects, but, on the other hand, without the intentionality of a consciousness, the image could not exist, at least as an object: once it is perceived, it must indeed be perceived as either an “old woman” or a “young woman” or an “ink blot”: in any case, it must be necessarily subjected to an intentional grasp.25 In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl writes that “things, which are not acts of thought, are nonetheless constituted in them, come to givenness in them – and, as a matter of principle, show themselves to be what they are only when they are thus constituted.”26 In Experience and Judgement, Husserl maintains that It becomes evident that, although it is correct that a truly existing object is first the product [Produkt] of our cognitive activity, still, for all cognitive activity, wherever it is brought to bear, this production of a truly existing object does not mean that the activity brings forth the object from nothing but that, on the contrary, just as objects are already pre-given, an objective environment is always already given to us,27

and that “[o]ver against the specific freedom of variation,” that is the possibility to constitute different intentional objects, “there is in all experience of the individual a wholly determined commitment.”28 Objects are “products,” as Husserl also defines them, of the intentional activity of a consciousness but this activity, in turn, is limited by the structure of the objects themselves. “Experience” can then be considered as the name Husserl gives to this essential correlation between intentional acts and structured given. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl claims that “experience is the consciousness of being with the matters themselves, of seizing upon and having them quite directly,” that is to undergo the structure of the given, but, on the other hand, he states further that “experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into consciousness.”29 So truth can be defined as the degree of evidence [Evidenz] of the adequacy between the two series of structures involved in the experience, the intentional series and the series of the given. In the sixth logical investigation Husserl writes that [i]f someone experiences the self-evidence [Evidenz] of A, it is selfevident [evident] that no second person can experience the absurdity of this

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same A, for, that A is self-evident [evident], means that A is not merely meant, but also genuinely given, and given as precisely what it is thought to be. In the strict sense it is itself present.30

As Gail Soffer notes, [t]his analysis may be characterized as a reinterpretation of the traditional correspondence theory of truth. In the Prolegomena, truth is held to be the idea of the correspondence between the experienced meaning of an assertion and an experienced state of affairs. Similarly, according to the Sixth investigation, a true judgement is one which corresponds to a state of affairs which can be given with adequate Evidenz.31

So, with reference to the image above, the sentence “the image represents a young woman” is true, although in a relative way, because it corresponds to the intentional object “produced” by the interplay between the structure of the intentional act and the structure of the given, while the sentence “the image represents orange juice” is false, because it is impossible to produce such an intentional object, in view of the interrelation between the structures of the intentional act and the structure of the given material involved. Moreover, truth, understood as the congruence of the evidence to experience, has different levels. The more an experience is ambiguous, that is when it permits different “solutions,” the more the corresponding truth is relative and evidence displays a low degree of congruence. In the case of the experience of spatiotemporal objects like, for instance, the experience of the image here proposed, truth can only be relative, because the intentional objects constituted therein are always ambiguous. There is always, at least theoretically, the possibility of an alternative solution, of a different interpretation, of an error or of a sensory or optical illusion.32 In Experience and Judgement, Husserl writes that “[E]very kind of object has its own mode of self-giving, i.e., self-evidence, even though apodictic selfevidence is not possible for all kinds, for example, not for the spatiotemporal objects of external perception.”33 What Husserl calls “apodictic” or “adequate” evidence, pertains, indeed, only to those intentional objects whose nature is absolutely univocal and, accordingly, whose truth is also univocal and unquestionable like, for instance, logical entities, mathematical truths34 or the objects of immanent experience, such as one’s own mental images or fictional representations.35 In Ideas I Husserl writes: All such evidence […] is either adequate evidence, of essential necessity incapable of being further “strengthened” or “weakened”, thus without degrees of weight; or the evidence is inadequate and thus capable of being

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increased and decreased. Whether or not this or that evidence is possible in a given sphere depends on its generic type. It is therefore a priori prefigured, and it is countersense to demand in one sphere the perfection belonging to the evidence of another sphere […] which essentially excludes it.36

Immanence and Transcendence Apodictic or adequate evidence pertains only to those objects whose truth is univocal and necessary, as well as to immanent objects, whereas transcendent objects, like the objects of external experience, namely all the spatiotemporal objects of the outer world, are always dubitable and uncertain. “Everything transcendent,” Husserl claims, “(everything not given immanently to me) is to be assigned the index of zero, that is, its existence, its validity is not to be assumed as such,”37 it is therefore “epistemologically null,”38 since it cannot allow for stable and confident knowledge. However, this position seems to lead to very problematic consequences and even to sceptical39 or solipsistic40 outcomes, despite what we have already said about the idealism/realism controversy and in contrast to the general aim of Husserl’s phenomenology.41 It is not by chance that Husserl talks, in this connection, of a riddle, which he names the “riddle of knowledge”: as soon as reflection is directed upon the correlation between knowledge and objectivity […] difficulties, untenable positions, and conflicting but seemingly well-grounded theories abound. This forces us to admit that the possibility of knowledge, with regard to its ability to make contact with objectivity, is a riddle.42

Indeed, if the knowledge of transcendent objects is always dubitable, “how can knowledge be sure that it corresponds to things as they exist in themselves, that it ‘makes contact’ with them?”43 To answer this question, Husserl suggests, a clarification of the conceptual pair immanencetranscendence is needed.44 There is in fact a first, naive, psychological understanding of these terms,45 which leads to what Husserl defines as the concepts of “real immanence” and “real transcendence”: real immanence refers to the condition of being contained in “the consciousness of a person and in a real mental phenomenon,”46 while real transcendence indicates the opposite, namely the condition of not being contained in a real consciousness, it refers then to the fact that “the known object is not really contained in the act of knowing.”47 To put it more simply, “[t]he immanent is in me, […] the transcendent is outside of me.”48 Such a

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definition of the concepts of immanence and transcendence entails an understanding of consciousness as a container, as a box or a bag, as Husserl also defines it. This conception of consciousness is exactly what Husserl tries to oppose, since it does not offer any suitable solution to the riddle of knowledge. Indeed, if only what lies inside the “borders” of consciousness can be known with evidence, “[h]ow do I, the knowing subject, know and how can I know for sure – that not only my experiences, these acts of knowing, exist, but also what they know exists?”49 To solve the riddle, according to Husserl, one needs a different and broader concept of immanence and of its counterpart, transcendence and, accordingly, a different understanding of what consciousness is. As Husserl writes, there is another sense of transcendence, whose counterpart is an entirely different kind of immanence, namely, absolute and clear givenness, selfgiveness in the absolute sense. This givenness, which excludes any meaningful doubt, consists of an immediate act of seeing and apprehending the meant objectivity itself as it is. It constitutes the precise concept of evidence, understood as immediate evidence.50

Immanence, understood as the condition of being inside a consciousness, gives way to a new concept of immanence, now understood as selfgiveness. Whatever is given, whatever is contained within the experiencerelation, can be considered as immanent, although it can display, as we have already seen, different degrees of evidence. Thus, in this new, broader sense51 of the term “immanence,” everything that is given is immanent, even transcendent objects, since they are immediately given, and given precisely as something transcendent,52 that is as something whose evidence cannot be adequate or apodictic.53 It is then clear that such an understanding of immanence has nothing to do with a psychological consciousness and entails a concept of consciousness other than the “bagconcept.” As Husserl writes, if “[t]he original problem was the relation between subjective psychological experience and the reality in itself apprehended in this experience,” now we are dealing not with human knowledge but rather with knowledge in general, without any relation to existential co-positings, be they of the empirical ego or of a real world. We need the insight that the truly significant problem is the problem of the ultimate sense-bestowal of knowledge, and thus of objectivity in general, which is what it is only in its correlation to possible knowledge.54

According to this new and broader sense of the term “immanence,” both

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consciousness and objects can be said to be immanent to experience, this understood as the correlation between the knowing subject and the known objects; still, these must not be interpreted as psychological categories, but as functions or roles pertaining to any possible experience.55 Indeed, every experience entails immediately and necessarily the position of both a subjective and an objective pole and phenomenology aims to study not the psychological rules of the relation between a specific consciousness and its particular objects, but instead the general and universal laws of this correlation, its different structures and its different properties. Phenomenology takes into account only the dynamic correlation between the consciousness-function and the object-function, their interdependence, and not consciousness and objects as isolated and self-sufficing elements.56 Consciousness is not a box and, accordingly, objects are not something contained in a box; both consciousness and objects are given immediately, at once, and they can be given only in their mutual correlation within the “field of immanence” of experience. Therefore, in its genuine sense, immanence pertains only to experience, wherein consciousness and objects are simultaneously given. Accordingly, absolute transcendence is impossible, since every transcendence is ultimately “contained” in the immanent field of experience. Objects can be transcendent to consciousness but not to experience, to which the genuine sense of immanence only pertains, since outside experience there can be simply nothing. The riddle of transcendence is then “solved”: consciousness and objects are necessarily given as interrelated57 and, moreover, transcendence, in its broader meaning, appears to be “impossible.”

Conclusion: Structural Phenomenology In order to conclude, I would like to point out a possible outcome of the reasoning I tried to present and to sketch some theoretical consequences of the suggested understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, which can be defined, following the works of scholars like Giovanni Piana58 and Elmar Holenstein,59 as “phenomenological structuralism” or “structural phenomenology.” Firstly, with regard to the idealism\realism controversy, I hope to have shown in which sense Husserl’s phenomenology represents a third way, according to which there cannot be any absolute or neutral point of view within the relation between world and subjectivity, since experience is always the result of the necessary and dynamic correlation between the structures of intentionality and the structures of every given material. Objects are independent from consciousness, with regards both to their

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existence and their structure. No idealism, then. On the other hand, objects would not be objects, they would not be proper objects of experience, if they were not constituted by a consciousness. No realism, then.60 According to this “third way,” I believe that it is possible to define Husserl’s own philosophical position in terms of a “structural phenomenology.” The main features of Husserl’s “structural phenomenology” can be briefly summarized in the following points: 1. The basic phenomena of experience are represented by structures, by multiplicities of interrelated elements. 2. There are no isolated nor unrelated phenomena. In a manuscript dated 1898, Husserl writes, in a marginal note which evidently resounds with Leibnizian accents, that “the absolute perfect knowledge of any thing implies the knowledge of the whole world” and that “everything, from its own viewpoint, mirrors the world.”61 Phenomenology, then, can be described as the general science of the formal relations between the different types of phenomena, which are always, according to the first point, understood as structured wholes. 3. The fundamental relation of every knowledge lies in the intentionality, that is in the mutual relationship between the structures of the consciousness and the structures of the different objectualities. There is no ontological priority whatsoever between the two poles of the intentional relation. As Husserl writes, [t]he phenomenology of knowledge is a science of the phenomenon of knowledge in a twofold sense: of [acts of] knowledge as appearances, presentations, acts of consciousness in which these or those objectivities are presented, become objects of consciousness, either passively or actively; and, on the other hand, of the objectivities themselves as objects that present themselves in just such ways.62

Although an epistemological priority pertains to consciousness, since it is consciousness that implements the process of knowledge, there could be no consciousness, and therefore no knowledge, without the intentioned phenomenological objectualities which are pre-given to consciousness. At the same time, no phenomenon could be experienced outside the relation to a consciousness.63 4. Phenomenology does not aim to describe empirical regularities, but, on the contrary, universally valid intentional laws.

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In a brief essay published in 1939, Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology, Sartre expresses the gist of this idea very well by writing – although it would be very problematic to consider his position as representative of a “structural phenomenology”64 – that “[c]onsciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness”65 and then that everything is finally outside: everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.66

A structure among the different structures of which experience is ultimately composed.

Notes 1 I would like to thank prof. Gaetano Rametta, Prof. Elmar Holenstein and Dr. Andrea Altobrando for having read and discussed a first draft of this paper. However, the responsibility for the content is mine alone. 2 Husserl, E. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer. 3 Husserl, E. 1982. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff, 86. 4 Husserl, E. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 187. 5 Fink, E. 2005. “The phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and contemporary criticism.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s Phenomenology, edited by R. Bernet, D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New York: Routledge, 233. 6 Ibid. 235. 7 “For to this lively group and to its varying membership and fringe, phenomenology meant something rather different from what it did to Husserl at this stage, i.e., not the turn toward subjectivity as the basic phenomenological stratum, but toward the ‘Sachen’, understood in the sense of the whole range of phenomena, and mostly toward the objective, non the subjective ones.” (Spiegelberg, H. 1960. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction. Volume I. The Hague: Nijhoff, 170). 8 Ingarden, R. 2005. “About the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s Phenomenology, edited by R. Bernet, D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New York: Routledge, 72.

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“Sartre is concerned to refute the view that phenomenology is a kind of idealism both because that is a misunderstanding of phenomenology and because he thinks idealism politically and ethically undesirable.” (Priest, S. 2004. The Subject in Question. Sartre’s Critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego. LondonNew York: Routledge, 144). 10 Sartre, J. P. 1991. The Transcendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 104-105. 11 Willard, D. Realism Sustained? Interpreting Husserl’s Progression Into Idealism. Presented at the Early Phenomenology Conference held at Franciscan University of Steubenville April 29-30, 2011 (http://www.dwillard.org /articles/artview.asp?artID=151). 12 Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, 86. 13 Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 187. 14 Husserl, E. 1998. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First book. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer, 116. 15 Ibid. 16 Fichte, J. G. 1991. The Science of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 247. 17 David Carr similarly writes, although his line of argument is slightly different from mine, that “Husserl is no metaphysical realist, nor is he a metaphysical idealist.” (Carr, D. 2007. “Husserl’s Attack on Psychologism and its Cultural Implications,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations in the New Century: Western and Chinese Perspectives, edited by K. Y. Lau and J. J. Drummond. Dordrecht: Springer, 41). 18 Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 73. 19 Ibid. 75. 20 Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations. Volume I. London-New York: Routledge, 194. 21 Husserl, E. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, erster Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. “Husserliana,” vol. 19 (1). The Hague-Boston-Lancaster: Nijhoff, 48. (My translation). 22 Husserl, E. 1973. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 72. 23 Ibid. 250. 24 “Phenomenology rejects the presumption of our having available to us an absolute point of view, a point of view presenting us with objective existents, on the one hand, and language or meanings, on the other, and then determining or fixing their relationships. (Such a viewpoint is presumed in correspondence theories of truth).” (Tragesser, R. 1984. Husserl and Realism in Logic and Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113). 25 “[…] things exist, and exist in appearance, and are themselves given by virtue of appearance; to be sure, taken individually, they exist, or hold, independently of

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appearance-insofar as nothing depends on this particular appearance (on this consciousness of givenness)-but essentially, according to their essence, they cannot be separated from appearance.” (Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 68). 26 Ibid. 52. 27 Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, 37. 28 Ibid. 343-344. 29 Husserl, E. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Haag: Nijhoff, 232. 30 Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigations. Volume II. London-New York: Routledge, 266. See also Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic., 19-20: “For example, an object of external perception is given as self-evident, as ‘it itself’, precisely in actual perception, in contrast to the simple presentification of it in memory or imagination, etc.” 31 Soffer, G. Husserl and the Question of Relativism. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer, 1991, 89. 32 “In Ideas I, Husserl adds the qualification that ‘adequate’ or maximal Evidenz varies from one category of object to another, and in the case of physical objects in particular has the form of a Kantian idea.” (ibid.). 33 Husserl, E. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, 20. See also Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 47: “There are diverse modes of objectivity and, with them, diverse modes of so-called givenness.” 34 Indeed, the status of mathematical truths and objects represents a very complex issue within the phenomenological framework and would merit, accordingly, a deeper and more precise consideration, which goes beyond the goals of the present contribution. For a recent and thorough examination of this issue, see Hartimo, M. (ed.) 2010. Phenomenology and Mathematics. Dordrecht-Heidelberg-London-Nuw York: Springer. 35 However, it is important to note that Husserl distinguishes between adequate and apodictic evidence. In the Cartesian Meditations he writes that “[a]n apodictic evidence […] is not merely certainty of the affairs or affair-complexes (states-ofaffairs) evident in it,” as with adequate evidence; “rather it discloses itself, to a critical reflection, as having the signal peculiarity of being as the same time the absolute unimaginableness (inconceivability) of their non-being, and thus excluding in advance every doubt as ‘objectless’, empty.” (Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, 15-16). 36 Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 333. 37 Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 63-64. 38 Ibid. 34. 39 “The skeptic says: knowledge is something other than the known object. Knowledge is given, but the known object is not given – especially and as a matter of principle in the sphere of those objects that are called transcendent. And yet knowledge is supposed to relate itself to the object and know it – how is that possible?” (ibid. 60).

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“Should I say: only phenomena are genuinely given to the knowing subject, and the knowing subject never gets beyond the interconnections of its own experiences. Thus it can only be truly justified in saying: I exist, and everything that is not me is mere phenomena, resolves itself into phenomenal contexts. Should I adopt, then, the standpoint of solipsism?” (ibid. 17). 41 “Phenomenology is directed to the ‘sources of knowing’, to the general origins which can be seen, to absolutely given universals that provide the general criteria in terms of which the sense and also the correctness of all our highly intricate thought is to be ascertained, and by which all the riddles concerning its objectivity are to be solved.” (ibid. 41). 42 Ibid. 25. 43 Ibid. 61. 44 “One answers – and this is the obvious answer – in terms of the conceptual pair or word pair immanence and transcendence.” (ibid. 62). 45 “At first one is inclined to interpret, as if it were entirely obvious, immanence as real immanence, indeed, as real immanence in the psychological sense: the object of knowledge also exists in the experience of knowing, or in the consciousness of the ego, to which the experience belongs, as a real actuality.” (ibid.). 46 Ibid. 64. 47 Ibid. 27. 48 Ibid. 63. 49 Ibid. 17. 50 Ibid. 27-28. 51 “real immanence (and, respectively, transcendence) is only a special case of the broader concept of immanence as such.” (ibid. 65). 52 “The relating-itself-to-something-transcendent, to refer to it in one way or another, is an inner characteristic of the phenomenon.” (ibid. 35). 53 “Genuine immanence is givenness, wherever it is found, even in the case of a transcendent object.” (Brough, J. B. 2008. “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology.” Husserl Studies no. 24, 186). 54 Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 55. 55 “ Husserl consistently emphasizes early and late his interest in the cognitive life of consciousness, Erkenntnisleben. In this respect he is interested in the essences of cognitive performances and the essences of their corresponding objectivities. This is ‘correlation research’ as Husserl termed it, and it is at the very core of phenomenology. His dissatisfaction with his early account in the First Edition of the Investigations is based on his worry that he had not completely put to one side a psychologistic sense of the subjective.” (Moran, D. 2005. “The Meaning of Phenomenology in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” in Husserl and the Logic of Experience, edited by Gary Banham, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 33). 56 “ Constituting consciousness is a web of interrelated intentional acts and their correlates, not a housing for disconnected experiential atoms.” (Brough, J. B. “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,” 191).

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“The role of interconnection and genesis in constitution points again to the complexity of constitution and of the constituted object, and how inadequate the image of the object as a simple thing stuffed into a bag proves to be. The bag conception is like a black hole, drawing each thing in and compacting it, but also disconnecting it from everything else. Husserl’s conception of consciousness as constituting restores the essential connection between seeing and what is seen, and discloses the complexity and dynamism inherent in both.” (ibid.). 58 See Piana, G. 1995. “Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus.” In Phänomenologie in Italien, edited by Renato Cristin, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 113: “Sometimes I have spoken of a phenomenological structuralism or, in a larger sense, of a structural-phenomenological viewpoint, in order to describe my understanding of phenomenological themes.” See also page 114: “The general thesis and, at the same time, the condition of possibility of phenomenological research is: In all of its forms of manifestation experience exhibits a structure, and phenomenological analysis must make this structure evident and show its different nodes and articulations.” (My translation) 59 See Holenstein, E. 1975. Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, and Holenstein, E. 1976. Linguistik Semiotik Hermeneutik. Plädoyers für eine strukturale Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 60 “True, he [Husserl] does speak of appearance as ‘in a certain sense’ creating objects […], but by that he only means that if we are to have objects, they must appear to us through acts of consciousness, and hence ‘cannot be separated from appearance’ […] Appearances give things, and give them in distinct ways, but they do not make them out of whole cloth.” (Brough, J. B. “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,” 190). 61 “[D]ie absolut vollständige Erkenntnis irgendeines Dinges die Erkenntnis der ganzen Welt einschließt bzw. […] jedes Ding von seinem Standpunkt die ganze Welt spiegelt.” (Husserl, E. 1979. Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890-1910). “Husserliana” vol. 22. Den Haag-Boston-London: Nijhoff, 339). (My translation). 62 Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology, 69. 63 Indeed, as John B. Brough notes, “to explain the essence of knowledge – demands an inquiry into both the side of the act and the side of its object.” (Brough, J. B. “Consciousness is not a Bag: Immanence, Transcendence, and Constitution in The Idea of Phenomenology,” 187). 64 “Sartre may never have called himself a phenomenologist. But phenomenology is certainly a decisive part of his philosophical method. Besides, Husserl and Heidegger supply him with the main points of departure for his philosophizing. They are philosophically much nearer to him than is any contemporary French philosopher.” (Spiegelberg, H. 1960. The Phenomenological Movement. A historical introduction. Volume II. The Hague: Nijhoff, 454-455). 65 Sartre, J. P. 2005. “Intentionality. A fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology.” In Edmund Husserl. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Volume I. Circumscriptions: Classic Essays on Husserl’s

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Phenomenology, edited by Rudolf B., D. Welton and G. Zavota. London-New York: Routledge, 258. 66 Ibid. 259.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE FOUR TRUTHS AND THEIR DOUBLE SYNTHESIS IVAN MOSCA

Introduction Through history, philosophers have alternated between different paradigms of truth while always opposing these to the concept of truth found in religion. This chapter will approach some of these paradigms from the perspective of social ontology, which is the study of the relation between truth and institutions. From this point of view and without any historiographical intent, we will distinguish between four forms of truth, grouped in two couples (the names of which are just markers for abstract categories and not historical reconstructions): the Tarskian/Pragmatist couple, and the Ancient/Modern couple. We will argue that institutions combine these different conceptions of truth; the argument will rely on the definition of institutions found in social ontology: institutions are objective facts constituted subjectively. In the dimension of commonsense, which structures institutions, truth and reality are merged, as well as the experience of these, which derives from the overlap of description and prescription. The chapter will follow this framework: x x x x

Tarskian and Pragmatist truths. This section will present the first couple of truths as the social ontologists conceive them. The ontological truth of religion. This second section will distinguish the philosophical form of truth from the ontological conception of truth adopted by religion. Ancient and Modern truths. This section will present the second couple of truths, as social ontology conceives them. The ontological truth of common sense. Finally, this section exposes the ontological conception of truth adopted by social

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ontology, which is quite different from the ontological truth of religion and which merges all the four conceptions of philosophical truth explained beforehand (Tarskian, Pragmatist, Ancient and Modern). Synthesis.

Tarskian and pragmatist truths As we have seen, the first couple distinguishes between the Tarskian and the Pragmatist truths. The Tarskian truth takes its name from the notable logician Alfred Tarski,1 who defined truth as a correspondence between the object and its description: tT = ıR Here (t) is Tarskian, (T) is truth, (R) is reality, and (ı) is description. Following this approach, the statement “it is raining now” is true if and only if, in the real state of things, it is raining now. According to the main authors of social ontology, like John Searle2 and Maurizio Ferraris,3 this strong concept of truth, shaped upon the analytical approach, has been faced, during the last century, by a weaker conception, normally adopted by philosophers of the continental tradition, which roots can be found in Nietzsche’s thought. Excluding any historiographical intents, we can try to formalize this last kind of truth from a famous passage of Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn,4 where Nietzsche maintains that truth is just an “illusion” which has “lost its awareness,” and that truth is a “coin with worn faces” lacking even “the value of its metal.” Truth, to Nietzsche (or, better, the truth of the approach hereinafter defined as “Nietzschean truth”), is not an object distinct from the subject knowing it, and it does not mirror an objective state of things, nor is it a subjective description of a real object. The formalization of these negative properties can be the following: nT  R nT  ıR nT  (ıR ‫ א‬S) Here (n) is Nietzschean, (T) is truth, (R) is reality, (ı) is description, and (S) is subject.

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Therefore, we could say that the Nietzschean truth (nT) is a particular relation between the subject and the object. The subject assigns a particular value to a representation: this value does not express the relation between the representation and the external objects (unlike in Tarskian truth), but it evaluates the control that the subject has upon the external objects (i.e. the objects outside his mind): nT = ı (R ෛ S) In this formula, the control is formalized as a set membership, but it should be emphasized that Nietzschean truth does not belong to idealism: from the point of view of nT, the control of reality is an achievement and not a starting datum. Nietzsche accuses society of constituting an illusory truth that, being basically just a representation, leads individuals to believe they control reality (although they do not): ı (R ෛ S)  (R ෛ S) The restriction of truth to such a specific subcategory could transform it into a marginal topic, relegating it to disciplines like psychology, sociology or politics. In order to avoid this danger, many analytic philosophers tried to reconsider the concept. From their point of view, nT has been re-implemented and updated by postmodern authors, like for example Lyotard5 and Vattimo,6 who again were inspired by Gadamer’s hermeneutics7 and by Derrida’s deconstructionism.8 In particular, to Ferraris,9 over the years, many postmodern authors promoted a weak conception of truth. On the one hand, postmodernism has consolidated the Nietzschean idea that truth is directed to a non-cognitive goal: this means that, if truth is very often used to justify and hide the real intentions of those who have social power, then the field that can study the truth is sociology or politics, not philosophy. On the other hand, postmodernism also promoted the Nietzschean idea that truth is not necessary for the progress of knowledge, as it may be obstructing research and innovation with a series of paradigms which are considered as true and therefore deemed unquestionable. In a socio-ontological frame, the conception named Nietzschean truth (nT) evolved into another type of truth, named Pragmatist truth (pT). This is not directly related with the historical Pragmatism of James, Rorty or other philosophers: the adjective “Pragmatist” here is just a tool which helps to identify a specific type of truth in the context of this chapter.

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According to this view, truth can be considered as a social device, so that the most important role of descriptions and representations is not to communicate or to understand reality, but to change it. pT = (ı ĺ cR) Here (p) is Pragmatist, (T) is truth, (c) is change, (R) is reality, and (ı) is description. Trying to converse with this continental approach (the debate with Derrida is famous), Searle attempted to reconcile the continental and the analytic approaches in order to connect the natural sciences with the human ones. The main goal of the social ontology of Searle is therefore to map the relationship between truth and reality in the institutions constituted by common sense and by particular forms of speech acts. The ontologists of common sense normally adopt the postmodern reflection on the functioning of society, in which truth plays the role of constructing the social reality of institutions and documents.10 However, the construction of social and institutional reality is realized in a regular way, that can be studied as an objective function constituted by single steps, through which common sense constitutes the framework of everyday life. Thus, social ontology seeks to combine the weak concept of truth (pT) with the strong concept of truth (tT).

The ontological truth of religion Before proceeding with the exposition of the other two types of philosophical truth (Ancient and Modern), it is necessary to examine a kind of truth which sometimes is confused with the truth of pragmatism. This is the concept of truth found in religious discourse: such a clarification allows us to avoid a confusion between Ancient and Tarskian truth, and between Modern and Pragmatist truth. In John 18:38, Pilate asks Jesus: “What is truth?” but he does not receive an answer from the prophet of Nazareth. Shortly before, Pilate also asked: “Are you the king of the Jews?”; to which Jesus replied: “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate, who here performs the functions of a judge, then asks Jesus what the nature is of that which he has come to testify. From the point of view of social ontology, Pilate’s problem could be defined as “socio-political”: Jesus appears to possess an authority that

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could undermine the authority of Rome. In conversation with Jesus, Pilate’s goal is to understand the aims of Jesus, in order to manage the social phenomenon that concerns him. So, during the conversation, Jesus’ answers seem to base his social power (“king of the Jews”) on the classical rhetoric of auctoritas (“they listen to me because I testify the truth”). If Pilate understands what kind of truth Jesus refers to, then he will understand what kind of power Jesus wields. But Jesus does not give him a reply, despite that a few pages earlier he answered the apostle Thomas when the latter asked: “How can we know the way?” Here Jesus said: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Then, why does Jesus not reply in the same manner to Pilate? Pilate is a Roman official, in charge as judge: he must ascertain a set of real facts through an objective description; above all, he must pronounce a performative speech act which implies a prescriptive command (Austin 1962). Following a certain interpretation of the passage, Pilate here represents the Tarskian paradigm, according to which truth is the relation of correspondence between the real facts and their description. Following another interpretation, Pilate does not wait for Jesus’ answer, but could instead be asking a rhetoric and ironic question: in this case, Pilate represents the Pragmatist conception of truth, according to which truth is just a tool for the acquisition of useful profits. In any case, Jesus’ statement “I am the way and the truth and the life” appears as a confusion between ontology and epistemology; the same confusion of subject and object that common sense uses in order to found social reality. If Pilate is Tarskian, Jesus’ choice to not give an answer could in Pilate’s eyes appear as an attempt to escape the unmasking of a rhetorical justification of power. If Pilate is Pragmatist, the very notion of truth is rhetorical. Jesus knows that he cannot compare his concept of truth with that of Pilate, whatever the conception of truth accepted by Pilate is: therefore, every answer is useless and Jesus chooses to stay silent. The truth embodied by Jesus is not a simple description of facts, nor a simple tool aimed at achieving a goal. The role as leader occupied by Jesus depends on a concept of truth that is neither knowledge nor a rhetoric tool. Apostles believe in the words of Jesus not because they are useful or because they mirror reality, but because they come from the very source of truth: as the son of God, the words of Jesus create reality (from the point of view of the modern philosophy of language, miracles are magic performatives). Jesus’ ȜȩȖȠȢ is both descriptive and useful, a double property which allows us to compare the nature of religious truth to the nature of institutional truth.

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Indeed, according to Searle, the constitution of social reality depends on a particular type of speech act. Normal language is made by descriptive speech acts (where the direction of adaptation goes from the word to the world) and prescriptive speech acts (where the direction of adaptation goes from the world to the word). Instead, the constitution of institutions involves a type of speech act that has a double direction of adaptation, both from world-to-word and from word-to-world. Searle11 has written that, exactly like god created light through a performative speech act (“fiat lux”), so a judge creates a verdict by way of a similar linguistic move. The concept of truth promoted by Jesus depends on the consensus of the subject, on faith. The ontological truth of religion shares some of its properties with the truth of common sense, since it also makes use of a performative language with a double direction of adaptation. However, there are some differences between Heidegger’s Das Man, which is the base for the constitution of institutions as they are studied by social ontology, and Jesus’ embodied truth (the relation between da-sein and Das Man does not matter here). Indeed, common sense and the ideology of political power justify their actions through Tarskian rhetoric: the title of the main newspaper of Soviet totalitarianism (Pravda, which means truth) aimed at convincing people that the justice of political power was grounded upon a correct description of facts. Instead, Jesus offers a very different path: like any other soteriological religion, in Christianity faith can be acquired without any reference to current reality. The kind of intentionality involved in the acquisition of religious truth depends on a performative epistemology: the very understanding of truth directly generates the ontological effect of salvation. Hence, the ontological truth of Jesus liberates the slaves without the sword; i.e. through the use of a book, a discourse which in no way contains instructions on how to fabricate and use swords. Contrary to this, the understanding of truth in common sense does not create social reality by itself: the social actor needs to behave according to some implicit prescriptions, and without them there are no social facts. Therefore, religious truth is neither the weak truth of Pragmatism, nor the strong truth of Tarski (which he himself calls “semantic truth”). Indeed they both separate knowledge, action and liberation, even when these steps are correlated. They consider these distinct in a way in which they do not necessarily imply each other. According to postmodern Pragmatism, it is necessary to keep these elements separated in order to prevent the exploitation of truth by political powers and common sense. According to Tarskian correspondentism, it is, on the contrary, necessary to clarify that truth is not sufficient for liberating people from social constraints, because

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these can only be broken by actions. Jesus knows that he cannot convince Pilate. The silence of Jesus leads Pilate to understand that he cannot solve the problem of the existence of something that, in order to exist, requires the consensus of a community. Hence Pilate can just “wash his hands in front of the crowd.” Umberto Curi12 points out that, exactly like in the New Testament, so also in Plato’s myth of the cave – the first important text of philosophy – the path of knowledge (truth) is closely related to that of liberation (way) and of recovery from illness (life). In fact, any complete philosophical system correlates knowledge (truth) to action (way) with the aim of improving the state of things through a kind of healing (life): for example, psychoanalysis, Marxism and empirical science perform these functions. In any case, what is important is to distinguish the ontological truth (oT) of religions, which is embodied in a person (normally, the Deity), from the philosophical forms of truth (pT and tT).

Ancient and modern truths Social ontology does not only combine the Tarskian and the Pragmatist forms of truth, but also the Ancient and the Modern ones. Ancient philosophers defined their epistemological tools in opposition to those used in religion, using them to represent an objective state of things. According to this Ancient view, the representation is a sort of object, totally distinguished from a subjective experience. In order to give a formalization, we can define experience (e) as the phenomenological and subjective feeling of contingent and temporal contents, often related to external things (reality); on the contrary, truth (T) is an objective and atemporal description of a state of things, often the external ones (reality): e = ijR T = ıR ıij Here (e) is the experience, (T) is the truth, (R) is the reality, (ij) is feeling and (ı) is description. In some cases, the description of reality can generate a prescription. Therefore, on one hand we have a first cognitive experience, through which we discover the truth as ܻȜȒșİȚĮ and Lichtung, and on the other hand we have a second cognitive experience, through which those who have knowledge of truth can use it as a tool to act (in this case, the action

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depends on truth, but it is not truth itself): eT  (T ĺ cR) Here (e) is the experience, (T) is the truth, (R) is the reality, (c) is change. Aristotle can be considered as one of the fathers of the Ancient truth paradigm: according to him, the philosophical experience of reality is made through a particular cognitive tool that could be called sense-ofwonder (W). This sense-of-wonder pushes the philosopher to recognize the simple experience of things as unsatisfactory; hereby the philosopher exceeds the wonderful experience of things in order to seek another experience, that of “finding the truth.” This truth can be related to the single things which the philosophers are experiencing, or even to all the possible experiences: (ijR + W) ĺ ? ĺ ıR Here (ij) is feeling, (R) is reality, (W) is sense-of-wonder, (?) is question, and (ı) is description. According to Aristotle, between experience and truth there is an intermediate step, that of a question. This step is what constitutes the particular response to the sense of wonder of philosophers: an explicit, clear and rational form of truth. In any case, the discovery of this impersonal truth depends on an original subjective engine: to Plato, philosophers are those who love and need (ijȚȜİ߿Ȟ) knowledge (ıȠijȓĮ). This is a central issue: a subjective feeling (ij) produces a subjective need of description (ı), which is in turn an objective entity: ijR (+ W) ĺ ıR ij (+ W) ĺ ı e (+ W) ĺ T Although truth is an object, it can be perceived and felt. So the experienceof-Truth (eT) is the ultimate experience for philosophers, because it finally satisfies their original need: eT e (+ W) ĺ T

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It is very important to notice that in the Ancient view, the experience-ofTruth (eT) is a subjective feeling of an objective fact (the truth itself). Indeed truth and experience-of-Truth are not the same: eT  T The experience-of-Truth is a phenomenological fall (e) of the epistemological curtain which hides the objective description of a state of things (T). This is the experience of understanding, which philosophers formalize as an answer to a question: e (+ W) ĺ ? ĺ eT Through the centuries, this approach has been flanked by a second conception of truth, and some philosophers, like Dilthey, opposed this – the Modern concept of truth – to the Ancient one13. According to the Modern view, truth is not an answer separated from experience: rather, it is an essential aspect of experience itself. This authentic experience is what could be called the Truth-of-experience (e = T). Ancient Truth (Plato: ıȠijȓĮ, separated knowledge): (e  T) ĺ eT Modern Truth (Dilthey: Erlebnis, lived experience): (ijR = ıR) ĺ (e = T) However, one property is shared by the Ancient and the Modern view. According to some Modern authors, the Truth-of-experience (e = T) can be considered the ultimate experience (Ue) for human beings, who then do not require any additional experience, just as was the case for the Ancient authors and their experience-of-Truth (eT). Ancient view: eT = Ue Modern view: (e + W = T) = Ue Furthermore, there is a variant of the Modern view, which, by slightly forcing the original thesis of the authors, can be presented through the theories of Schiller and Gadamer. According to this variant, the authentic

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Truth-of-experience (e = T) cannot be found simply in the experience of real things (ijR), but only through the filter of an aesthetic attitude, a concept very similar to the Aristotelian sense-of-wonder (W): Ancient view (Aristotle-version): (e + W) ĺ ? ĺ eT Modern view (Schiller-version): (e + W) = T Modern view (Gadamer-version): (e + W) + ? = T The formulas express a difference. On the one hand, and according to the thesis that we in this chapter will call “Gadamerian truth,” the Truth-ofexperience can only be achieved through a dialog (an activity constituted by a series of questions and answers); on the other hand, and according to what we call “Schillerian truth,” the Truth-of-experience always implies a prescriptive effect (the moral stage after the aesthetic stage). Recapitulating, there are two paradigms of the relation between truth and experience: an Ancient view, that we can date back to Plato and Aristotle, that depicts truth as an object separated from the phenomenological experience of reality (e  T), and a Modern view, that we detect in authors like Schiller, Dilthey, and Gadamer, that depicts truth as an essential aspect of the experience of reality (e = T). According to the Ancient view, the subject can make an experience-of-Truth (eT) which is different from the original experience of reality (ijR). On the contrary, according to the Modern view, the experience of reality is truth itself (ijR = ıR = T). Some authors who share the second view, such as Schiller (Spiel) and Gadamer (Erfahrung), consider the possibility of grasping the truth of experience to be possible only by way of aesthetic contemplation; other authors, such as Plotinus or even Schopenhauer, define the highest kind of comprehension as a sort of mystic intuition. In any case, both the aesthetes and the mystics share the belief that, in order to be bring about truth, experience has to be accompanied by a sort of sense-of-wonder filter (e + W) – exactly like Aristotle did.

The ontological truth of common sense A small sociological excursus can be useful in order to introduce how social ontology merges Ancient and Modern truths. From a certain point of view, sociology is the mapping of the evolution of the cultural patterns

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of the 20th century: by combining this with the ontological analysis of our society14 it is possible to disclose how the basic structure of our current institutions (e.g. the free market) is changing its roots. Largely influenced by the popular versions of the philosophies of the 20th century publicized by the media, the universal values of our society are changing fast from objects to experiences: private property, fixed ideals, static idols, and written laws are being substituted by services, instrumental rationality, feelings, and a plural, frame-oriented centrality and protagonism of the subject. Sociologically, this can be considered as a long-term consequence of the change in paradigm incurred during the 18th century, when the society of the Ancien Régime, grounded upon duties, gave place to the society of the Industrial Age, grounded upon rights. Indeed we know that, in order to carry out a duty, the subject has to deny her desire and nature: on the contrary, in order to demand a right, the subject has to exalt her self and her nature. Hence, it does not surprise that through the years this change has led to a general negation of the dimension of “ought” (sollen) in favor of the general dimension of “is” (sein), and in particular of the subjective “is” (the popularized version of the concept of da-sein originally presented by Heidegger). From the point of view of many scholars of social ontology, this is a consequence of the vulgarization of the main message brought forward by artists and philosophers of the 20th century as they criticized the notion of “being,” both as the collection of entities (seiende) and as the abstract form of the property of existence (sein). Accordingly, the pop and media version of contemporary philosophy exalts the open dimension of “being there” (dasein). This is also adopted by the institutions of our society which, like grinders, have chewed, digested and absorbed the message of modern artists and philosophers, transforming it into an invitation towards a subject-centered anthropology. This process has been emphasized by the evolution of our society: markets require consumerism, which requires the freedom of choice, which again requires a central attention focusing on subjective experiences. Therefore, the institutions of current society do not promote an objective conception of truth (e  T), which requires an experience-of-truth (eT) practicable only with extra-ordinary activities, often related to sacred places and times. Rather, our society promotes the subject-centered conception of truth (e = T) which requires the centrality of the aesthetic attitude. We have seen that the Ancient philosophers consider truth (T) as an objective representation, a sort of object that can be experienced in se and per se (eT). But, if the current and widespread ideology proposed by the markets negates the objective truth as separated from the experience of the

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subject, then it also promotes the reduction of the object to the subject. However, there are some social actors, such as professional intellectuals and conservative institutions like Law, science and religion, who reject this reduction. Normally, these intellectuals and institutions exalt the object against the subject, presenting this object alternatively as a scientific description (sein – it is – truth) or as a moral prescription (sollen – it must be – true truth). In the middle of this conflict, there is a dimension that joins the current Zeitgeist of mainstream markets (which adopt the paradigm of the Truthof-experience (e = T)) with the upstream requests of intellectuals (which sustain the paradigm of the experience-of-Truth (eT)). This middle field is commonsense, where description (sein) and prescription (sollen) collide. In commonsense, subjective being is presented as objective: since the dimension of reference is an intersubjective reality made by representations, what in this dimension is represented as objective is also objective and real: rR ĺ R Here (r) is representation and (R) is reality. The dimension of commonsense is the dimension of the impersonal Das Man theorized by Heidegger; a social reality that only recently has been analytically studied by philosophy and in particular by the followers of Austin’s analysis of performative speech acts. Commonsense both describes a fact (it is – sein: “you are married”) and prescribes a behavior (you ought to – sollen: “you must not cheat”). It was a deep analysis of commonsense that led the most widespread philosophic current of the second half of the 20th century, constructivism, to maintain that the commonsensical institutions are subjective constructs (see for example The Social Construction of Reality, by Berger and Luckmann15). As we have seen, traditionally philosophers have invited new adepts to reject the commonsense of įȩȟĮ in favor of a completely separated truth (ıȠijȓĮ). Along this line and according to social ontologists, some hermeneutic philosophers seem to combine this constructivist approach to institutions with the traditional critique of commonsense. The result is a critique of institutions and even of the concept of truth as opium of the people directed to justify the status quo.16 It is important to notice that other hermeneutic philosophers (such as Gadamer) do not criticize institutions and above all do not criticize the commonsense, interpreting it as an implementation of bias and prejudice (Vorurteil, Vorverständnisse),

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which are reinstated as the real faces of truth, rediscovering also the objective value of celebrations, customs and other institutions. Social ontology can be considered as a sort of reversed heir of constructivism, expunging the postmodern critique of truth and institutions, and in a way reinterpreting the rediscovery of the objectivity of commonsense (see for example The Construction of Social Reality by Searle17). Indeed, social ontologists have started to study commonsense as a real and objective dimension, analyzing it with the categories of ontology. Thus, according to social ontologists such as Searle, Smith and Ferraris, commonsense is the relation between subjective intentionality and the objects that it constructs. The subject constitutes institutions by intending them as objective and independent facts: therefore institutions are social facts, real objects constituted by the subject. In turn, they regulate the behaviors of the subject itself as if they were totally independent from her. Therefore, according to social ontology, we can find a truth (T) about social facts although they are constituted by us. The reason is that we constitute social facts by conceiving them as independent from us, so this independence is the basis for objective knowledge. We can make an experience-of-truth (eT) about social facts because they are constituted by a truth-of-experience (e = T). The socio-ontological study of common sense leads to a double synthesis. The first is a synthesis between the Tarskian and the Pragmatist conception of truth: indeed, social reality is constituted by a double direction of adaptation (both descriptive and normative). The second is a synthesis between the Ancient and the Modern paradigms, which conceive truth either as an object separated from experience (e  T) or as subjective experience (e = T): [(T = r) + (rR ĺ R)] ĺ [(e = T) ĺ eT] The socio-ontological truth is an experience-of-Truth that depends on a Truth-of-experience: the knowledge of the mechanism of commonsense, which pairs sein and sollen.18

Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks to certain people who directly contributed to the development of this text: Denys Vinçon for his help in cutting off the useless formulas, Pietro Daniel Omodeo for his enlightened attitude, Saša Hrnjez for the strength of his arguments, and Søren Tinning for his tenacious drive and his corrections.

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Notes 1 Tarski, A. 1944. “The semantic conception of truth and the foundation of semantics.” Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research no. 4 (3): 341376. 2 Searle, J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. USA: Free Press. See also Searle, J. 2010. Making the Social World. UK: Oxford University Press. 3 Ferraris, M. 2009. Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce. Italy: Laterza. See also Ferraris, M. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Italy: Laterza. 4 Nietzsche, F. 2009 [1873]. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Translated by L. Licandro, La Weltanschauung dionisiaca. Verità e menzogna in senso extramorale. Italy: Edizioni di Ar. 5 Lyotard, F. 1979. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. France: Les Éditions de Minuit. 6 Vattimo, G. and Rovatti, P. A. 1983. Il pensiero debole. Italy: Feltrinelli. 7 Gadamer, H. G. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Germany: Unveränd. 8 Derrida, J. 1967. De la grammatologie. France: Les Éditions de Minuit. 9 Ferraris, Manifesto. 10 Ferraris, Documentalità. 11 Searle, Making. 12 Curi, U. 2008. Meglio non essere nati. La condizione umana tra Eschilo e Nietzsche. Italy: Bollati Boringhieri. 13 Again: this chapter does not intend to explore a historiographical path, but to expose a model which can distinguish different conceptions of truth, adopting names just as markers for categories. 14 Ferraris, Documentalità. See also Smith, B. 2003. John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality. In John Searle. UK: Cambridge University Press. 15 Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. USA: Doubleday & Co. 16 Vattimo, G. and Zabala, S. 2011. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx. USA: Columbia University Press. 17 Searle, The Social Construction of Reality. 18 We have to conceive these concepts in the particular form we outlined in this chapter and not in the historiographical form that can be seen in the original texts of Kant and other philosophers who have analyzed sein, sollen, etc.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE CONTRIBUTION OF HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY TO GEOGRAPHY ERNESTO C. SFERRAZZA PAPA

Introduction The analysis of the connections between philosophy and geography has rapidly gained in interest in recent years, especially thanks to the works of authors such as Claude Raffestin, David Harvey, Peter Sloterdijk, Stuart Elden, and Jeff Malpas,1 just to mention the leading figures in these kinds of studies. Even the research of important Italian scholars such as Giuseppe Dematteis, Franco Farinelli, and Claudio Minca has focused on the study of possible relations between philosophy and geography.2 The rapid development of similar studies is due mostly to the “new” global conditions in which our society grows and lives, but also to the theoretical necessity of overcoming the lack of communication between these disciplines. In this sense, philosophic thought paradoxically has never engaged geographic studies in a significant way. This truly is a paradox, if one considers Strabo’s Geographica, one of the first examples of a systematic elaboration of geographic thought, in which not only are the “elective affinities” between geography and philosophy highlighted, but the comparison of these two disciplines is erected as a general methodology to study the universality of knowledge. In regards to this, Strabo clearly states that The science of Geography, which I now propose to investigate, is, I think, quite as much as any other science, a concern of the philosopher.3

Strabo’s plea to consider geography as a new field of study for philosophers, if not the field of study, apparently has gone unheard and overlooked. Indeed, if we look briefly at the history of philosophy, we notice that only a few authors seem to have shown interest in geographic

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knowledge. Although there are some notable exceptions: Kant, for instance, rigorously taught geography for many years and wrote the voluminous Physische Geographie (1802). To a lesser extent, Hegel also took an interest in geography: starting from his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1821), he embraced the idea, suggested by Ritter, a colleague at the University of Berlin, of the necessity of including geographic elements in the formulation of a universal history of the spirit: This geographical substratum needs to be intended, instead of an external circumstance, as a determined constitution which is different and in compliance with the nature of the populations that appear in it.4

How should we interpret this lack of interest of philosophical thought towards geography? Considering this shortcoming in a more profound way, it is undeniable that philosophical thought has always paid much more attention to disciplines like History, Art, Mathematics, as well as to scientific disciplines like Biology and Physics, but at the same time it is also true that there is an enduring presence of “geographic” concepts within the philosophical debate. Indeed, philosophy, throughout its history, has used terms, concepts, and intuitions that belong to geographic knowledge. That geography has primarily a gnoseologic character, and therefore is a possible subject for philosophic speculation, is again stressed by Strabo who, in conformity with a typical topos of ancient philosophy, couples knowledge with happiness, and in this way, consequently, geography with happiness: Wide learning, which alone makes it possible to undertake a work on geography, is possessed solely by the man who has investigated things both human and divine – knowledge of which, they say, constitutes philosophy. And so, too, the utility is manifold, not only as regards the activities of statesmen and commanders but also as regards knowledge both of the heavens and of things on land and sea, animals, plants, fruits, and everything else to be seen in various regions – the utility of geography, I say, presupposes in the geographer the same philosopher, the man who busies himself with the investigation of the art of life, that is, of happiness.5

Strabo asserts an idea of geography as a form of philosophy, thus fully identifying the experience of the geographer with that of the philosopher, and, in this way, the truth of geography with the truth of philosophy: if geography is an experience of knowledge, isn’t philosophy also, etymologically speaking, simply “love for knowledge”? A point of view, like the one resembled by Strabo, that could be defined as “ontologic”: philosophy is geography, as a form of investigation of what exists in the

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world. Nevertheless, although this perspective accords to geography the solemnity of philosophic thought, it still doesn’t explain the intersections and the connections existing between these two apparently autonomous disciplines. This aspect is relevant and decisive, as it allows us to explore the potentialities that geographical and philosophical knowledge have for the individual. What kind of truth does geographical knowledge transmit to the individual? What kind of possible “dangers” could be lurking in the geographical experience? Which possible role can be assumed by philosophic thought in order to engage such issues? Having established these premises, at least three possible lines of investigation can now be considered. The first one is based on an epistemological analysis of the scientific status of geography, committed to the formulation of a “Philosophy of Geography.” The second one analyzes the role and the meaning of geographical concepts (space, place, milieu) in a perspective that can be defined as hermeneuticphenomenological. The third and the last is the analysis of the relation between political geography and political philosophy, aimed at investigating the biopolitical role of geographic concepts. It may be unnecessary to indicate the various intersections and conjunctions of these different approaches. Therefore, rather than attempting an overarching analysis of all three of them in an excessively brief and biased manner, we think it preferable to focus solely on the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, specifically addressing the work of Martin Heidegger, as the leading figure of this particular tradition in Western philosophy. It has been contended, maybe in a hyperbolic manner, that “Heidegger’s philosophy invites us to rethink the entire field of geography.”6 Undoubtedly, Heidegger’s speculation invites us to reconsider the man– territory, man–space, man–environment relations as bifold and in which the very essence of individuals is involved, thus shifting, as Eric Dardel would put it, from geography to geographicity,7 from the description of the world to the experience of the world. The aim of this essay is to scrutinize the contribution that Heideggerian philosophy can make to geography.

Geographical elements in Heidegger’s philosophy We have already mentioned that philosophy has always reflected on concepts that belong semantically to the discursive universe of geography. In regards to this, one has simply to look at the role that the concept of “space” has played in philosophic thought. From Aristotle to Augustine, from Descartes to Leibniz, from Kant to Wittgenstein, the list of all of the philosophers who have dealt with problems involving space is never-

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ending. Apart from this, philosophy has actually not dealt much with the role that these concepts represent in the experience of the individual. For this reason, we believe that, from this particular standpoint, philosophy apparently has not been able to deal with the right questions: What is space for a subject? Is it possible to have a space that is neutral, innocent, and uncontaminated by the subject that perceives, lives, and populates it? These questions reflect the widely discussed space/place difference. If the historical reconstruction proposed by Edward Casey is true,8 then philosophy has always shown some sort of benevolence towards the former (space), thus inducing it to ignore, or at least consider less important, the latter (place). Philosophy has always preferred what we may define as a “Cartesian” approach, that is to say the description of an aseptic, mathematized, quantifiable space, rather than reflecting on a spatial concept that is strongly related to the personal and subjective experience of the individual. Even in a purely geographical framework there has been a certain discrepancy between a qualitative and quantitative vision of geography, each corresponding to a different vision of the world, of the individual and of the role of the individual in the world. For this reason, the particular way in which Jeff Malpas and Stuart Elden read Heidegger’s thought is very interesting, as it considers the problematization of the very notion of place as the basis where geographical and philosophical thought both meet and collide. An article written by Casey leads us,9 from its very title, to the core of the problem we are dealing with: “What Does It Mean to Be in the PlaceWorld?” In other words: how can philosophy think an intrinsically geographical experience like the “being-in” of what Casey defines, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, as “the geographical self”? Indeed, most of Martin Heidegger’s thought was committed to this issue. Certain scholars, such as Malpas,10 have even interpreted Heidegger’s philosophy as a continuous ontological and phenomenological problematization of the concept of place, from Sein und Zeit to the last “episodic” essays, arguing that Heidegger’s philosophy is more concerned with spatiality than temporality. But in order to approach Heidegger’s engagement with the concept of space in an appropriate and meaningful manner, one has first to consider §12 of Sein und Zeit, where a preliminary sketching of being-in takes place. In that section, Heidegger describes the Being-in-the-World as an “[a] priori necessary constitution of Da-sein,”11 pointing out the suggestive connection between the verb to be, bin, and the locative adverb bei, by. In this sense, the Dasein is always something that has a localized structure, even though Heidegger prudently states that “[the] spatiality of being-in-the-world first gives the presuppositions for working out the

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phenomenon of the spatiality of the world and for asking about the ontological problem of space.”12 To determine what you can find being-in a determined space or a given environment, is an act marked by the experience of ready-at-hand (Zuhandenheit) as being-close, being handy (zur Hand) to Dasein. As stressed by Malpas, the question about being handy to Dasein implies the question of space: “the idea that being and presence are connected is especially significant for the inquiry into the connection between being and place.”13 Still maintaining this Heideggerian line of thought, Edward Relph has attempted to lay foundations for a geography on phenomenological grounds, asserting that “a place is not just the ‘where’ of something; it is the location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon.”14 In other words, it is for this reason that geographical knowledge can be considered as such only when it is able to account for the meaning that space has for the individual, thus binding together the idea of space with the experience of space in which individuals live. Consequently, geography does not deal with a meaningless space, but with a space that is lived, consciously perceived, and historically determined: in this way, some of the concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy reflect this original conception of geographic knowledge, considered as “[a] profound and immediate experience of the world that is filled with meaning, and as such is the very basis of human existence.”15 The concepts of space and place, considered as important fils-rouges of Heidegger’s philosophy, appear however to be somehow problematic. From a philosophical point of view, the contrast between the concepts of space and place represents a way to keep at a distance their physical counterparts that usually shape the collective imaginary. However, issues that are even more critical emerge when these problematics are considered from a political angle. It may be inappropriate in this particular theoretical context to investigate all of the connections that existed between Heidegger and Nazism, although it is well known that Heidegger joined the NSPD, was nominated rector in Freiburg in 1933 and a year later resigned his post. Nevertheless, the possible political meaning of Heidegger’s concept of place has to be at least taken into account. It is universally accepted that Hitler’s political ideology, as Stuart Elden has pointed out, insisted on the notion of Lebensraum to endorse his warlike and racial theories. The notion of Lebensraum – living space or room for the German Volk – was an important issue for Hitler in Mein Kampf, where he talked about the restrictions on the German living space, and that the solution to this was not to be sought in merely colonial acquisitions – the ‘place in the sun’

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Therefore, on one hand we have a concept of place as a space inhabited and lived by the subject, which leads us to think about the relationship between the individual and the world as well as the environment surrounding him: a relevant topic for any perspective in social and human geography. On the other hand, the same notion of place, and consequently the critique of the concept of space it implies, leads to a political reflection on how to think our world and how the individual relates with it politically. These are the two main branches of the Heideggerian thought on space: a kind of reflection that, as we will see, could make a fundamental contribution to the debate on social and political geography.

Dwelling The article by Casey we quoted before, explicitly oriented towards the investigation of “[the] nature of the human subject who is oriented and situated in place,”17 recognizes in Heidegger’s philosophy a typical case in which a dialogue between philosophy and geography is possible.18 The idea that occupies a pivotal role in the relationship between philosophy and geography is Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling.” In Sein und Zeit, he writes: Being-in designates a constitution of being of Dasein, and is an existential. But we cannot understand by this the objective presence of a material thing (the human body) ‘in’ a being objectively present. Nor does the term being-in designate a spatial ‘in one another’ of two things objectively present, any more than the world ‘in’ primordially means a spatial relation of this kind. ‘In’ stems from innan-, to live, habitare, to dwell. ‘An’ means I am used to, familiar with, I take care of something. It has the meaning of colo in the sense of habito and diligo. We characterized this being to whom being-in belongs in this meaning as the being which I myself always am.19

In this text from 1927, it is already clear how Heidegger defines dwelling, being-dweller, as the specific way of being of Da-sein. According to Casey, this is the foundation of Heidegger’s thought on dwelling; but most of all it represents the possibility of formulating a different notion of space, that is radically different from the Cartesian idea of spatio and of

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extensio. Heidegger deals again with this topic in an essay from the 50s that goes under the significant title of “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In this text, Heidegger offers interesting cues. He thinks together dwelling and building, but somehow inverting the order of terms in which they are usually conceived. According to Heidegger it is not dwelling that comes from building, rather it is that building finds its reason in dwelling, because “[to] build is in itself already to dwell.”20 Although building and dwelling – Heidegger notes that in formal German bauen, building, is expressed as buan, dwelling – are not a mere being-in but an actual caring. But what does “caring” mean for dwelling in the Earth? Mortals dwell in that they save the earth – taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free (freilassen) into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.21

Heidegger’s saving and caring imply a concept of space that cannot coincide with the neutral and aseptic Cartesian space. Dwelling, as the fundamental way of being of what is mortal, involves in itself a concept of space – that is neither spatium nor extensio – on which the very experience of the individual relies: dwelling and building, the latter being considered as well as a form of dwelling, reveal and make possible for the individual its true essence. Therefore, the idea of space as a geometric and mathematic reduction of the world, like spatium or extensio, is replaced by the idea of place. Place is the space that opens itself towards building, where building represents the foundation and the disposition of spaces. In this way, Man is located in space only when it populates a place, that is when its being-in implies the consciousness that it needs to care for its spatial dimension. Therefore, dwelling, that is not a mere “inhabiting,” is an original way of being that determines the very essence of men as such. This all can be verified starting from the linguistic analysis of the term we use to describe these actions. Heidegger states: We do not merely dwell – that would be virtual inactivity – we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there. Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the

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The recognition of dwelling as the fundamental dimension of the human being recalls the idea of the spatial dimension of the being-in explained in Sein und Zeit (§ 23). What interests us is that compared to Sein und Zeit, here Heidegger clearly focuses on concepts like space, spatiality, place, position: concepts usually codified within the discursive universe of geography. And not only because, as Heidegger explained in Sein und Zeit, the space that opens to the worldliness of the World implies that the Being-in is innerwordly or world-dependent (welthörig); but mainly because the being of man is inevitably constituted by its capacity for making its existence authentic, starting from the possibility of an authentic spatial experience, of an authentic man–nature relationship. This particular issue of Heidegger’s philosophy therefore deals with the relation between man and space; and the fact that the space he discusses simply is not the traditional three-dimensional space is exhibited by the distinction he makes between space and place. Here the listening to the original meaning of these words is again, according to Heidegger, illuminating: What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for (etwas Eingeräumtes), something that – namely within a boundary, Greek ʌȑȡĮȢ.23

The place is something that makes room, as something from which space receives its essence: “The spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations.”24 In this sense, Heidegger can reassert in terms of means–end the relation between building and dwelling, because “[building], by virtue of constructing locations, is a founding and joining of spaces,”25 meaning that building is the creation of a direct connection between men and the surrounding world they live in.

Positionality and maps We argued that the notion of dwelling represents one of the crucial points of Heidegger’s thought and of the relation between philosophical and geographical reflection. As shown in Relph’s studies, dwelling defines a specific way of being-in-the-World, as the fundamental experience of the subject. Dwelling constitutes the most authentic kind of man–world relationship; a relationship that reveals itself as having concern for the world, for the surrounding environment and the places we dwell in. This

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requires, obviously, a specific vision of the world that the individual experiences. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, these considerations do not represent a mere diagnosis of modernity, but a severe critique of it. We could also affirm, beyond Heidegger’s thought and considering the contemporary practices of government of spaces and territories, that man is no longer capable of dwelling or, in other words, is not capable of having an authentic relation with the world. This can be considered as an issue precisely of a geographic nature: because it involves a certain way of describing and representing the world. At the same time, this also relates to man’s own political existence, as shown by Elden’s analysis of the contribution of Heidegger’s thought to geography. Elden was the first to put emphasis on a particular idea developed by Heidegger in the Beiträge, a collection of essays written at the end of the 30s: the concept of Machenschaft (machination), that Heidegger will later further develop during the 50s in the renowned questioning of the problems concerning technology. Machination, that is “[the] essential swaying of beingness,”26 holds within itself objectiveness, in the sense of the perception of space intended impersonally as extension: “[the] interpretation of beings as representable and re-presented.”27 In other words machination is, to summarize the aphoristic and rather difficult reflections Heidegger enclosed in his Beiträge, the reduction of the world to a series of facts that are perfectly calculable and comparable. As a direct consequence, the world is reduced to a picture and the space of lived experience is turned into a mere geo-graphic product. We will see how Franco Farinelli’s philosophical-geographical reflection will be molded after Heidegger’s concept of world picture. With the help of Elden’s analysis, we now want to explore what the relations between machination and lived experience – or objectivity and subjectivity – consist of: we will deal again with the vexata quaestio of space/place. It would be a bad mistake to try to find a clear distinction, a radical difference between machination and lived experience within Heidegger’s thought: in spite of their difference, they share the same genesis. “Lived experience corresponds to machination, a correspondence which was long held back and only now finally emerges.”28 In spite of their widely accepted antithesis, these two phenomena pertain to each other, as they have the same historical origin: that is to say the Latin interpretation of the Greek physys as nature. This semantic shift corresponds to a process of constant technification of the world for which, as Elden suggests, “nature is destroyed because it is separated from human beings, it is seen as a separate realm from human existence.”29 According to Heidegger, the advent of the technological era was made possible by a precise conception

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of the world that, in the essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” was identified with nature as Be-stand, as the conception of nature as something purely exploitable and usable. Heidegger states this condition with the term Gestell, “[the] way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.”30 The positionality, the im-position, the pro-vocation of nature as a neverending source of resources, and the reduction of the world to a group of calculable data are phenomena that, according to Heidegger, define the modern condition. But most of all, positionality, im-position, pro-vocation, reduction, are independent phenomena, connected to an absolutely mutual cause–effect relationship. Even mankind may now incur the metaphysical risk of being treated as an expendable resource. The comparison here is shocking, mostly if we think about the political dimension Heidegger operates in: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.”31 This is because, unlike what we may deduce from a first, brief glimpse, to reduce nature to a simple resource does not actually have an economic purpose, but more a “managing” one: through the devices of machination and positionality, the world becomes something that can be perfectly ordered. As a matter of fact, ordering “[not] only assaults the materials and forces of nature with a conscripting. Requisitioning assaults at the same time the destiny of the human.”32 The political consequences of this Weltanschauung have been analyzed through geographical lenses, especially by Elden and Malpas. The former studied the political implications of Heidegger’s thought and interpreted the politics of Nazi Germany within the frame of Heidegger’s notion of calculability.33 The latter insisted on the political value of concepts such as being-in-the-world and dwelling, relating them to the reflections of geographers like Vidal de la Blanch and Ratzel.34 These notable studies maintain the thesis according to which, from Heidegger to the most recent contributions to geography, an increased awareness of a more topological concept of space capable of taking into account the phenomenological ground that brings together subject and object, individuals and the world in which they dwell, has been witnessed. In this sense, the connection between geography and philosophy become evident, and Strabo’s words sound almost prophetic. Calculability and imposition lead us to the last Heideggerian text we would like to discuss: the essay “The Age of the World Picture,” published in the collection Holzwege. In this essay, the theme of calculability returns, though expressed in a different way. Calculation allows

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individuals to depict being, to have a clear picture of it. Beings are objectified so as to be clearly represented. This process of objectification, that according to Heidegger characterizes the whole history of Metaphysics, starts with Cartesian philosophy in which, as we noticed already, space is reduced to mere extension: What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and truth is first defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The title of Descartes’s principal work reads: Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditation on first Philosophy). ȆȡȫIJȘ ࢥȚȜȠıȠࢥȓĮ is the designation coined by Aristotle for what is later called metaphysics. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.35

With Descartes, a new conception of being was born, which allowed man to depict it and to conceive it as a picture. Therefore, in the modern age, “[the] Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.”36 But this representedness of being causes men to think of themselves as the primary term of every true-relation with being: on one hand, an explicit subjectivism is established, but at the same time being becomes a pure quantifiable and measurable object. In the age of the picture of the world, objectivism and subjectivism belong and come together: man becomes subjectum and the world becomes disposable and therefore conquered. An Italian geographer, Franco Farinelli, studied the important implications of this insight for geography. According to Farinelli, geography is the description precisely of that very world which the individual is in, in a Heideggerian way, thought as the description of the experience observed in the moment when, according to Wittgenstein, the ontological equivalence between the world and the totality of the facts is stated. In this sense, philosophy almost turns out to be the natural development of geographic knowledge, which, instead, represents “[the] original form of Western knowledge.”37 Far from being a purely descriptive discipline, geography appears from its very origins as a performative and creative activity precisely because it is a descriptive activity. Farinelli states: For too long it has been said that Geography was the knowledge that tells where the things are without noticing that actually, by doing it, Geography was telling what things are. And it was telling it as Cartography, as an underlying and silent meaning, appealing to the absolute power of the map, which doesn’t allow any critique or correction.38

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A further explanation is required in order to understand the specific features of Farinelli’s study. The history of geography, as the history of all disciplines, has experienced many internal disputes that helped define its boundaries, possibilities, and fields of application. The reduction of geography to a simple mapping of the existent world, and the consideration of cartography as “[universal] geodetic tools in order to guarantee what it has been discovered,”39 used to be customary until Ritter and Von Humboldt, following Kant’s teaching, assigned the ambitious role of a “critique” of geographic reason to the renewed discipline of geography. Centuries later, debate concerning the theoretical foundations of geography fired up again in the second half of the twentieth century, in the form of the contraposition of Bunge against Walmsley,40 object against subject, quantitative geography against the recognition of the individual experience within the acquisition of geographic knowledge. Farinelli takes a stand in this debate: his research, as a matter of fact, is driven by the consideration of geography as a kind of knowledge that orientates “[the] patterns and figures of thought.”41 The pioneering role led by Western thought ensures that the fundamental problem of the geographic thought is, ultimately, the problem concerning truth. In this sense, the story of Christopher Columbus is exemplary. In his third journey, Columbus started doubting that the lands he had reached were Cathay. The sailor from Genoa started wondering whether it really was a new world. Still, the maps by Toscanelli, the greatest cosmographer of that time, proved Columbus’s intuition wrong. And Columbus, says Farinelli, takes a philosophically crucial action: “just to make the earth in compliance with its cartographic image, he kicks the world.”42 With a gesture that in some way reminds us of Heidegger’s essay about the picture of the world, Columbus conceived the truth not as the truth of the experience, but rather as the truth of the picture, and on the truth of the picture, that acts as a way of anticipating reality, he builds his experience. The truth Columbus believes is, in short, the result of a “transcendental fallaciousness,”43: il n’y a pas de hors-texte. According to Maurizio Ferraris “there is nothing social outside the text.”44 The creation of the social object takes place through the following rule: Social Object = Inscribed Act.45

In this sense, we could legitimately talk about the hegemony of the text (paper, maps) over reality (the World). Regarding to this, Ritter used the suggestive expression “cartographic dictatorship,” but we could more modestly talk about the “truth of the map,” or the abolition of the “subject of geographic knowledge.”46 But in this way, according to Farinelli, a

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dangerous proximity between truth and violence is established: the map becomes the definitive codification of a state of the world, thus a condition of the world that impedes any kind of alteration in the subject/object relationship. This, consequently, “tightens not only the object but also the way to refer to it,”47 a truth-procedure that had already been exposed, although in a different context, by Nietzsche, for whom the necessity that something is true does not imply that it actually is.48 In similar terms Farinelli defines – in the globalized world that pretends to be recognized no longer as a map but as a globe – what he believes to be the irrevocable necessity of deconstructing the “domain of the map.”49 In other words, Farinelli defends the necessity to replace the cartographic models with other models of geographic description, thus shattering the topographic appearance “from which it’s impossible to deduce anything.”50 There is an abysmal gap between world and map, reality and picture, between a conception of space permeated with the lived experience of individuals and a neutral concept of a perfectly representable space. Only the violence of the cartographic gesture can produce the total flattening of the former onto the latter, determining one only possible ‘truth’, and thus denying the possibility of an authentic geographic experience for the subject. Far more radically than in the case of Baudrillard, for whom there is a sort of “precedence” of the picture (simulacrum) on the object represented, Farinelli states that “[by] now chart and territory can’t be distinguished as the second took completely the form and nature of the first,”51 exactly as described in Borge’s tale On Exactitude in Science. But as in Borges’s story, the map, that map, is impious, here as well the world claims its reality, its unavoidable facticity, and this model of “cartographic dictatorship,” through globalization and fluidization of information, is definitely doomed to a crisis.52

Conclusions I would like to conclude my brief overview of the possible readings of Heidegger as a geographer with a few considerations, in order to sketch out a statement of intents. I believe that Heidegger’s reflections as I presented them – aimed mostly at analyzing the possible contents of the German philosopher’s thoughts about the notion of place – may not be useful solely in a geographical perspective. Far from being merely academic practice, they can also be useful in the contemporary age in which the individual lives and operates. First of all, they demonstrate how pointless it is to remain isolated in a single academic field, revealing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the theme of space. In this

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chapter I decided to delimit this particular approach within the boundaries of the geographical and philosophical fields, but in reality it is worth extending it in order to include historical, political, juridical, architectonical, and religious domains. Some aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy are absolutely crucial in this sense and the present chapter engages broadly with three of its fundamental themes. First of all, the concept of being-in-the-world, which renders possible a wide investigation about the role and the responsibilities that individuals must assume towards the world they live in. Secondly, the theme of dwelling. A topic that leads us down to the current political fights for the rights to have a home and to live decently. Here, again, Heidegger’s philosophy may prove to be full of unexpressed potentialities. Lastly, the question concerning the picture. This theme is crucial to geography, since it brings into question – or at least it opens a question concerning – the problem of cartography. As Brian Harley explained, using the conceptual tools offered by Foucault’s work, cartography cannot be considered “[over] politics that regard the construction and control of knowledge.”53 In this way, we can try to answer Farinelli’s question about the prevailing of the cartographic reason: why can’t we free ourselves from the veritative logic enclosed in the maps? “The reason why charts can be so persuasive by spreading their messages lies in the fact that rules of society and rules of measurement and transcription of the territory find their legitimacy in the same image.”54 Heidegger’s problem of the picture becomes cartographic and the geographic problem of the map becomes something that implies a truthvalue, thus having political implications of crucial importance. This opens the possibility to doubt the logic of the map, thus questioning the fact that space and time can be systematized according to a pre-established and conventional order decided by power, and through which power legitimates itself. The relationship between power and knowledge, the fulcrum of Michel Foucault’s work,55 could be reconsidered according to this perspective. These are just some of the possible directions for future research that the relation between Heidegger’s thought and the concepts of the semantic universe of geography might suggest. I believe that the unexpressed capacities of the thought of an author like Heidegger can be explicated through the use of the conceptual lenses offered by other disciplines. By doing this, we may discover concepts that have been forgotten and disused for long time and that will now find fertile ground for application and experimentation within philosophical and political analysis, which in the present times of crisis are more than necessary.

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Notes 1 See Elden, S. 2000. “Rethinking the Polis. Implications of Heidegger’s questioning the political.” Political Geography 19: 407-422. Idem, 2001. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Idem, 2005. “Contributions to geography? The spaces of Heidegger’s Beiträge.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 811-827. Idem, 2006. “National Socialism and the politics of calculation.” Social & Cultural Geography 7 (5): 753-769. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Malpas, J. 2004. Place and Experience. A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Idem, 2008a. Heidegger’s Topology. Being, Place, World. Cambridge-London: MIT Press. Raffestin, C. 1980. Pour une géographie du pouvoir. Paris: Librairies techniques. Sloterdijk, P. 2011. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Translated by W. Hoban. Cambridge: MIT Press and Idem, 2014. Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology. Translated by W. Hoban. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2 See Dematteis, G. 1985. Le metafore della Terra. La geografia umana tra mito e scienza. Milano: Feltrinelli. Farinelli, F. 2003. Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo. Torino: Einaudi. Idem, 2007. L’invenzione della terra. Palermo: Sellerio. Idem, 2009. La crisi della ragione cartografica. Torino: Einaudi. Minca, C. 2001. “Postmoderno e geografia.” In Introduzione alla geografia postmoderna. Edited by Claudio Minca, 1-84. Padova: CEDAM. Minca, C., and Bialasiewicz, L., 2004. Spazio e politica. Riflessioni di geografia critica. Padova: CEDAM. 3 Strabo. 1917. Geography. Translated by H. L. Jones. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, I, 3. 4 Hegel, G. F. W. 1996, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822-1823) (Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, Band 12). Edited by K. H. Ilting, K. Brehmer, and H. N. Seelmann. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 106. 5 Strabo, Geography, I, 3-4. 6 Tanca, M. 2012. Geografia e Filosofia. Materiali di lavoro. Milano: Franco Angeli, 158. 7 See Dardel, È. 1986. L’uomo e la terra: natura della realtà geografica. Translated by C. Copeta. Milano: UNICOPLI. 8 See Casey, E. S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. 9 See Casey, E. 2001. “Between geography and philosophy: What does it mean to be in the place-world?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, no. XCI: 683-693. 10 See Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology. 11 Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 50. 12 Ibid., 102. 13 Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 13.

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Relph, E. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 3. Ibid. 5. 16 Elden, “National Socialism and the politics of calculation,” 759. 17 Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy,” 683. 18 The same aspect is analyzed in Resta, C. 1996. Il luogo e le vie. Geografie del pensiero in Martin Heidegger. Milano: Franco Angeli. 19 Being and Time, 50-51. 20 Heidegger, M. 1971. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper&Row, 144. 21 Ibid., 148. 22 Ibid., 145. 23 Ibid., 152. 24 Ibid., 154. 25 Ibid., 156. 26 Heidegger, M. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) (Gesamtausgabe, Band 65). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 127. 27 Ibid., 108-109. 28 Ibid., 132. 29 Elden, “Contributions to geography?” 819. 30 Heidegger, M. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by W. Lovitt, New York & London: Garland Publishing, 20. 31 Heidegger, M. 2012. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures. Translated by A. J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 27. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 See Elden, “Rethinking the Polis,” and “National Socialism and the politics of calculation.” 34 See Malpas, J. 2008b. “Heidegger, Geography, and Politics.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2: 185-213. 35 Heidegger, M. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by W. Lovitt, New York & London: Garland Publishing, 127. 36 Ibid., 130. 37 Farinelli, Geografia, 9. 38 Ibid., 37. 39 Sloterdijk, P. 2008. L’ultima sfera. Breve storia filosofica della globalizzazione. Translated by B. Agnese. Roma: Carocci, 100. 40 See Bunge, W. 1962. Theoretical Geography. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup. Walmsley, J. 1989. Abitare la città: la dimensione personale dello spazio. Translated by Sabina Visintin. Torino: Ulisse. 41 Farinelli, Geografia, 9. 42 Ibid., 19. 43 Ferraris, M. 2001. Il mondo esterno. Milano: Bompiani, 182 15

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Ferraris, M. 2013. Documentality. Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. New York: Fordham University Press, 131 45 Ibid., 120-174. 46 Farinelli, Geografia, 55. 47 Ibid., 79. 48 See Nietzsche, F. 1971. Frammenti postumi 1887-1888. Translated by Sossio Giametta. Milano: Adelphi. 49 Farinelli, Geografia. 163. See also Harley, B. 2001. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Edited by Paul Laxton. Baltimore-London: J. Hopkins University Press. 50 Ibid., 193. 51 Ibid., 201. 52 See Farinelli, F. 2009. La crisi della ragione cartografica. Torino: Einaudi. 53 Harley, B. 1989. “Deconstructing the map.” In Introduzione alla geografia postmoderna, Edited by Claudio Minca, 237-258. Padova: CEDAM, 238. 54 Ibid., 245. 55 For a ‘Heideggerian’ interpretation of Foucault’s thought, see Elden, S., Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. Concerning the relation between Foucault and geography, see Crampton, J. and Elden, S. (eds.) 2007. Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Burlington.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN MOOD AND METHOD: WHERE DOES ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE TRULY TAKE PLACE? RASMUS DYRING

I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog. —Malinowski, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term1 The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us. And it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me… The strangeness of the Other, his very freedom! Free beings alone can be strangers to one another. Their freedom which is ‘common’ to them is precisely what separates them. —Levinas, Totality and Infinity2

Introduction Anthropology’s claim to truth – its authority, as James Clifford put it – is grounded in an “I was there” that permeates any ethnographic text. The authority on which the production of anthropological truth rests is the anthropologist’s being-there, in experiential proximity to the sociocultural phenomena he or she is in the field to examine. What Clifford and the Writing Culture-movement in anthropology went on to criticize was the possibility of ethnographic writing actually conveying the complexity of the culture in which it is immersed. The main problem addressed, then, is one of representation: how can an ethnographer truly give voice to the cacophony of non-conforming, even contradictory voices of the multiplicity that make up a human community?3 This chapter raises the more fundamental problem of what it even means to be there in the field. There is more to being-there than a position in geographical space. An estranged Malinowski acknowledged this when he, while in fact being there on location in Papua New Guinea, nonetheless had to admit to his

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diary that he felt infinitely remote from the people under study. The question therefore remains, how does one arrive in the field in the first place? This question is raised in the present chapter as an existential rather than a technical, anthropological-theoretical question. However, in so far as anthropology actually rests on the being-there of ethnography, the question qua existential is indeed also a radical methodological question – a question inquiring as to the methodos, the path (hodos) “after” (meta-) which to follow in order to arrive in the “there” of existence. This chapter suggests the concept of existential emplacement as a key to unlock the site in which ethnographic experience takes place. While this concept of emplacement in its main tenets is inspired by Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit, it will be required that it enters into a critical discussion both with Heidegger’s predecessors and heirs in the philosophical tradition and with the anthropological literature, which sheds light on those experiences of alienness often hidden from the selfsameness of thought. Otherwise, it will not be able to accommodate the moods of estrangement testified to in Malinowski’s diary and the postures that an anthropologist is prompted to assume in the face of such moods.

Grasping the life of the Other: In the grasp of life’s Otherness Polemicizing against what he took to be methodologically deficient studies of the human being, Malinowski suggested the method of participant observation as a constituent part of a truly scientific anthropology. As Malinowski writes: [T]here is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belong such things as the routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body… the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities, and of passing sympathies and dislikes between people… All these facts can and ought to be scientifically formulated and recorded, but it is necessary that this be done, not by a superficial registration of details, as is usually done by untrained observers, but with an effort at penetrating the mental attitude expressed in them.4

The first thing to note here is that the phenomena of fundamental interest to anthropological study are not those things that an informant would simply say about him- or herself upon reflection. They are those

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imponderabilia of actual lived life, which come to and are sustained in their full actuality within the very praxis of being human. The “facts” of interest to anthropology are of such a phenomenal character that they can only be observed from the inside of the practices in which they unfold. This in turn means that the anthropologist must take positive measures to find him- or herself in the very place of existence of those under study, participating in the concrete practice that constitutes their particular way of life. The second thing to note is that in addition to immersion in the field, which could equally be ascribed to the missionaries who reported on their experiences among “the natives,” anthropological study requires a trained, scientific attitude. The ethnographer must take systematic measures to disclose the “mental attitude” that comes to expression in practices inherent in a particular way of life. Hence, according to Malinowski, anthropology is the scientific discipline that it claims to be only when it is based on ethnography, on the qualified experience of being-there in the field. Once thus immersed in the field, the final goal, of which an Ethnographer should never lose sight… is… to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him.5

There thus seem to be two components to what an ethnographer, via being-there in the field, has gained access to and should subsequently record: first, the basic understanding of the world common to those studied, and secondly, the hold which life has on those studied. The first component deals with grasping how those studied grasp their life and their world, while the second component deals with grasping how those studied are themselves in the grasp of life. On the existential level of the beingthere of those studied, these two moments are obviously of two different phenomenal orders: the first is primarily an active moment of grasping life, while the second is primarily a passive being in the grasp of life. Curiously however, once we shift to the ethnographic level of being-there, both moments are turned into active moments: the ethnographer is to “grasp the native’s point of view” and “study… the hold which life has on him.” The hypothesis to be pursued at length in this chapter is that any emphatic unveiling of human life as experienced by the cultural Other initially presupposes not an active intellectual openness to another “vision of the world,” but rather a pathic-experiential openness of the ethnographer

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to the grasp which life has on those human beings under study. That is, grasping the world of the other and the grasp which life has on him, presupposes that the ethnographer him- or herself is somehow and to some degree caught up in this very grasp.6 As his posthumously published, scandalous diary reveals, Malinowski did in fact find himself in the grasp of life. What caught him, however, was not that same direct “hold which life has on the native,” but a pathos of radical estrangement which led him to exclaim that [a]s for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog.7

What frustrates Malinowski here is clearly not only the unintelligibility of a certain logic of practice, but not being able to find himself in these practices on those existential grounds that make them stand forth as mattering. Hence, while Malinowski has indeed arrived on location geographically, he is unable to arrive in that place of existence, that grasp of life, from which the world of “the natives” unfolds. Furthermore, there seems to be an ontological relation between the estranging “hold” that life has on Malinowski and the mattering “hold” that life has on the native. It is not the case that the ethnographer and his research subjects are merely attuned differently to life’s hold; Malinowski’s pathos of estrangement springs from a pathically sensed, utter void at the core of the life of those studied – an utter void which appears as an abyss before a scientific anthropology that seeks the firm ground of positively being-there in the field. These considerations point to the question of the fundamental role of pathos in the emplacement of human existence in the world in general, and in the ethnographic endeavour in particular.

The emplacement of human experience: pathos Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, writes that “from the ontological point of view we must as a general principle leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘bare mood’.”8 Hence our fundamental existential pathos (pl. pathƝ), our moods, most primordially let us find ourselves in the world. This matter of finding oneself – of Befindlichkeit – is not primarily a question of knowledge, willing or even doing in a strict sense of the term, but a pathic phenomenon; it has to do with how we basically “suffer” the hold that life has on us. Further, the process of emplacement is a topological

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phenomenon: it is constitutive of our place of existence, and allows us to find ourselves within it and among one another in certain delimited ways. Although it was Heidegger who first conceptualized Befindlichkeit as a dimension foundational to human existence, the very dynamic internal to this process of existential emplacement can be found in various guises throughout the philosophical tradition. Looking more closely at Heidegger’s treatment of the phenomenon, it does indeed become clear that his analyses of Befindlichkeit owe a great deal to both Aristotle’s and Kierkegaard’s work. Acknowledging this debt to the tradition, while however retaining Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit as a main point of reference, I suggest that the most fruitful exposition of the existential emplacement of human experience is achieved by consulting also some of those authors of the tradition who touch upon the matter of Befindlichkeit. With this approach I aim to accomplish two things. The first of these is to free the concept from the “fundamental ontological” agenda of Sein und Zeit in order that it may instead assume a more general philosophicoanthropological character, thus facilitating a wider-ranging phenomenology of the processes of finding oneself in a certain place – but also, and of equal importance, at the limits of a place, outside a place, dis-placed. The second objective is to emphasize a decisive phenomenon in the process of emplacement that is downplayed in Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit: namely, the phenomenon of assuming a certain posture on the grounds opened by pathos and the emplacing dynamic unfolding between pathos and posture.9

Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit The most formal description of the matter of existential emplacement is to be found in Sein und Zeit.10 Here Heidegger describes Befindlichkeit by way of three ontological characterizations. The first deals with how moods open up human existence, Dasein, in its facticity; the second deals with how moods open up the world as a whole; and the third deals with how moods more particularly let the things and events of the world have an impact on us. As a first characterization of Befindlichkeit, Heidegger writes that Befindlichkeit disclose[s] Dasein in its thrownness, and – proximally and for the most part – in a manner of an evasive turning-away.11

That Dasein is disclosed in its thrownness (Geworfenheit) means – as the metaphor of having been thrown into the world indicates – that a moment of arbitrariness and necessity is revealed as being foundational to human

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existence. One had not originarily thrown oneself, but the place one is arbitrarily thrown into is nonetheless the place from which of necessity one must begin one’s own project (Entwurf) of being. This aspect Heidegger calls the facticity of human existence, as opposed to the factum brutum of the things of the world. Because human existence, unlike worldly things, is characterized by a fundamental self-relation in its mode of being – that it in its being inherently revolves around this being itself12 – the factical aspect of its existence shows up as a weighty burden that it is destined to carry, an imperative that encroaches upon us: that we must take upon us the task of taking care of our being (Sorge). Most often, however the burden and imperative of human existence is disclosed in evasive moods. Most often our everyday moods of sheer indifference, our banal boredom, our uplifted and exhilarated moods, etc., turn us away from the burdensome demand of being, so as to let the ways of the world assume responsibility for our existence. Of interest in our present context is not such an existentialist ethics, but the merely formal, phenomenological claim that our moods disclose differently – depending on their respective phenomenal peculiarities – an imperative dimension that is fundamental to human existence: namely, “the factical” that it is and “the imperative” that it henceforth has to be (“Dass es ist und zu sein hat”13). As a second characterization of Befindlichkeit, Heidegger writes: It [die Befindlichkeit] is an existential fundamental modus [Grundart] of the equiprimordial disclosure of the world, co-existence and existence, because it [Befindlichkeit] is itself essentially [wesenhaft] Being-in-theworld.14

The moods which emplace us in the world, Heidegger here claims, are themselves ontologically worldly in nature. Moods are not mere subjective colourings of a pre-given state of affairs, they are not inner states projected onto an outer, neutral materiality; moods are intimately implicated in the phenomenal constitution of the world and whatever comes to presence within it: The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something.15

In establishing the most basic openness of the world, moods open up not only the scope of any spontaneous directedness towards the things of the world, but also the scope of any subsequent scientific gaze: that is, they

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open the sphere within which the scientific formulation and recording of (in Malinowski’s words) ‘the facts’ can take place. Even more radically however than the sphere in which the facts and objects of the world can appear as things present to a scientific gaze (as things present-at-hand, as Heidegger would have it), moods open the pragmatic sphere within which the practical care for being (Sorge) can take place. That is, they open the pragmatics that originarily constitute the things of the world as the things they are, i.e. in their particular significance (Bedeutsamkeit), which derives from the usefulness (Bewandtnis) of their readiness-to-hand to the care for being (Sorge). Moods thereby ground not only the place where scientific observation can happen, but more originarily the place within which the very practical participation takes place that Malinowski suggested should unlock to scientific observation the imponderabilia of actual life. The originary openness of the world is not something that human existence of itself – of its own will, its scientific attitude, its interpretive vocabulary – can provide, but something that in the guise of a mood “comes over us,” something that “assails” us: A mood assails [überfällt] us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.16

Being in a mood means being in the grasp of something beyond one’s own direct control, being overwhelmed by something that arises out of the world in which one exists. Malinowski seems to have some not-furthertheorized intuition to this effect when he writes of “the hold which life has on the native” as a phenomenon to be recorded. The consequence however that Malinowski does not draw from this importance of the suffering of the hold of life is to raise the question of how this hold of life relates to the anthropologist and his or her possibility of accessing, or at least to some degree approximating, “the native’s vision of his world.” As a third and final characterization of Befindlichkeit, Heidegger writes: Existentially, a state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit] implies a disclosive submission [Angewiesenheit] to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters [Angehendes] to us.17

Between the first two characterizations of Befindlichkeit, human existence is opened to itself as a burdensome task, and the world is opened as a whole within which only things can appear as objects for our observation and practical engagement. In this third characterization Heidegger combines his two previous characterizations to state that mood discloses

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human existence in a particular mode of being submitted (angewiesen) to the world (which relates to the basic imperative dimension of human existence, to Sorge), and that we are struck (betroffen) by the things of the world as mattering (angehen) to us in differing ways according to the configuration of this primordial submission (Angewiesenheit).18 Only because we are already emplaced in the world by our moods can things show up as being of “interest and importance” to us. If Heidegger is right here, and if we are right in following him in the question of ethnographic experience, this means that the ethnographic endeavour of grasping “the native’s vision of his world” and “the hold which life has on him” depends on the anthropologist being emplaced in the field in a way that opens the world in a configuration of submission and mattering (Angewiesenheit and Angänglichkeit) somewhat similar to that which opens the world of those human beings studied. The methodological problem, then, is how such an attunement is to be accomplished, when those moods that provide this fundamental emplacement in the world remain beyond our direct control. Heidegger does actually write of the possibility of some degree of mastery over our moods. That such a possibility exists does not, however, mean that the world-openness of moods is not ontologically primary after all. The openness constituted in moods still encompasses and determines the entire sphere within which the knowledge and will to mastery of our moods can work. Indeed, Heidegger goes on: “when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods.”19 Hence it seems that by nurturing one grounding mood we can gain a somewhat forceful stand from where we can oppose another grounding mood. Since the elaboration of such an ontico-existentiell dynamic of mood posited against mood is not of essence to the fundamental ontology worked out in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger only mentions the matter in passing. For our purposes, however, the question is of the utmost importance, since it points in the direction of the more active registers of the emplacing suffering of the “hold of life” and the phenomenon of posture.

The emplacement of human experience: posture Looking to Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Hans Lipps in what follows, I shall outline some aspects of this dynamic indicated but not fleshed out by Heidegger in his concept of Befindlichkeit. Each of the consulted authors will bring into view a complementary dimension in the phenomenon of posture and the emplacing dynamic between pathos and posture in general. Aristotle’s concept of hexis will grant us a template for thinking about posture as a fundamental mode of having-oneself. Kierkegaard’s exploration

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of the inwardness of such a having-oneself – the human spirit, the self – grants us a view of how freedom is actualized on the strength of posture. And finally, Hans Lipps’ notion of Haltung will point to the worldliness, sociality and spatializing properties of posture.

Aristotle’s concept of hexis as template for a concept of existential posture As Nussbaum rightly points out, each of the Aristotelian virtues relates to a specific experiential sphere of human existence – a grounding experience, as she designates it, which resonates quite well with Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit.20 The virtue of courage, for example, is grounded experientially in the pathos of fear. Following this general intuition, what is of interest in the present context is not just how praxis – be it virtuous or vicious – is emplaced in an experiential sphere circumscribed by pathos. Of greater interest is how the various configurations of an agent’s “psychological” constitution are, on their side, co-constitutive of the very phenomenon of pathos, which qua grounding experience originarily opens the moment of action and emplaces agents and everyday praxis within it. Virtuous action, Aristotle states, is not just a question of doing the right thing (which one might also do through chance), but of doing the right thing out of the rightly configured psychƝ. In Aristotle’s words: acts done in conformity with the virtues are not done justly or temperately if they themselves [qua isolated acts] are of a certain sort, but only if the agent also is in a certain state of mind when he does them: first he must act with knowledge; secondly he must deliberately choose the act, and choose it for its own sake; and thirdly the act must spring from a mode of having the enactment that is steadfast and not-to-be-moved-about [bebaios kai ametakinetos echon prattƝ].21

That the virtuous act springs from a certain “psychological” disposition – a certain “state of mind” – in virtue of which the agent is “having” (echon) his or her enactment is not to be understood as a question of a good will or “Achtung fürs moralische Gesetz,”22 or, more generally, of a noble purpose. If anything, the question of purpose is entailed in the second specification of virtuous action, which deals with the choice (proairesis) of the act for its own (noble) sake. Rather, the third specification deals with the foundational relationship between action, agent and the grounding experience of pathos that circumscribes the entire situation in which the agent finds him- or herself prompted to act.

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The term used by Aristotle to denote this relationship is hexis (pl. hexeis). Hexis is etymologically linked to the verb echein, to have; it therefore connects as a main category to the word echon found in the third specification quoted above. In the Metaphysics Aristotle writes of hexis in general that the term on the one hand designates a relation of activity (energeia) between a haver and a thing had (echontos kai echomenou): that is, an active state of “having,” of actively being in possession. On the other hand, he writes, it designates a state of “having” that is a “disposition” (diathesis). Disposition is an “arrangement of that which has parts,” such that it assumes a certain position (thesis) as regards place (kata topon), potentiality (kata dynamin) or form (kat’ eidos).23 This characterization of hexis as a state of being composed and assuming a certain position, a certain posture, dovetails beautifully with the meaning of the verb “to have” (echein) as it is recounted by Aristotle.24 In one sense, “having” means that that which is had is had in accordance with the impulse of the haver, i.e. is directed by the haver’s active state of having; in another sense, “having” means, in Aristotle’s words, that which prevents anything from moving or acting in accordance with its own impulse; as pillars hold (up) the weight which is imposed upon them, and as the poets make Atlas hold up the heaven, because otherwise it would fall upon the earth… It is in this sense that we say that ‘that which holds together’ holds what it holds together; because otherwise the latter would disperse…25

Much more than merely denoting something as figuring passively and indifferently in, i.e. as externally related to, an inventory of belongings, the category of hexis and the operative term echein denote an ontologically active internal relation between haver and had. In having, the haver’s own impulse and endogenous principle of motion is posited against the exogenous principles of motion of that which is had. And in the very activity of this state of having, the entire relational structure assumes a certain composition, is held together in place, is configured in its potentiality, is sustained in its form. In the specific context of human praxis, Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics connects the concept of hexis intimately to that of pathos26: the hexeis are the formed states of character in virtue of which we are well or ill disposed in respect of the emotions [pathƝ].27

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In the first place we should note here that what is being had in the hexis in this case is not initially the pathƝ; in the having of the hexis it is ourselves that we have, in such a way that renders us susceptible and responsive to pathos in more or less favourable configurations. The concept of hexis in this specific context thus designates an active state of “having” that is a self-relation, a having-of-oneself, in terms of which one assumes a certain position and is composed in a certain way in the face of the imposition of pathos. Now, the hexeis constitutive of properly virtuous acts, are, as quoted above, steadfast and not-to-be-moved-about (bebaios kai ametakinetos) modes of having-oneself in one’s praxis in the face of pathos. The pathƝ, for their part, are, as Aristotle puts it in the Metaphysics, “hurtful alterations and motions [alloioseis kai kineseis], and especially hurts which cause suffering.”28 Or, as it is put in the Nicomachean Ethics, “we are said to be moved [kineisthai] by the emotions [pathƝ].”29 So while pathos imposes upon us, assails us and thus on the whims of its impulses “seeks” to move and mould into a certain guise that grounding experience in which we find ourselves emplaced, our hexeis by their potential for stable composition are co-determinants of that experiential range that the pathic stirrings of existence are allowed to have on us. This in turn means that the emplacing, grounding experience of pathos phenomenally is what it is only within its intimate relation to the having-of-oneself, the bearing, the posture, that is the hexis.

The existential dynamic of posturing: despair, faith and Verlegenheit While Aristotle in his ethical thinking is interested in the interrelation between pathos and posture only in so far as it sheds light on the human praxis in its worldly arena, in the works of Kierkegaard and Lipps we find extended analyses of the existential dynamics of the interrelation and the impact of this dynamic on human life as such. Kierkegaard explores extensively the phenomenon of having-oneself in the inwardness of this self-relation. The human being, Kierkegaard writes, is spirit, and as such it is “a” self. Neither spirit nor self are substances, but processes of self-relation. As Kierkegaard puts it, “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”30 As such a non-substantial self-relation, the self is freedom.31 However, while the human being freely bears and sustains itself on the strength of its modes of self-relation – its existential postures – the self has not created itself. It is created by another power, by God. So in the self’s modes of

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bearing itself, in its postures, it relates not only to itself, but necessarily also and fundamentally to a constitutive power beyond the self.32 All the different guises of human existence explored by Kierkegaard relate somehow to the un-grounding experience of being such a non-substantial abyss of freedom, and the different postures assumed by human existence in the pathic grasp of this un-grounding experience, which emplaces and necessarily delimits human existence in its freedom. The phenomenon of despair is especially informative in this respect. Despair, according to Kierkegaard, is a misrelation in the self’s mode of self-relation, i.e. the de facto reduction to one of its relata of what is essentially a process of relation between the relata, whereby the freedom inherent in the self-relating process makes itself unfree; it traps itself in one dimension of its existence. The person seeking to realize him- or herself by way of worldly enjoyment – that is, by assuming an aesthetical posture – despairs in the face of the finitude of the things of the world, which cannot sustain his or her being in the aspects of infinity also implicit to the relational structure of the self. In this case, human freedom in its self-imposed unfreedom might appear to itself in the demonic, pantheistic pathos of boredom.33 A similar dynamic can be observed in all the postures of despair: they are all mis-relating postures, modes of havingoneself that resonate in, and perpetuate, the very un-grounding experience of human existence to which they originarily respond. The only posture that will bring peace to a human being is the posture of faith, which lets the self-relation rest transparently in the power that created it, God. Only on the “absurd” grounds of faith will human beings find themselves in a firm posture.34 Where Kierkegaard mostly sheds light on the inwardness of the phenomenon, Lipps shows how the inwardness of posture is equiprimordially worldly. Hans Lipps in his Die Menschliche Natur explicitly elaborates on the Heideggerian concept of Befindlichkeit, but takes a concept of Haltung – posture – rather than that of Stimmung as the main category. Not unlike Kierkegaard, Lipps connects closely the originary emplacement of human freedom and the phenomenon of posture: The freedom of a human being shows itself in the uncoercedness [Ungezwungenen] of the posture [Haltung] with which he appears [auftritt]…35

And like Aristotle, Lipps finds that what characterises a human being in his or her singular personality is not so much the various affects that one might undergo, as the posture that he or she assumes, which, in response to the affects, nurtures or suppresses, and hence composes and moulds

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one’s being-affected into a certain guise.36 As Lipps writes, almost as if directly responding to Heidegger’s question of the mastery of our moods: The posture to some degree shifts [schaltet] the affects. One can be properly sad only when one also by way of one’s posture [haltungsmässig] submits oneself to this sadness… A more relaxed posture – e.g. sitting on a chair – quickly dampens the anger: one can intercept the affects through the posture.37

However, Lipps goes farther in his exploration of this emplacing interrelation between pathos and posture than either Aristotle or Kierkegaard, in so much as he extends his analysis to the existential registers of the spatial emplacement of being-together. According to Lipps, posture is not an epiphenomenon, not a mere outer expression of some inward state. Postures are their own expression, as Lipps puts it.38 Postures are what they manifest, and thus they are not primarily inward, but immediately worldly phenomena. The pride of the proud person “resides” in this person’s posture – the straightness of the back, the pushed-forward chest, the firm gaze. And in virtue of the phenomenal immediacy of our postures and their inherent gestures and mannerisms, they compose not only a personal stance from where the predicaments and pathƝ of life can be met; they create and compose (schaffen, figurieren39) around them the space for co-existence. Thus the phenomenon of posturing as Lipps describes it is an existential mode of taking place from the nexus of which a spatializing process unfolds. Through one’s posture, as he writes, “one joins the others [verbindet man sich dem anderen], one’s space is thereby co-composed [mitgestaltet]…”40 This process of spatialization, which encompasses both the posturing person him- or herself and those around him or her to create a common and shared space41 between them, is especially prominent in the phenomenon of what in Lipps’s German is called Verlegenheit – awkwardness, embarrassment. In Lipps’s words, the person on whom the pathos of Verlegenheit, for whatever reason, imposes becomes questionable [fragwürdig] to himself. And that means for him a disturbance in his ability to feel himself pathically in the situation [Störung des pathischen Sich-einfühlens]. A mood that can serve as the ground of tacit intelligibility [unausdrücklichen Verstehens] can no longer arise in him. He cannot find himself.42

In want of those shared moods that non-thematically attune the “imponderabilia of actual life” in their tacit intelligibility, the person

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suffering the pathos of Verlegenheit cannot find him- or herself to be properly in place. In the pathos of ver-legen-heit, one finds oneself emplaced in one’s place (Lage) in the modus of dis-placement. Emplaced in the pathos of dis-placement, one loses one’s posture, as Lipps puts it.43 However, the pathos of dis-placement and the loss of posture do not leave a person floating off into the abyss; the displacing emplacement of Verlegenheit places a person on demand, encroaches on a person with an imperative insistence that he or she assume a posture that will alleviate the weight of the displacing situation. The response to which launches a frantic oscillation of posturing: The awkwardly dis-placed person [Der Verlegene] does not know what to do with his hands. Where to stand, to whom he should turn, where to direct his gaze… He appears unfree, inhibited exactly because he is in the grasp of a force that demands of him that he must act in some way, that he must assume some kind of posture.44

In this respect, Lipps’s Verlegenheit complements Kierkegaard’s despair. Both phenomena resonate in a pathic, un-grounding experience which perpetuates the very mis-relating mode of posturing, which again perpetuates the un-grounding experience. In both phenomena, the very freedom inherent in the human possibility of assuming a posture in the face of the predicaments of existence entangles itself in itself, rendering itself unfree in its free self-relating having-of-itself. Posturing is precisely free in the displacing situation to flounder about and tire itself out in its attempt to find a firm foothold. In the awkwardness of the dis-placed person’s failing attempts to assume a steadfast posture in the situation, “it is manifest how Verlegenheit withholds us from finding that middle ground which lets us join the others.”45 But even though this commonsensical middle ground of communal being is not to be found, Verlegenheit is at its core a phenomenon of being-together. The others are constitutive of the questionability (Fragwürdigkeit) of my place in the world, and my awkward posturing immediately encloses also those others within the awkward space of the displacing situation. So although there is no mood that emplaces non-problematically on the same ground those present, as would a shared fear of something threatening in the vicinity or the ecstatic atmosphere at a concert, there is a mood of another modality, a pathos to the second power (so to speak), which arises from the oscillations of the posturing that cannot find itself with firm ground under its feet; and this pathos emplaces those present in the suffering-in-common of their displacing situation.

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This phenomenon of displacement will serve as an important guide in the consideration of the pathos of estrangement that follows in the next section. Let me briefly sum up the concept of emplacement in general as it has been developed above. The emplacement of human existence unfolds in a dynamic interrelation between pathos and postures. The pathƝ (as argued by Heidegger) disclose human existence to itself, the world as a whole, and the things of the world as mattering in a certain way according to a fundamental mode of existential submission, also pathically anchored. This moment of existential submission, however, is not utterly passive, but, as indicated by the concept of posture, is existentially the nexus of an interplay between pathos and posture. The submission to the predicaments of existence is a submission that assumes certain postures, thereby modifying the entire process of emplacement.

The pathƝ of displacement and posturing towards the in-stead of ethnography I shall now turn to the more specific question of the pathos of estrangement and the emplacement of the ethnographic encounter. During the exposition of the notion of emplacement some pathic configurations have already been mentioned. It might be worth taking our point of departure in some of the most general of these configurations, in order to work our way towards those phenomena of radical estrangement testified to in Malinowski’s diary. There is first of all a range of emplacing pathƝ that might be categorized as the pathos of homeliness. These pathƝ of homeliness emplace human existence in some configuration of ordinariness, such as “the undisturbed equanimity and the inhibited ill-humour of our everyday concern,”46 as well as banal forms of boredom47 or despair over the finite things of the world.48 In all these instances, human existence is at home in the world, despite the fact that the things of the world might very well impose on human existence in modes of mattering that are felt to be more or less expedient, more or less entertaining, more or less significant for a life-project. The same goes for the phenomenon of fear.49 The mood of fear arises with the presence of a well-known threatening thing which approaches within my homely world. Although we often speak of the fear of the unknown, the pathos of estrangement cannot simply be explained as a phenomenon of fear. The threatening object of fear – the un-known – would in this case be merely negatively defined relative to the security of the known, and the mood of fear of the unknown would still be disclosing

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the world in a configuration of homeliness. Rather, if we were to investigate the pathos of estrangement as a phenomenon of fear, we would still have to take our point of departure in the experience as such of alienness before being able to point to how it might impose upon human existence as threatening. Two pathƝ of emplacement deserve to be treated at greater length, both of which seem exemplary as regards experiences of alienness that stand out not merely relative to a place of homeliness, but which take place as the destabilization of the places of homeliness as such. These two are the phenomenon of anxiety and the already touched-upon phenomenon of Verlegenheit.

Anxiety and un-homeliness In anxiety, Heidegger writes, “ist es einem unheimlich”: one is assailed, not by some upsetting thing of the world, but by the un-grounding experience of an abyssal unhomeliness – nothingness – at the very foundation of the homely world.50 The mood of anxiety hence resembles a mood of estrangement in its displacement of human existence from the homely into the utterly unhomely. However, there are some decisive differences in the respective modes of displacing emplacement between the two phenomena, and these can be related to the three ontological characterizations of Befindlichkeit (disclosure of world, of existence and of the mattering of the things of the world). Heidegger writes that in anxiety, [a]ll things and we ourselves sink into indifference [Gleichgültigkeit]. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold [Halt] on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing.51

As regards the basic disclosure of the world, it on the whole sinks into a state of utter insignificance (Gleichgültichkeit, völlige Unbedeutsamkeit52); but in this insignificance of the individual worldly things, the human condition of worldly existence as such (In-der-Welt-sein), of freedom, imposes itself upon us.53 But as Malinowski writes of his experience of the remoteness and utter insignificance of the life of “the native,” it would be wrong simply to say that the significance of the world on the whole recedes. The utter unimportance felt by Malinowski does not primarily relate to his own homely world, but to the indication of a whole world of

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supposed significance, which, however, remains beyond as nontraversable a threshold as that between human being and dog. Rather than letting the significance of the world on the whole recede, the pathos of estrangement discloses the world as lacerated by rifts of alienness. Beingin-the-world is disclosed in the pathos of estrangement as being-at-thelimits of a homely world that borders on a world that in its ground is utterly shrouded in alienness, and not (as it is the case in the pathos of anxiety) as a place in which any possibility of getting a “hold” (Halt) on, and hence assuming a posture (Haltung) in the world, sinks entirely into nothingness. As regards the basic opening of human existence, Heidegger finds that anxiety individuates (vereinzelt) human existence, pulls human existence out of the inauthentic, homely “fallenness” and turns it towards itself. Although Malinowski was clearly not at home in the world when he found himself in the grasp of estrangement, this pathos did not merely turn the anthropologist in on himself; rather, he found himself emplaced among, in the nearness of human beings that were utterly inexplicable to him, and the factical “that” of co-existing in this manner imposed upon him, in the pathos of estrangement, the disclosure of an unavoidable existential condition: a being-together that could not be reduced to the co-existing beings having anything more substantial, such as culture, values, the Good etc., in common. Contrary to the Vereinzelung of anxiety, the pathos of estrangement here seems to entail a sort of foundational sensus communis – a pathic sense of being-together – that precedes the communal sharing of any positive commonsensical vision of the world. Finally, as regards the disclosure of the things of the world in their mode of mattering, the homely structure of meaning – according to which any individual thing can appear as mattering in virtue of its “practical” significance – collapses once it is overwhelmed by anxiety (“Sie sinkt in sich zusammen”54). In the pathos of estrangement, however, individual things matter qua their utter alienness from any self-evident intelligibility of what is of “interest and importance,” not because they (like the fear of the unknown) domesticate the alien, but because the alienness of the things encroaches on and delimits the very sphere within which any domestication, any appropriation can possibly take place. Contrary to the homely nexus of the pathos of fear, the pathos of estrangement originates in an abyssal “beyond.” As Bernhard Waldenfels puts it with respect to alien-experience (Fremderfahrung) in general: In a strict sense of the term, the alien is ‘grounded’ nowhere. Rather, it draws my experience into the abyss; so that it no longer for me myself is something exclusively own.55

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Being-at-the-limits of his own world, but nonetheless in a mode of beingtogether with human beings inhabiting this abyssal “beyond,” Malinowski experiences things not merely with a neutral disinterestedness, but groundshakingly as being “utterly devoid of interest and importance.” That is, things are experienced as mattering infinitely in virtue of the pathic imposition of the non-mattering void of that abyssal alienness that they “incarnate.” The alienness of these matters – constituted in a beingtogether of which the ethnographer is a part, but belonging to a world of which the ethnographer is not a part – ; this alienness, the very experience of it, will serve as a possible point of connection between the two cultural worlds. The phenomenon of Verlegenheit will allow us to disclose in more depth these traits of the emplacing pathos of estrangement that have now begun to emerge.

“Common” dis-placement In addition to the cases of awkwardness in which one has embarrassed oneself, in which one has brought upon oneself and others the pathos of displacement by somehow stepping, or at least finding oneself, outside one’s bounds, Lipps also points to those cases which have no such “objective” causes, but where the mere co-presence of human beings lets an awkward mood arise. In this “common” dis-placement (“allgemeine” Verlegenheit), it is our situation qua shared that imposes upon us. An example of such a commonly displacing situation would be the chance meeting and subsequent conversation between peripherally acquainted persons on the street, or in the elevator. Such scenarios, in Lipps’s words, display “[h]ow the partners in a conversation can be burdened by the demand that they uphold the conversation nicely, and not leave it stranded.”56 Regardless of what relation these persons have or do not have, what societal strata and cultural sphere they otherwise inhabit, and regardless of what sort of place this street or this elevator might be under ordinary circumstances, the situation of itself has suddenly effected what we might call a topological modification, exposing as a rift in the midst of the ordinary world a province of dis-placement. In this site of “common” dis-placement, Lipps writes, [o]ne finds oneself… on a ground that is neutral towards that, which otherwise would come between the participants in terms of sympathy and antipathy. Through the tone that attunes [gestimmt] this being-together [Zusammensein], the limits of such a situation are determined [bestimmen sich die Grenzen]. It is a determined place [bestimmte ‘Lage’] onto which each has to transpose [übersetzen] himself.57

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In their co-presence, the persons find themselves confronted with a “neutral ground”: that is, a ground on the hither side of how things might ordinarily stand between them, on the hither side of the ordinary world, onto which they for the duration of the awkward situation (of the elevator ride etc.) must trans-pose (über-setzen) themselves, upon which they must assume those postures (Haltungen) that will uphold (erhalten) the conversation fittingly keeping up the appearances of an ordinary world. With this phenomenon of “common” dis-placement Lipps presents us with a nuanced glimpse of the dynamics internal to what was merely hinted at above as the pathos of being-together apprehended in a kind of sensus communis. The place of the “common” dis-placement is a place opened in and through a shared pathos of being-together that attunes (gestimmt) and delimits the place of this being-together (Zusammensein) in such a way that none of those co-present, on the one hand, own this place or its mood (it is in that sense not only neutral, but alien); but on the other hand, each of them is nonetheless called upon to trans-pose themselves onto this alien ground, to assume a posture upon it; that is, to engage in a process of posturing that is itself ontologically implicated in creating and composing (schaffen, figurieren) this shared space.58 In the ethnographic encounter, I believe, we find an emplacing dynamic between pathos and postures similar to that coming to the fore in Lipps’s phenomenon of “common” dis-placement.

The estranging in-stead of ethnography Anthropologist C. Jason Throop has recently written of a so-called ethnographic epoché.59 This epoché, unlike that found in Husserl, is not one reflectively posited by the anthropologist. It is a phenomenological modification of the anthropologist’s subjectivity, effected by, as it were, “experiences of estrangement” and “unassumable alterity.”60 The ethnographic epoché, as Throop puts it, is an unwilled result of unpredicted frustrations and vulnerabilities arising when confronting the limits of interpretability in the ethnographic encounter.61

The phenomenological modification, however, is not exclusively fashioned by such pathic experiences; for it to take place, the responsiveness to this pathos of estrangement of a certain kind of posture – what Throop calls the anthropological attitude – is required. The epoché, then, is

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In parallel with the concept of existential emplacement developed in this chapter, Throop here operates with an originary moment of passivity, a pathos arising from the being-together with the inexplicable Other, which is responded to in an active moment when a particular posture is assumed in the face of this pathos. The grounding experience of ethnography that arises from this phenomenologically modifying dynamic is one in which the ethnographer’s commonsensical understanding of “the true, the good, and the beautiful” is not merely bracketed, but genuinely put in question.63 As the person who finds him- or herself dis-placed (verlegen) in an awkward situation becomes questionable (fragwürdig64) to him- or herself, so the ethnographer becomes questionable to him- or herself. However, unlike the awkwardly dis-placed person (der Verlegene), the ethnographer, who responds not merely to the estranging pathos, but answers a professional call, must actively seek to orientate towards, to trans-pose (sich über-setzen) him- or herself onto the estranging ground, not merely translate the alien into the homely. Interrupted in their natural human tendency to “assimilate experience to the self-sameness of our being,” Throop writes, ethnographers “become opened to possibilities of seeing other ways of being that are not, and yet may never be, our own.”65 An especially salient example of this dynamic is to be found in Throop’s account of the healing sessions performed on the young girl Tinag’s broken arm by a traditional healer in the Micronesian island of Yap.66 Without anaesthesia, the resetting of the broken bone in the girl’s arm is obviously extremely painful. Finding himself in the clinic among Tinag’s family members, who were present to support her and – which turns out to be of utmost importance – to suffer the world-shattering pain alongside her, Throop writes that he, in those moments of extreme suffering, was “made to existentially question his own very presence as a witness.”67 But in these situations of displacing estrangement, Throop suddenly finds himself faced with the true integrity of Tinag’s being – a being that is not assumable to the self-sameness of my own being. The intensity and viscerality of Tinag’s pain… compelled a shift in my orientation to her. In those moments, she could no longer ever simply be a subject of my research… Tinag’s… singularity would always outstrip my attempts at understanding her, whether in terms of my own theoretical commitments or in terms of our shared interactional history together.68

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On the strength of the anthropological mode of in-sisting on alienness, the dis-placing pathos that at first obscures the anthropologist’s view – the pathos which, in Malinowski’s case, inserts itself as an infinite remoteness between himself and the field proper – becomes modified into a pathos of estrangement of another modality. From being estranged from the situation at large, Throop’s pathos of estrangement now arises from the abyssal viscerality of Tinag’s pain and the unassumability of her singular existence. Rather than the anthropologist’s view being rejected at the “limits of interpretability,” he is now called upon to trans-pose himself into the place of existence of those under study by the very “same” hold that life has on them also: the radically estranging grasp of pain. The radical alienness of this world-shattering pain becomes a cross-cultural point of connection between Throop and those cultural Others under study. Yet although the healer, the caregivers, Tinag and the anthropologist himself suffer-in-common the estranging grasp of pain, Throop stresses that each person suffers singularly in his or her unassumable being.69 Throop has not assimilated their way of being. He has not “gone native.” In virtue of the emplacing dynamic between the pathos of estrangement and the anthropological mode of posturing, of trans-posing oneself onto those alien grounds opened in the pathos of estrangement, the anthropologist is emplaced in the field in a manner that, on the one hand, interrupts the immediate domestication of the alienness of the phenomena observed, yet on the other hand nonetheless allows a trans-position back into a homely idiom. Waldenfels calls the ontological structure that allows ethnography to maintain this kind of paradoxical proximity-in-remoteness originary substitution (originäre Stellvertretung: literally, the “being there instead of another”). Originary substitution here presupposes stepping into the place of the other. However, this does not mean that the ethnographer is to inhabit the place that the other inhabits in the same way that the other inhabits it. That the substitution is originary in Waldenfels’s terms means that the place of the in-stead is “created” in the very act of stepping into it, of the posturing trans-position onto its alien ground. The in-stead thus created is then indeed one of alienness. It is alien with respect both to the homestead of the ethnographer and to the homestead of those Others under study. Emplacement into the estranging in-stead renders ethnography capable of a special kind of Fremddarstellung – a presentation of the alien – which, in accordance with Fremderfahrung, or the experience of the alien, starts from what is alien, even if it continues dealing with it in the framework of a certain order.70

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The in-stead created in the anthropological mode of posturing towards the pathos of estrangement is the liminal site between two homesteads: the liminal site in which ethnographic experience takes place and from where anthropological truth emerges.

Concluding remarks In this chapter I have argued that the existential phenomena of moods and the postures by way of which we position ourselves in the face of the pathos of our moods, are essential moments in the emplacement of human existence in general and of ethnographic experience in particular. Malinowski’s Diary presented us with a case of a mood of estrangement that arose as an obstacle to that being-there-in-the-field on which the ethnographic project rests. By first disclosing the ontological structures of moods and postures, and secondly by tracing the dynamics between these phenomena through a variety of configurations, we ended up with a notion of existential displacement that seemed conducive of an understanding of the proper place of the production of ethnographic truth. In the light of this phenomenon of displacement it was shown how ethnographic experience, by transposing itself onto those alien grounds opened by the pathos of estrangement, is able to find a point of connection with the culturally alien world, without on the one hand reducing its otherness to something homely, or, on the other hand, “going native.”

Acknowledgements The research presented in this paper was made possible by a grant from the Danish Research Council (FKK 11-104778), which funds the research project “Existential Anthropology – Inquiring Human Responsiveness,” Aarhus University. I would like to thank my colleagues in this project – Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Kasper Lysemose and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer – for their inspiring comments. Last, but not least, I would like to thank the editors for their effort in putting this book together.

Notes 1

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1989. Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 167. 2 Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 73.

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Cf. Clifford, James. 1983. “On Ethnographic Authority.“ Representations 1(2): 118-146; Clifford, James, and George E Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. 4 Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1984. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 18-19. 5 Ibid 25, emphasis added. 6 Cf. Jackson, Michael. 2009. “Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy” Anthropological Theory 9(3), 241. 7 Malinowski, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 167. 8 Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 177. Cf. Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Sein und Zeit, 19. Auflage, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 138. 9 The concept of posture, Haltung, is by no means absent from Heidegger’s work. His 1924 lecture course on Aristotle shows how both the concept of pathos (as that which brings one “aus der Fassung”) and that of hexis (as a “Gefasstsein,” an “Auf-dem-Posten-sein in seiner Lage”) play a prominent role in the early formation of the concept of Befindlichkeit later found in Sein und Zeit. However, both in the 1924 lectures and in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger too quickly turns the question of “Haltung” into a question of an authentic configuration of Dasein, which obscures the wider picture of the generative interplay between pathos or moods and Haltung. In the 1929–30 lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, we similarly find a discussion of Haltung reduced to the exposition of the Grundhaltung of being-towards-death. Cf. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Die Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (GA18). Frankfurt a. M: Vittorio Klostermann, 176; Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik – Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (GA29/30). Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 427. 10 Prominently §29, Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. 11 Heidegger, Being and Time, 175; Sein und Zeit, 136. 12 Ibid. §9. 13 Ibid. 173; 134. 14 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 137, own translation. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 176. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 176; Sein und Zeit, 137. 16 Ibid. 176; 136. 17 Ibid. 177; 137-8. 18 Ibid. 177; 137. 19 Ibid. 175; 136. 20 Nussbaum, Martha C. 1988. “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy. 13, 36. 21 Aristotle. 1934. Nicomachean Ethics, Loeb Classical Library. Translated by H. Rackman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.4 1105a30–33, emphasis added and the translation is slightly altered in the last sentence from H. Rackman’s “fixed and permanent disposition of character” to a more literal translation in which “bebaios” (from “baino,” “to walk”) is rendered by “steadfast” as something one

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can walk upon, and “ametakinetos” is rendered as something that is not simply immoveable (akinetos), but is not-to-be-moved-about (a-meta-kinetos). Finally, “echon prattƝ” is rendered quite literally as the having of the enactment. 22 Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Frankfurt a. M: Insel Verlag, A152. 23 Aristotle. 1933. Metaphysics: Books I-IX, Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, V.19 1022b1–4; V.20 1022b4–14. On the relationship between hexis and diathesis, cf. also Aristotle. 1938. Categories, Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Harold P. Cooke. Cambirdge: Harvard University Press, VIII 8b25-9a14. 24 For reasons of clarity, I shall relate merely the first and the fourth meaning of echein. The four meanings are, briefly, having (1) as “directing according to one’s own impulse,” (2) as “making present,” (3) as holding and containing, and (4) as upholding and sustaining, Aristotle, Metaphysics, V.23 1023a8–25. 25 Aristotle, Metaphysics, V.23 1023a8–25, emphasis added. 26 As Oele points out, this connection is more indicated than fleshed out theoretically. She does a great deal of work to explore this connection, as does Heidegger in his 1924 Aristotle lectures. Cf. Oele, Marjolein. 2012. “Passive Dispositions: On the Relationship between Pathos and Hexis in Aristotle” Philosophy. Paper 36. http://repository.usfca.edu/phil/36, 16; Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (GA18), §17, §18. 27 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.5 1005b25–27. 28 Aristotle, Metaphysics, V.21 1022b19–22, emphasis added. As with the concept “echein,” I am also limiting my discussion of the meanings of “pathos.” Hence I am only relating the third of the four senses of pathos listed in the Metaphysics. These four sense are pathos as: (1) the possibility of being altered, (2) the actuality of an alteration, (3) the suffering of hurtful alterations and motions, and (4) extreme cases of suffering. 29 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.5 1106a5, emphasis added. 30 Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980b. The Sickness unto Death. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 13 emphasis added. Cf. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1995. “Sygdommen til Døden” In SV15, 73. 31 Ibid. 29; 87. 32 Ibid. 14; 73. 33 Kierkegaard, Søren. 2004. Either/Or. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 230-1; Kierkegaard, Søren. 1995. Enten Eller, første Halvbind, SV2, 267-8. 34 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 14; “Sygdommen til Døden,” 74. 35 Lipps, Hans. 1977. Die Menschliche Natur (Werke III). 2. Auflage. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 22. All translations of Lipps are my own. 36 Ibid. 20, cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.5 1106a6–14. 37 Ibid. 21. 38 Ibid. 13. 39 Ibid. 22. 40 Ibid. 19.

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Cf. Bollnow, Otto Friedrich. 2009. Das Wesen der Stimmungen – Schriften Band I, Studienausgabe in 12 Bänden. Wützburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 118. 42 Lipps, Die Menschliche Natur, 12. 43 Ibid. 18. 44 Ibid. 11. 45 Ibid. 12. 46 Heidegger, Being and Time, 173; Sein und Zeit, 134. 47 Heidegger GA 29/30: §23,§24, cf. also Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 227-241; SV2 263-277. 48 Kierkegaard, The Sichness unto Death, 33-35, 50-54; “Sygdommen til Døden,” 90-92, 106-110. 49 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III.6, Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980a. The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reidar Thomte. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 42; SV6 136, Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §30, Heidegger, GA18, §21. 50 Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “What is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, Revised and expanded edition. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Routledge, 101; Heidegger, Martin. 2004. “Was ist Metaphysik?” In Wegmarken (GA9), Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 111. 51 Ibid. 52 Heidegger, Being and Time, 231; Sein und Zeit, 187. 53 Ibid. 232; 188. 54 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 186. 55 Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1997. Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 1. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 75, own translation. 56 Lipps, Die Menschliche Natur, 29. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 19, 22. Cf. section 3.2 above. 59 Cf. Throop, C. Jason. 2012. “On Inaccessibility and Vulnerability: Some Horizons of Compatibility between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” Ethos 40(1): 75-96; Throop, C. Jason. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. 60 Throop, Suffering and Sentiment, 281. 61 Throop, “On Inaccessibility and Vulnerability,” 85. 62 Ibid. emphasis added. Cf. also Throop, Suffering and Sentiment, 281. 63 Throop, Suffering and Sentiment, 281. 64 Lipps, Die Menschliche Natur, 12. 65 Throop, Suffering and Sentiment, 281-2. Cf. also Jackson, Michael. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn Books, 48-9; Jackson, “Where Thought Belongs: An Anthropological Critique of the Project of Philosophy,” 238-41. 66 Cf. Throop, Suffering and Sentiment, 235-263. 67 Ibid. 282.

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Ibid. 282, emphasis added. Ibid. 70 Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. “In the Place of the Other,” Continental Philosophy Review 44, 163, emphasis added. 69

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH IN JAZZ IMPROVISATION JENS SKOU OLSEN

Dance and song can be understood as primary adaptations to the environment; with them man can feel towards a new order of things and feel across boundaries, while with speech, decisions are made about boundaries. This is why even in industrialized societies, the changing forms of music may express the true nature of the predicament of people before they have begun to express it in words and political action.1

Why do jazz musicians invest their entire lives into performing acts of musical improvisation? Why would people want to sleep all day, play wild jazz music in small basement clubs all night and spend most of their professional life in a tour bus eating food from gas stations in remote country villages? It is certainly not an economically profitable endeavor and most often jazz musicians do not come even close to being famous, let alone properly recognized for their art. It is a nomad’s life. In some respects, it is a life of being a stranger even to your friends and family; the collective, interpersonal intensity of the jazz group and the mind-blowing experiences of musical miracles is just too strong a source of social cohesion and artistic experience to be replaced by the trivial sensations of ordinary life. When asked, jazz improvisers might concede that being a jazz improviser makes absolutely no sense, but they still cannot help themselves. Why? Because improvising jazz is a practice that is extremely meaningful in a special way. This preoccupation with meaningful nonsense makes jazz improvisers do things that most people would consider simply irrational – such as showing up for a gig while being sick, forgetting to collect their salaries after the gig or not knowing whether they are in this town or that one. A jazz improviser has to cultivate special attention to the living now, as this is the only place from which the music

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can unfold. Attention to both retrospective past and prospective future must yield to this now, and the cultivation of the now makes it grow broader, wider and deeper.

The jazz happening Jazz improvisation is the fortunate coming together of two basic human practices – music making and improvisation – a coming together that has been so successful and vibrant that it is hard if not impossible to play or discuss jazz without at the same time improvising or discussing improvisation. A lot of music in the world does not include any improvisation, and a lot of music improvisation is not in any way idiomatically related to jazz. Nevertheless, improvisation is in many respects the heart and soul of jazz, and jamming, burning, blowing, screaming, trading, growling, chasing, hanging, ad-libbing, soloing, comping, running – all these jazz practices bear witness to this fact. To be a part of a jazz happening is to have an angle on music, on art, and on life itself. Jazz improvisation is at its untamed, unpolished and noncommoditized root and ground subversive, revolutionary, angry, collective, compassionate, forceful, sensual, wise, immediate, unstable, intelligent, liberating, non-reproducible and in effect irreversible.2 Jazz improvisation is the sign and vehicle of change and in this respect, it is a very precious music born out of the millions of African Americans having to endure centuries of slavery and oppression. The healing vibrations of gospel, blues and jazz helped a tormented people. Improvising helped them exchange pain, anger and hunger for revenge with hope, pride and a willingness to sacrifice themselves in the fight for a future freedom to come. Jazz improvisation is causally moving air molecules and changing our lives in various ways, but still, these improvisations are something very different from most causal agents acting upon the world. Mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates are,3 but jazz exists in the sense that it, like all living beings, is in a continuous state of flux4 – of a coming-to-be, and we have to continuously breathe new life into each single sound and pulse. Jazz improvisation never finishes – it simply stops and starts again. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. A jazz improviser may take his horn out of his mouth at the end of the set. However, in reality, the improvisative flux continues, tacitly, as a musical dialogue that the musicians pick up from where they left it. Skill, competence, excellence, experience and stuff grow out of the basic human curiosity and ability to act on impulse, to experiment and risk it all just to see what happens.

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In this sense, jazz improvisation is a reflection of a practice as old as the evolution of man. Jazz improvisers today are still playing on instruments made of the very same raw materials available to the first humans 200,000 years ago: wood, skin, reed and gut. Evidence found in European Ice Age caves supports the hypothesis of music-making as a central human practice. In the Aurignacian period, stalagmitic rock formations in caves were used as lithophones – pieces of rock being struck to produce musical sounds. Ongoing use-wear analysis of repeated percussion on stalagmites resulting in the consistent appearance of scratches and densely clustered surface cones points to use-wear caused by sound production. Thus, the preliminary finding of Cross et al.5 is that the longevity of music-making as a human behaviour is evident and the capacity for music as ‘sense-making in sound’ can be traced back to the very emergence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.6

Trying and failing Improvisation is in effect the practice of trying and failing – trying to accomplish or make or create something beyond the certainty and safety of experience and routine, and accepting it when we push too hard and fail – and then, letting ourselves be inspired by our failure and play it back to the world as the next new thing. Improvisation as a general practice is found in most if not all parts of both science and everyday life, as life as well as science unfolds in an unscripted manner.7 Lewis sees improvisation as the practice of real-time exploration, discovery and response to conditions – a fundamental practice in the existence and survival of the individual and the species.8 Borgo9 notes that improvisation – even though it played an integral role in the European art-music tradition centuries before the jazz tradition adopted the concept – nevertheless acquired negative connotations as something unfinished, temporary, off-hand or spur of the moment in the nineteenth century as suggested by Norris.10 Thus, even today, in spite of improvisation’s seemingly strong influence in all works of life, many cultural and educational institutions do not view improvisation as a central human excellence, let alone give it much attention or credit. Small11 looks for an explanation of this in two aspect of contemporaneity: First, both performers and audience today experience music as something that is made in advance and presented as CDs, MP3s online or as preprogramed and rehearsed performances. Second, the world of music today, “[l]ike the rest of our society, is permeated through and through with the industrial ethic [turning music into] a commodity which is bought and paid for. What they are buying is

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stability and reassurance, and the tension and the possibility of failure which are part of any improvised performance have no place in modern concert life.”12 Still, it seems reasonable to conclude that every sequence of intentional, predetermined actions contains gaps of undetermined, chance moments demanding some form of decision-making, structuring, or binding-together; and the choices and possible scenarios are literally infinite in these gaps between the negotiation of the idea or plan and its material realization.13 If we consider the fact that we spend most of our lives deciding and acting in social contexts influencing and being influenced by others’ improvisative actions, the infiniteness of possible outcomes is not only multiplied but also ontologically indeterminate. As noted by Dennen, the logical consequence of such a general view on improvisation is that all actions and events are improvised and indeterminate. This renders the concept of improvisation obsolete as it, in becoming a universal concept, cannot do any work in our philosophizing – and we must therefore “[e]schew such a broad notion of improvisation (however indisputable) in favour of a more conservatively construed definition.”14 In support of Dennen’s position, Crossan and Sorrenti15 distinguish transactional stimulus response behaviour from improvisational behaviour: we act spontaneously even when we repeat ourselves in routine action. Mere spontaneity, therefore, does not in itself necessarily result in the remarkable process of creativity that characterizes jazz improvisation.16

Now it is here and now it is gone Jazz improvisers do not produce and sell improvisation as objects or artefacts in the world and jazz audiences do not buy them or consume them: it is true that CDs containing jazz improvisations are produced, bought and replayed ad infinitum, but nonetheless, improvising jazz is a transcendent process, a social happening that is truly foreign to commercial interests. The jazz club, the town hall and the street corner are the primary breeding grounds for jazz. Improvisation constitutes a mode of creativity which, according to Bailey, opposes any fixation into musical objects, “[f]or there is something central to the spirit of voluntary improvisation which is opposed to the aims, and contradicts the idea, of documentation.”17 The American free improviser and instrument maker Tom Nunn argues that a core ingredient of improvisation is the unknownabout-to-be-known18 and this is a happening-in-the-moment that is lost in recordings. Nunn finds it impossible to capture on tape musicians and

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audience playing together, communicating and collectively creating in the moment. Consequently, according to Nunn, some improvisers object to the recording of their music because so much of the experience is lost in doing so. A live performance is a unique event, whether it is jazz improvisation or any other genre or style. Improvisation has an authentic presence in the live performance that we cannot record and replay. The English composer Cornelius Cardew is in line with Nunn on the question of documenting improvisative practice. He writes that “[d]ocuments such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of time and place.”19 This means that the sounds we hear when we play a CD of jazz improvised music are indeed what the musicians actually played at the live-recorded event. However, this is all we experience from the CD – the mood and vibration of the social event; the experience of the coming-to-be is lost, and the music is divorced from its social hotbed. The English improviser Valerie Pearson describes recordings of musical improvisations as phantom products in the recognition of their non-existent existence – as a product promising to contain that which cannot be documented or commoditized: Despite the ephemeral nature of free improvisation, audio recordings are often used as a misunderstood product of the ‘performance’. They misrepresent the music as a fixed, repeatable product whose quality has been selected for promotion, and sometimes as a commodity that can be owned and sold.20

The position of Pearson and other critics implies that recording and documenting musical improvisation is at best empty and at worst a misrepresentation of the music. Jazz improvisation is special in this regard because it is pure spontaneous movement as it plays hide and seek with silence. Now it is here and now it is gone. There is a continuous back and forth, a push-pull of interconnected molecules in air, wood, metal, skin and human tissue. Whether you are the musician improvising or you experience musicians improvising is of no real importance. Between the musicians playing and the audience listening, this living improvisative moment emerges and there is really no telling of the source of the improvisations. It is a do-happening that dissolves the demarcation between the objective, external goings-on of the world and our subjective inner world, intentions, and actions. Of course, some jazz musicians may be better at initiating the improvisative moment than others and some audiences may be better at electrifying the venue with a vibrant, hopeful

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silence; but the letting go of the subject in order to make way for the collective improvisative experience is a common challenge for all involved. This means that in the jazz improvisative moment any inner-outer metaphors of spatiality become meaningless. Jazz improvisation is an activity, and activities relate to things in the world in a special way. The improvisations are not inside the instruments played just as the experience of improvisation is not inside the audience’s individual ears and minds. Jazz musicians say that they play the concert hall; they play the audience while being themselves played by the audience and the emerging musical improvisations. How can we gain a deeper understanding of the wholeness and limitlessness of the jazz improvisative experience without limiting our search to those things that are rationally observable facts? Is it possible to ‘know’ more than we can rationally cogitate, and if so, could we find a way to unfold or explain this knowledge; that is, lay it out on a plain piece of paper such as the pages in this book?

One of the sciences, one of the arts This process, at once irrational and shameful, takes place on the margins of truth, and thus borders more on magic than on empirical science.21

When jazz improvisers and audiences are engaged in the improvisative ‘do-happening’ moment, they often describe their experiences as ‘magical’, ‘mind-blowing’ or ‘out of this world’. How can we address such knowledge that we experience to be true although it is not confined to that which is rationally observable? We generally tend to consider science and art to be as different as fire and water – two elements that we know for sure will not mix easily without sabotaging both. The water will extinguish the fire while the fire will try its best to evaporate the water. While acknowledging the futility in mixing the two, we still need to draw on both science and art in our study of that which transcends the rationally observable. We need a constellation of science and art that enables us to address the questions before us – an ambition that we should consider reasonable, as history has repeatedly shown this to be possible. Johann Sebastian Bach, Niels Bohr, Charlie Parker and Albert Einstein are just a few examples. Truly great artists are brilliant researchers in their field and truly great scientists are brilliant artists in their field. Jørgensen writes about the limitation that modern science has put upon itself by only addressing “[k]nowledge that is true in the sense that it is

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consistent with empirical data.”22 This position held by mainstream science, if taken literally, would make it difficult if not impossible to investigate that “which differs radically from both our everyday impressions and our scientific knowledge.”23 Nisbet argues that good science is nourished by the same creative imagination found in music, poetry, and painting. Even though art and science are very different in their distinctive formal characteristics, they nonetheless have something in common that by far surpasses their differences: The artist’s interest in form or style is the scientist’s interest in structure or type. But artist and scientist alike are primarily concerned with the illumination of reality, with, in sum, the exploration of the unknown and, far from least, the interpretation of physical and human worlds.24

Nisbet bases his argument on the simple observation that none of the groundbreaking sociological ideas, theories and themes developed during the 19th Century came about through a practice resembling today’s notion of a scientific method. To Nesbit, the accepted scientific approach is “[r]eplete with appeals to statistical analysis, problem design, hypothesis, verification, replication and theory construction, that we find described in our textbooks and courses on methodology.”25 Naturally, art was not driving the discovery of these groundbreaking discoveries either, but rather a constellation of science and art. Any act of innovation and discovery must presuppose an “[a]esthetically-motivated curiosity.”26 Bateson supports this idea of constellation, because it is in the intersections and the fractured surfaces between practices, fields, and traditions that we can imagine the world differently; whereas “[a]t the centre of any tradition, it is easy to become blind to alternatives.”27 This coming together of science and art in some form or other28 might imply a less-than-scientific endeavour with the risk of undermining the authority and validity of science; but as Jacobsen points out: Dealing creatively, poetically, and indeed imaginatively with methodology is not equivalent to mere playfulness or the abandoning of conventional criteria for social research. Rather, it is a matter of admitting that there is not one single linear road leading to knowledge about the social world and that detours, shortcuts, excursions and round trips are an integral and imaginative part of the development of scientific knowledge.29

Nisbet writes that great art and science are alike in so many respects, which drives them to penetrate to the realm of feeling, motivation and spirit:

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The ‘endless literalness’ that Nisbet is referring to is synonymous with the prosaic face or surface value of things, processes, and relations that we observe and record. At the surface of our jazz improvisational experience in the jazz club are the jazz musicians’ audible melodies, chords and rhythms. These impressions are observable, recordable and analyzable. We can even study the group processes in the club and gather valuable information on reception, non-verbal dialogue and the acoustic properties of the venue. No doubt, this would constitute valuable knowledge in the sociological and musicological study of live performance. However, would we by doing this get any closer to grasping the ‘mind-blowing’ and ‘out of this world’ qualities of the live musical experience – that which must surely be the sine qua non of any important musical experience? Deep understanding is a practice that must necessarily also draw on the transformative potential of the poetic, as the prosaic will not allow us to see through the surface into deep waters. Explaining and understanding the froth on the waves by a delimited study of the froth may explain something and help us gain a limited understanding of the composition and behaviour of the froth itself. However, froth does not make the ocean waves move, and understanding the froth will not help us grasp either the deep currents, the temperature fluctuations of the ocean or the wind, or the gravitational pull of the moon. These are the processes from high up and deep down that radically shape the environment and bring forth the froth. The froth on the ocean waves is observable and analysable but epiphenomenal in relation to the movement of the ocean and the moon – just as the melodies, chords and rhythms are epiphenomenal to the musical experience proper (Erfahrung). Playing the correct notes with the correct rhythm in their proper form does not necessarily make truly wonderful music. Even if we play these notes, rhythms and forms perfectly, we may very well end up with bleak, shallow music. Even worse, how is it possible that artistic order, harmony and musical development can result from five jazz musicians spontaneously improvising together? What are we missing? We must go beyond the epiphenomenal impressions of the empirically manifest reality in an aesthetic shift of perspective. This shifting of perspective is sensitive,

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imaginative and as such a faculty of the human mind that must transcend the prosaic. Jacobsen writes that the complex social predicament we find ourselves in calls for sociological research that is able to grasp this in a creative and poetic manner. And, if social researchers merely continue to practice the more traditional ways of investigation, “[t]here is a good chance that we might miss out on solving, understanding, and explaining the problems with which we are faced.”31 This includes developing more emotionally engaged methodologies that are able to illuminate the many facets of lived experience: Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense “construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, written not in conventional graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.32

Geertz interprets reading as ‘constructing a reading’, and this is necessary if the manuscript is foreign and faded. However, this does not imply a detached or disconnected construction because we have a genuine interest in understanding this very manuscript; our construction as an interpretation and deciphering of this manuscript must therefore be true to the manuscript. Our constructed reading must hold truth-value in the rendering of that which the manuscript means to communicate. Our construction must never be merely self-referentially about itself if we are to recognize this as an attempt to scientifically explain and understand our life world. We notice here a fundamental difference between art and science: just like social science, so does art construct meaning based on the observation, interpretation, and deciphering of reality. Yet to the extent that art is able to further an understanding of reality, it does so exclusively by being true to none other than art itself. Art constitutes a culturally highly valuable practice with great formative and transformative power, but again, this is not an intentional strategy on art’s behalf, but a tacitly emerging dimension of an art practice fully occupied with itself and being true to itself. Ryle writes of an immense but nonetheless unphotographable difference between that which is apparent and that which is actually going on. Ryle suggests a theoretical framework of thin and thick descriptions to account for the stratified layers between the apparent and the actual. This continuum constitutes complex, multi-faceted social world layers, and precisely this Rylean unphotographable quality of these layers renders impossible any simple registering or description of social life and social

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organizational structures and systems. In Ryle’s framework these layers are not the result of assured heuristic strategies but rather of social agents’ individual and collective self-questioning and experimental actions.33 Adopting Ryle’s framework Geertz theorizes that the object of ethnography lies precisely between the thin and the thick descriptions of the social world as a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which actions and social happenings are produced, perceived, and interpreted.34 The study of these layers is thus more of an interpretative than an observational activity and, What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what [the social agents] are up to. There is nothing particularly wrong with this and it is in any case inevitable. Right down to the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole enterprise, we are already explicating; and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon winks upon winks.35

Doing research is the Rylean thick description and what this chapter is faced with is thus “[a] multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render.”36

Inhabited, possessed and robbed of self Without throwing oneself for a time into the sea of uncertainty, one cannot escape the contradictions and inadequacies of deceptive certainty.37 Philosophy is the opposite of all comfort and assurance. It is turbulence, the turbulence into which man is spun, so as in this way alone to comprehend Dasein38 without delusion. Precisely because the truth of this comprehension is something ultimate and extreme, it constantly remains in the perilous neighbourhood of supreme uncertainty. No knower necessarily stands so close to the verge of error at every moment as the one who philosophizes. Whoever has not yet grasped this has never yet had any intimation of what philosophizing means.39

From only about a decade apart in time (1929-1939), both Norbert Elias and Martin Heidegger stress the need for a turbulent uncertainty if we are to escape the illusion of deceptive certainty. They are both attacking the illusory certainty of understanding, of explanation and of knowledge as rigid, perceptual sedimentation – and supreme uncertainty is the cure. This makes perfect sense to a jazz improviser. The very act of improvising is

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uncertainty in its extreme form because it is a multidimensional uncertainty. To begin with, each musician in the band has to rid himself of his prior intentions, strategies and expectations and thus reach a state of complete, individual uncertainty. To make sure that this does not turn into merely a placid meditative state, the musician places himself on a stage in front of 500 people eagerly expecting to have their minds blown. Then, a band of musicians – while being spun in turbulent group uncertainty – face the task of co-creating an artistically expressive structure, development and form without any blueprint or plan. In our efforts to grasp the multiple dimensions of jazz improvisation, three aspects present themselves. First, the musicians and audiences experience what they do by experiencing in a special way. Second, the musical experiences constitute something more than just the explicit, observable musical content, form and development. Third, the musicians do not transmit the musical experience and the audience does not receive it. Let me begin by discussing these aspects briefly: First, in order to be able to have the mind-blowing musical experiences referred to earlier every single individual attending must take part in the collective experience. This is possible only by letting go, by carrying each other and ourselves away from our apparent subjective enclosures. There is a distinct Mahayana40 quality in the fact that everyone needs to get everyone to join if the collective do-happening is to be; and the magic will not manifest itself even if just two or three members of the audience remain withdrawn in their subjective selves. All those present must emerge from their (subjective) minds if they want to come to their (intersubjective sensitive) senses. Jørgensen denotes this special way of experiencing as ‘an experience proper’ that – lacking a controlling subject – is open for change.41 To Jankélévitch, this involves music’s possessive aspects as the do-happening dissolves the separation of inner and outer: By means of massive irruptions, music takes up residence in our most intimate self and seemingly elects to make its home there. The man inhabited and possessed by this intruder, the man robbed of a self, is no longer himself: he has become nothing more than a vibrating string, a sounding pipe. He trembles madly under the bow or the finger of the instrumentalist.42

Jankélévitch makes us realize by way of a poetic surplus that the audience is not just a group of spectators (onlookers); rather, I find them to be spectacteurs, that is, resounding co-actors in the collective improvisations. Jørgensen similarly notes that both object (the band on stage) and subject (the individual members of the audience) – through experience proper –

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are changed by the complex intersubjective subjectivity which the object and subject has given place to.43 Second, the ‘magical’ or ‘out of this world’ quality of the musical experiences is not an indication of any divine or supernatural intervention (though some musical experiences might open up to such additional religious experiences). Jørgensen writes that we need not limit our perception of miracles as either divine (godsent) or profane (fortunate events); we may also understand miracles as “[s]udden experiences of a dimension in the world we are seldom aware of. The word ‘miracle’ may also denote an unexpected experience of something ‘more’,”44 that changes our view of the world. This leads to a deeper understanding of the utterances of people having experiences that they call ‘mind-blowing’ and ‘out of this world’: the jazz improvisative moment blows their subjective minds and pulls them out of their subjective worlds. The phrases ‘magical’ and ‘out of this world’ therefore do not refer to some supernatural experience but rather a truly collective, immanent transcendent experience of a sudden inflation of our life world amidst our daily lives. Ben Sidran regards the transcendent experience in jazz improvisation as originating from an orally based culture not fearing perceptual excess: Literate society often turns a deaf ear to the implications of an oral culture. Because the literate culture and the oral culture have alternative views as to what constitutes relevant, practically useful information, they impose alternative modes of perception for gathering information. Western culture, it seems, stresses the elimination of perceptual information. The Western view of the witch doctor or schizophrenic as one who receives “too much” of reality indicates this fear of perceptual excess. Although all people have to do certain kinds and amounts of elimination, in oral cultures, members appear to experience a wider range of emotions on a more immediate level of sensation: it appears that the oral man receives more perceptual information as well as perceptual information of a different kind.45

Third, jazz musicians do not produce improvisations and audiences do not consume them. This is a radically social understanding of individuals that has no need for the separation of the individual members of the audience and the group of musicians playing. The improvisational do-happening unfolds through the actual experience of the joint social activities without reference to abstract concepts such as internal and external, producer and consumer. When a guitarist fastens a string on his guitar it will resonate if the tension in the opposition of the guitar’s neck and the bridge is sufficient. Neither the neck nor the bridge are the sole producers of the sound of the string as they constitute one and the same process; and likewise, the jazz improvisers and the audience are the opposing polarities

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from which a single, unified group experience is resonating. Each participant in this do-happening will encounter varied levels of intensity and different realms of experience based on the experiential horizon of each individual. Nonetheless, the intensity of the audience’s collective applause is ample proof of a unified resonant activity made possible by innumerous locally-restrained, self-governing processes. Who is playing for whom? Who is the creator of the jazz improvisations bouncing back and forth? We realize that these questions – intriguing as they are – have no meaning because of their attempts to separate the dohappening whole into separate parts. What constitutes this do-happening whole? In addition, is this whole the sum total of things and agents – such as jazz musicians, musical instruments, venues and people listening?

Whole, part and fragment What are we in this? Where do we want to go? Did we once just stumble into the universe by chance?46

Jazz improvisers often have difficulty in negotiating the more trivial aspects of being a part of society. A concert arranger expects maybe two performances each of 50 minutes separated by a break of 30 minutes. What happens? The musicians forget what time it is and where they are and play either for too long or too short. Why is that – is the loss of rational control a necessity in order to be able to improvise? During the brief moments in which we succeed in living spontaneously in self-forgetfulness, we live and experience in wholes. We ‘become one’, we ‘let go’ and we ‘surrender ourselves’ – and in the evening we ‘fall’ asleep as the night ‘falls’. We stumble and let go of our firm, rational grip on life as the visible day turns into nightfall. As we sleep it is merely the rational froth on our consciousness that has been laid to rest; helplessly thrown into uncertainty, we dream. In our dreams, it is as if we have surrendered to the whole for a short while – undisturbed by the brute force materiality of the world. As we strive to understand our lives, the whole becomes sort of ‘too much’, and we feel the need to cut it up in smaller pieces in order to analyse, logically categorize and gain a rational understanding of one piece at the time. There are problems, though: it is difficult to separate the whole into smaller pieces. We may try to bite off smaller bits of the world, which we then can control and manipulate, but what we do not realise is that the whole does not come bitten.47 Instead of parts of the whole, we may end up with fragments, and fragments are broken, torn bits and pieces

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of the whole that are no good. Are we analysing parts or fragments in the construction of our theories of the world? Here, the physicist David Bohm explains his position on whole, part and fragment: The way we see depends on the way we think. In classical physics, the parts are the primary concept and the whole is only an auxiliary concept, which is convenient when you have many parts working together like a machine. However, the parts are taken as the basic reality. The focus here is too much on analysis and it tends to lead to fragmentation. The parts and the whole are correlative concepts but the fragment is the result of breaking something apart. If you smashed a watch, you would get fragments, not parts. The Western view aims at getting the true parts of the universe but in some ways, perhaps it gets fragments. To some extent, this happens in physics but much more so in fields like biology, psychology and sociology. If you break up the whole falsely into fragments you have become confused. You are going to treat the fragments as separate when they are not and you are going to unite what is in the fragment when it is not united. This leads to confusion … In quantum mechanics, the whole is the basic reality and the parts are a result of analysis.48

Heidegger regards our fundamental way of being as a continuous transition towards being as a whole. This whole represents our home and we are homesick in our longing to enter into a nearness to the world as wholeness. Meanwhile, we oscillate back and forth in the transitory state of subjective unrest.49 We need to ask ourselves which road we should follow – the comfort of deceptive certainty or the uncomfortable turbulence of comprehending Dasein without delusion? Heidegger writes that uncertainty is not a property or aspect of our lives for us to choose or discard – it is the root and ground of human Dasein: Dasein stands before possibilities it does not see. It is subject to a change it does not know. It constantly moves in a predicament it does not have power over … We know all this in a unique kind of knowing, which is distinctive as hovering between certainty and uncertainty.50

Again, this resonates with any jazz improviser: she stands before possibilities that she does not see. She, her audience and the emerging improvisations are all subject to unknown changes. Musicians, audience and improvisations move in a predicament they have no power over, and this represents a unique kind of knowing, which is distinctive as hovering between certainty and uncertainty. To improvise jazz is to approach the wholeness of the world in the recognition that the whole is the basic reality. Jørgensen makes an

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important distinction between understanding and aesthetic experience with regard to the experience of cohesion.51 Understanding is the categorization of rationally manageable facts and as such a fragmented view that seeks meaning in the causal relation of separate parts. These causal relations are seen to be significant, and in that respect everything signifies something; but the fragmented understanding of the world as made up of parts renders the world basically meaningless. Thus understanding is by way of its incohesiveness devoid of meaning. Nonetheless, we experience cohesion and meaning in our lives, and this conflict between what we understand and what we experience is of central importance: How do we get an account of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free rational beings that we can make consistent with our conception of the rest of the universe as consisting entirely of mindless, meaningless, physical particles in fields of force – how do we reconcile what we think we know about ourselves with what we know or think we know about the rest of the universe?52

In opposition to the rational understanding of everything being constructs of mindless, meaningless physical particles in fields of force, we have access to deep aesthetic experiences. These experiences are cohesive and are experienced to be true, albeit a kind of truth which rests in between certainty and uncertainty as proposed by Heidegger. In his view, it is meaningless to talk about the whole as a being, thing or entity. The world as wholeness is not a something that is, rather the world whirls (waltet53) or worlds (weltet) in the same way as the rain rains and the snow snows.54 To Schürmann these utterances represent not simply tautological formulations but rather a desimplified simplicity – a way of grasping the wholeness. Das Walten waltet, das Ding dingt, das Wesen west, die Welt Weltet, die Sprache spricht,55 and Heidegger writes that “[y]et how much we seem merely to be repeating the same thing, this says something essential. It points the direction in which we have to search, indeed the direction in which metaphysics withdraws from us.”56 Watts locates the problem of our preoccupation with fragments and parts to our language. Subjects, verbs and predicates refer to the tacit belief system that nouns cause events, and we therefore learn that things are the basic stuff and the world as wholeness is the abstract sum total of things. As a result, we thingify, that is, we produce thinks – non-existing units of thought – in order to be able to break the world as wholeness down into seemingly controllable parts. In this way, we break that into fragments which was not broken in the first place:

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Chapter Seventeen The tree apples and the world peoples. If evolution means anything, it means that. However, you see, we curiously twist it. We are thinking in a way that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch out, WATCH OUT! Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.57

Following Bohm, Heidegger and Watts the wholeness of the world is not an abstract sum total of things. On the contrary, things are thinks and as such merely human abstractions of rational understanding. The wholeness of the world is what counts, apart from the fact that there is nothing – that is to say no things – to count. In any given concert hall, the hall halls: the floor, seats, lights, roof and walls come alive. They improvise, as do the musicians, the audience and bar personnel. This improvisative moment is a resounding, an oscillating “[t]o and fro between this neither/nor? Not the one and likewise not the other, this ‘indeed, and yet not, and yet indeed’.”58 It is an unrest in uncertainty in the mind-blowing life of transitory humans underway as the wholeness of the world.

A sonic way of knowing place If parts and fragments are figments of our minds, does that not render impossible jazz improvisation as a thing in the world? Stephen Feld has coined the term ‘Acoustemology’ as a response to the term ‘Anthropology of Music’ in the recognition that the patterning of sounds described as ‘music’ in the Western world is an artificial separation and a limitation of the full human and environmental world of sound. Rather, Feld suggests ‘an Anthropology of Sound’ that views jazz improvisation as a sonic way of knowing place, as “[a]n exploration of sonic sensibilities, specifically of ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth. This seems particularly relevant to understanding the interplay of sound and felt balance in the sense and sensuality of emplacement, of making place.”59 In Feld’s view music is not only musicking in the Smallian sense,60 music is the totality of the sources and agents producing sound including the reception of sound in a sonic/acoustic formation and transformation of social and historical meaning. One of the many challenges of improvising live is engaging in dialogue with the many sounds and resonators present in any room, club or concert hall. As mentioned earlier, musicians talk about ‘playing the room’ as an instrument. That is, they need to be able to adjust their technique, instrument and sound in relation to all the materials and surfaces present – ventilation systems, espresso machines, concrete walls,

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wood, glass, fabric, people – every surface sounds and resounds and this has a radical influence on what is musically and artistically possible or not. For a high-level improvising musician there is no such thing as a ‘bad room’ – every physical landscape is a continuum of sonic realities and challenges that every jazz musician must meet in order to let music happen. In this final, radical move beyond the delineation, objectification and commodification of music and musical improvisation, the world’s innumerable sounds and sonic sensibilities become available as the ineffable reservoir of jazz improvisation.

Truth on your instrument Interaction in nature takes place not primarily in order to survive but as the creative expression of identity.61

This chapter began by wondering about what drives jazz improvisers – and we will now reconsider these questions: Why do jazz musicians invest their entire lives into performing acts of musical improvisation? Why would anyone want to sleep all day, play wild jazz music in small basement clubs all night and spend most of their professional life in a tour bus eating food from gas stations in remote country villages? Following Ralph Stacey, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,62 human interaction such as jazz improvisation takes place not primarily in order to survive but rather out of a creative expression of identity. What does this mean? It means that every interaction in nature is creatively expressing a surplus. The flowers are more colourful than they strictly need to be in order to lure the bumble bees into spreading the flowers’ pollen sacs, and the jazz improvisation vibrates more than strictly needed to lure the jazz audience into buying a ticket. Nature is not simply competent in its fight for survival as in the literal meaning of the Old French term competent meaning ‘sufficient, appropriate and suitable’. The world expresses itself through an abundance of excellence, of things and beings involved in peak expressivity, which has the potential of blowing our subjective minds again and again. This surplus of expression and meaning is fuelling our capacity for experience proper (Erfahrung) that is not just mere impression (Erlebnis). Impressions are explicit in their imprint on our skin, like the feeling of wind in our hair or sound in our ears. And most of the time, these impressions do not amount to more than that: wind in our hair and sound in our ears. Impressions are surface phenomena like the froth on the waves that do not necessarily call upon us to stir up a turbulence in deep waters.

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Herein lies the challenge for jazz improvisers. Sound impressions have to grow into improvisative music experiences. Jazz improvisers do not play to impress their audience. They are servants to a far greater cause – that of partaking in aesthetic experience as an experience proper: The feeling of cohesion and meaningfulness associated with the aesthetic experience is not only individual but also common to mankind. It is not just something private, but, on the contrary, something of universal validity. True, the personal experience of cohesion and meaningfulness is manifested individually, as it presents itself at a definite moment in a definite place, occasioned by something specific. But the very feeling of cohesion and meaningfulness experienced by the individual in the specific situation is not different from the one others have experienced in other situations. Or, more precisely, all these people have the very experience in common that a feeling of cohesion and meaningfulness is possible, however different the individual manifestations of the feeling they remember may be.63

The difference between the aesthetic impression of great-sounding music and the experience proper of a mind-blowing musical experience is both subtle and deep. It is subtle in the sense that even the collective creation of a poetic silence might bring forth experience proper, and it is deep because it affects us in a way “[t]hat he or she is no longer what they were before.”64 In Jørgensen’s theoretical framework an experience proper takes place in immanence in the sense of the world that immediately surrounds us and of which we ourselves are a part. We are thus already in immanence. Transcendence is a concept of experience and in that sense identical to the experience of transcendence. Jørgensen denotes transcendence as a movement in immanence – that is, us being moved in our world – and the experience of immanent transcendence therefore is [v]ery meaningful because it refers to a specific experience, and an experience that anyone may have, namely when we feel as if the world suddenly opens up and allows a surplus of meaning, i.e. intensified meaning, to open up.65

The experience of immanent transcendence is the coming together of subject and object – of feelings, sensations and the materiality of things – in the wholeness of the world. Jørgensen writes that the experience of immanent transcendence is genuinely shared,66 and “[w]e are not only for each other as objects to subjects, but also with each other – in intersubjective subjectivity.”67 Being an experience proper it is truthful and

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meaningful albeit not understandable as such, because the experienced surplus constitutes an ‘incomprehensible more’.68 And sometimes, this opening up of the world reaches so far towards the rooftop of our world that we invoke the heavenly realms and notions of the divine: Of course John Coltrane is the one who inspires everybody, if you were fortunate enough to be in his presence in those days. He would always encourage you to fully express what you had. Not half of it, because it’s not made that way, or three quarters – the entire experience of the expressive self. Truth on your instrument. That just opens so many doors, so many avenues, so many vistas and so many plateaus. You could hear your sound, music, light, coming from the ethereal, heavenly realms. When you played in octaves that you would never go – your bass area, and your contra-bass area, or your tenor area. You heard all kinds of things that would have just been left alone, never a part of your discovery or appreciation.69

The surplus of truth, meaning and transcendence is apparent in this quotation, but also a secularization of the notion of the divine.70 The wholeness of the intersubjective subjectivity leaves no room for gods or equivalent religious objects, and in this short reminiscence from Alice Coltrane her husband quickly withdraws himself in favour of the inspiration and transcendent force of his art. Just like we normally do not talk about the chair we sit in or notice the glass from which we drink, her story is not ‘about’ John Coltrane. It is about the experience of truth in jazz improvisation and about the opening up of doors, avenues, vistas and plateaus. If we are to risk going to the verge of error by trying to ‘explain’ the experience of truth in jazz improvisation – of why we build concert halls or move chairs and tables in a bar in order to create a space for jazz musicians to improvise – then I would nominate the philosophical framework of experiencing immanent transcendence as a candidate – and with considerable uncertainty suggest that this position would be viewed upon by jazz improvisers as fitting. But then again, were I to be right in my assumption, they would soon return to silence and restlessness; for words and philosophy will not take us to where we need to go – instead, let us get our instruments, let’s grab hold of each other and get busy exchanging jazz improvisations into experience proper!

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Notes 1

Blacking, J. 1989. A Commonsense View of All Music: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60. 2 I owe the inspiration of this passage to Jacques Attali’s book Noise—The Political Economy of Music where Attali sees music as not only a product of culture but a hope for a new age, “…a herald of a liberation from exchangevalue…” (Attali, 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 141). 3 Searle, J. 1996a. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin. 4 From Latin fluxus meaning “flowing.” 5 Cross, I., Zubrow, E., & Frank, C. 2002. “Musical Behaviours and the Archaeological Record: A Preliminary Study.” Experimental Archaeology. British Archaeological Reports International, 1035(1), 25–34. 6 Caldwell, D. 2013. “A Possible New Class of Prehistoric Musical Instruments from New England – Portable Cylindrical Lithophones.” American Antiquity, 78(3), 520–535. 7 Dennen, J. 2009. On Reception of Improvised Music. TDR: The Drama Review, 53(4), 137–149. 8 Lewis, G. 2006. “Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer Reflects.” Contemporary Music Review, 25(5-6), 429–434, 430 9 Borgo, D. 2005. Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. New York: Continuum. 10 Norris, C. 1989. Music and the Politics of Culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart. as cited in (Borgo, 2005, 17). 11 Small, C. 1998. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 12 Ibid. 283–284. 13 Dennen, On Reception of Improvised Music, 138. 14 Ibid. 139. 15 Crossan, M., & Mark, S. 1995. Making Sense of Improvisationࣟ: Spontaneous Action, Strategy, and Management Behaviour. Ontario: Western Business School, University of Western Ontario. 16 Vera, D., & Crossan, M. 2004. “Theatrical Improvisation: Lessons for Organizations.” Organization Studies, 25(5), 727–749. 17 Bailey, D. 1993. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da Capo Press, ix. 18 Nunn, T. E. 1998. Wisdom of the Impulse: On the Nature of Musical Free Improvisation. San Francisco: Tom Nunn, 29. 19 Cardew, C. 1971. Treatise Handbook: Including Bun no. 2 [and] Volo Solo. Berlin: Edition Peters, xvii. 20 Pearson, V. 2010. “Authorship and Improvisation: Musical Lost Property.” Contemporary Music Review, 29(4), 367–378, 374. 21 Vladimir Jankélévitch, 2003. Music and the Ineffable. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1.

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Jørgensen, D. 2011. “The Experience of Immanent Transcendence.” Transfiguration: Nordic Journal of Religion and the Arts 2010-11, 2010-2011(1), 35–52, 34. 23 Ibid. 2011, 33. 24 Nisbet, R. A. 2002. Sociology as an Art Form. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 10. 25 Ibid. 3. 26 Ibid. 11. 27 Bateson, M. C. 2001. Composing a Life. New York: Grove Pressௗdistributed by Publishers Group West, 73. 28 Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. 2012. Arts Based Research. Los Angeles: Sage. 29 Jacobsen, M. H. 2014. Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research. Surrey: Asgate, 11. 30 Nisbet, Sociology as an Art Form, 12. 31 Jacobsen, Imaginative Methodologies, 9. 32 Geertz, C. 1977. The Interpretation of Cultures (New edition). New York: Basic Books, 10. 33 Ryle, G. 1971. Collected Papers: Collected essays, 1929-1968. Hutchinson, 489. 34 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 7. 35 Ibid. 9. 36 Ibid. 10. 37 Elias, N. 2001. The Society of Individuals (Reissue edition.). New York: Bloomsbury 3PL, 93. 38 Dasein means “to be there, present, available, to exist” and it refers to any and every human being. Dasein is in the world and lights up itself and the world. Dasein unifies man by avoiding the traditional tripartition of body (Körper), soul (Seele) and spirit (Geist), and among its central features is existence (Existenz), thrownness (Geworfenheit) and falling (Verfallen). 39 Heidegger, M. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. (W. H. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.) (New edition edition.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19. 40 Mahayana is a movement within Indian Buddhism that focuses on the enlightenment of all beings. In Mahayana there is no intrinsic self and as such no individual ego or personality. Thus, the only way Mahayana Buddhists can liberate themselves from the cycle of birth and death is by enabling all beings to be enlightened together with them. 41 Jørgensen, “The Experience of Immanent Transcendence,” 41. 42 Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 1. 43 Jørgensen, “The Experience of Immanent Transcendence,” 41. 44 Ibid. 33. 45 Sidran, B. 1980. Black Talk. New York: Da Capo Press, 1–2. In his book, Black Talk, the American jazz pianist Ben Sidran presents the first systematic study of orality and the influence of literacy in jazz. 46 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 5.

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I owe this pun to British American philosopher and Zen Buddhist Alan Watts who originally coined this phrase in the mid-1960s during one of his many lectures on his ferryboat The Vallejo in California. 48 David Bohm in an interview at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Interviewer: Tor Nørretranders. Nørretranders 1985. 49 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 5–6. 50 Ibid. 19. 51 Jørgensen, “The Experience of Immanent Transcendence,” 37. 52 From a lecture given by John Searle in 1996 (Searle, 1996b). 53 Knowles, A. 2013. “Toward a Critique of Walten: Heidegger, Derrida, and Henological Difference.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 27(3), 265-276. Quoting Heidegger in Identität und Referenz (1959) Knowles reads Walten as “[a] forceful back-and-forth (auseinander-zueinander) … Walten ‘is’ not anything” (2013, 270) . 54 Heidegger, M. 1969. Vom Wesen Des Grundes. The Essence of Reasons. Northwestern University Press, 102. 55 Reiner Schürmann, in Knowles, 2013, 269. 56 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 6. 57 Alan Watts in a recorded lecture march 1969. 58 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 6. 59 BasĞo, K. H., & Feld, S., School of American Research, School of American Research Advanced Seminar titled “Place, Expression and Experience.” 2009. Senses of place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 97. 60 Small, Music of the Common Tongue. 61 Stacey, R. D. 2000. Complexity and Management (1. edition.). London: Routledge. In his book Complexity and Management, Ralph Stacey reviews the conclusions of the complexity sciences (represented by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers) in order to gain a new understanding of how we can make sense of our lives as human beings in organizations. 62 Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. 1986. La Nouvelle Alliance. Paris: Gallimard Education. 63 Jørgensen, “The Experience of Immanent Transcendence,” 38. 64 Ibid. 37. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 40. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 44. 69 Berkman, F. J. 2007. “Appropriating Universality: The Coltranes and 1960s Spirituality.” American Studies, 48(1), 41–62, 43. Jazz pianist Alice Coltrane talking about playing with her husband John Coltrane in 1965-67 in a conversation with Franya Berkman. 70 Stengers, I., & Latour, B. 2014. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Trans. M. Chase. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Simone Aurora holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Padua, Italy. Most important publications: “Metamorfosi, differenza, singolarità: il problema del trascendentale in Deleuze e Canetti,” in Rametta, G. (ed.), Metamorfosi del trascendentale II, Cleup, 2012; “Deleuze, Guattari e le macchine semiotiche” in Janus. Quaderni del circolo glossematico, 10, 2012; “Lo “Strutturalismo” di Edmund Husserl” in Janus. Quaderni del circolo glossematico, 13, 2014; “Territory and Subjectivity: The Philosophical Nomadism of Deleuze and Canetti” in Minerva – An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 18, 2014; “A Forgotten Source in the History of Linguistics: Husserl’s Logical Investigations” in Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologique, 5 (11), 2015. Silvana Ballnat has a PhD from the University of Potsdam. She has studied and worked in different universities and other institutions in Skopje and Berlin. Her research areas include 19th and 20th century German philosophy, in particular hermeneutics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and methodology of scientific research. Her main publications are Das Verhältnis zwischen den Begriffen “Erfahrung” und “Sprache” ausgehend von Hans-Georg Gadamers Wahrheit und Methode (2012); Ɇɢɫɥɟʃɟ, ʁɚɡɢɤ, ɫɜɟɬ (2013); “The Problem of Sharing Language: Davidson in a Gadamerian Perspective” in Trópos: Journal of Hermeneutics and Philosophical Criticism, 2014. She is co-editor of Journal of Philosophical Inquiry and a member of the advisory board of Ɏɢɥɨɡɨɮɫɤɚ ɬɪɢɛɢɧɚ. Daniele Campesi is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Cagliari. He previously studied in the Universities of Pavia and Vercelli (Università del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”). His main interests are concerned with German idealism, philosophy of existence, and hermeneutics; in this regard, he focuses especially on the work of Schelling, Jaspers, and hermeneutical thinkers such as Luigi Pareyson and Hans-Georg Gadamer. 2015 is the year of his first forthcoming publications.

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Gaetano Chiurazzi is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Torino. He studied and worked as Research Fellow at the Universities of Torino, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris. His interests are especially concerned with French and German philosophy, in particular Derrida, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer. This is attested by his main publications: Scrittura e tecnica: Derrida e la metafisica (1992); Hegel, Heidegger e la grammatica dell’essere (1996); Teorie del giudizio (2005; Spanish translation: Teorías del juício, 2008); Modalità ed esistenza (2001; German translation: Modalität und Existenz, 2006); L’esperienza della verità (2011). For LIT-Verlag he has edited the volume The Frontiers of the Other: Ethics and Politics of Translation (2013). He is the co-editor, with Gianni Vattimo, of Tropos: Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica. Rasmus Dyring has an MA in philosophy and is a PhD student in philosophy at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. Dyring has published articles on phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, which explore the middle ground between socio-cultural anthropology and philosophy. Selected publications: “The Pathos and Postures of Freedom: Kierkegaardian Clues to a Philosophical Anthropology of the Ethical” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy (forthcoming, Vol. 47); “The Concerted Praxis of Being Human: A Philosophico-Anthropological Essay on Being and Provocation” in Minerva – An Open Access Journal of Philosophy (2014); “The Provocation of Freedom” (forthcoming in Cheryl Mattingly et al. (eds.): Moral Engines: Exploring the Moral Drives in Human Life, New York: Berghahn Books). Nicolai von Eggers is a PhD student in The History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus. He has studied and worked as Research Fellow in Politische Theorie at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt a.M. and Philosophy at Université III, Bordeaux. His main interests are contemporary political philosophy and the history of political philosophy, including ideas of sovereignty, the right to resist, and revolution. His main publications are Efter Guds død – kapitalisme og nydelse, Nietzsche med Lacan (2013); “Roots of Political Economy” (forthcoming) in Thorup, M. (ed.), Profiting from Words; “Governmentality, Police, Politics – Foucault with Rancière” in KultuRRevolution (no. 64, 2013); “Objects of History/Objects of Ideology” in LIR journal (2013). He is co-editor of the journal Slagmark, and of the book series Revolutions (Slagmark).

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Saša Hrnjez (University of Turin) has recently finished his PhD on Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies. He studied philosophy at the University of Novi Sad (Serbia) and at the University of Turin (Italy), with research periods at the Freie University in Berlin. His recent publications are: “Sensus communis, Publizität, Révolution: An Examination of Kant’s Political Antinomy through Kant’s Third Critique” in Philosophy and Public Space (2014); “Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality” in Tropos (2013); “Staro umire a novo ne može da se rodi – Gramši na putu raÿanja novoga” in Stvar (2013); “L’ermeneutica della partecipazione e i limiti del soggetto” in Tempo e praxis (2012). He is also one of the founders and editors of the Stvar/Thing – Journal for Theoretical Practices and has carried out translations of philosophical books and texts from Italian and English to Serbian, including Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Dorthe Jørgensen is Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Besides having a PhD in History of Ideas (1995), she has a Higher Doctorate in Philosophy (2006) and another Higher Doctorate in Theology (2014). Professor Jørgensen studied and worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Aarhus, Freie Universität Berlin, Columbia University in New York, and the Danish Institutes in Rome and Damascus. Her interests are especially concerned with philosophy of experience, philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutic phenomenology, non-substantialist metaphysics, and theological aesthetics. This is attested by her main publications: Nær og fjern: Spor af en erfaringsontologi hos Walter Benjamin (1990); Aber die Wärme des Bluts: Den romantisk-moderne dialektik imellem vilje til Form og erfaring af faktisk fragmentering. I anledning af G.W.F. Hegels fortrængning af modernitetserfaringen (1996); Den blå blomst – og den pukkelryggede mandsling: Tekster og tankebilleder om kunst, liv og filosofi (1997); Skønhedens metamorfose: De æstetiske idéers historie (2001); Viden og visdom: Spørgsmålet om de intellektuelle (2002); Historien som værk: Værkets historie (2006); Skønhed – En engel gik forbi (2006); Aglaias dans: På vej mod en æstetisk tænkning (2008); Verdenspoesi: Malerier og tankebilleder (2011); Den skønne tænkning: Veje til erfaringsmetafysik. Religionsfilosofisk udmøntet (2014); Nærvær og eftertanke: Mit pædagogiske laboratorium (2015). For English summaries of her books and for shorter texts in English and German, please visit her web page pure.au.dk/portal/da/[email protected] and the Facebook page “Dorthe Jørgensen in English.”

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Contributors

Jens Linderoth is a PhD student in philosophy of religion at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University in Denmark. He has a master’s in history of ideas and classical Greek, and a second master’s in theology. He worked in the area of religious dialogue as leader of the Dialogue Center before he started his PhD studies. These studies are concerned with Heidegger’s relation to religion and science in his transformative early Freiburg period. Linderoth has published widely in Danish on religious dialogue. Some of his publications are: “Oldkirkens ortodoksi – en ustabil konstruktion?” in Den Nye Dialog 119 (2010); “Mange store problemer bag Dialogcentrets lukning” in Kristeligt Dagblad 01-04-2011; “Johannes Aagaards missionalitet i filosofisk terapi” in IKON June 2011; “Ild i kirken – udfordringen fra Johannes Aagaards dialog-akademi” in IKON October 2012. Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth is Adjunct Professor at the Department of Applied Philosophy at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. LundsgaardLeth has studied and worked as a visiting research scholar at Freie Universität Berlin, Warwick University, and the University of Chicago. His interests are particularly concerned with existential philosophy, German idealism, history of philosophy, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. His publications include articles in both Danish and English, such as “Forståelsens praksis – Gadamers hermeneutiske ontologisering af Aristoteles’ praksisanalyse” in Slagmark (2012); “‘Det Ethiske’ som indre opløsning af den tyske idealisme” in Kierkgaard Gentaget (2013); “The Temporality, Modality, and Materiality of Hope” in Hope in All Directions (2014). Ivan Mosca is a PhD candidate at the University of Torino. His interests are especially concerned with social ontology, game studies, and bioethics. In the last three years he has published over 20 articles and spoken at over 20 conferences all around Europe (Italy, France, Greece, Latvia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Turkey). He is a member of the Labont research center, Consulta di Bioetica, and Bioethos. His main publications are “The Social Ontology of Digital Games” in Handbook of Digital Games (2014); “The Social Ontology of Gender in Computer Games” in Mise au Point (2014); “Ontologia della pirateria informatica” in Piracy Effect: Norme, pratiche e casi di studio (2013); “The deConstruction of Social Ontology: the Capital of Palestine” in The Nature of Social Reality (2013); “+10! Gamification and Degamification” in G|A|M|E (2012); “Simposio su Documentalità. Introduzione” in Etica &

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Politica/Ethics & Politics (2011); “Le regole del gioco : Perché la realtà sociale non è un sistema normativo” in Rivista di Estetica (2010). Jens Skou Olsen is Associate Professor of Artistic Practice at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and a PhD student at Roskilde University and Copenhagen Business School. He is a professional jazz musician and composer. His interests are concerned with artistic experience, improvisation, and performativity in modern society. Main publications: “Improvisationens mellemspil: et alternativ til den systematiske feedbacks strategiske asymmetri” in Oekonomistyring og Informatik (2014); “Sansningens sansning af sig selv: Kunstnerisk forskning som kilde til revitalisering af kreative fællesskaber” in Nye dimensioner – Hvad er kunstnerisk forskning? (2014); Musisk ledelse: vejen til et levende arbejdsliv (2013); “Kommune, hva’ så?” in I fællesskabets tjeneste – 100 års kommunal ledelse (2013); “Creativity and Learning: Educating the Creative Mind” in Chara – Journal of Creativity, Spontaneity, and Learning (2010). Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Torino. He has been a fellow at the Center for Religious Studies and Research at the University of Vilnius. His interests are concerned with theoretical and political philosophy, in particular Carl Schmitt’s thought, the problem of the relation between space and power, and biopolitics. He has published: “Etica dell’ospitalità e filosofia del debito: l’ospitalità come forma-del-debito” in Lessico di etica pubblica (2013); “Teologia economica e mass media: il dispositivo glorioso nella filosofia di Giorgio Agamben” in Lo Sguardo (2013); “Beni comuni e uso delle cose” in Lessico di etica pubblica (2013); “La porta e lo scriba: appunti per una critica filosofica del diritto” in Revista portuguesa de Filosofia (2014); “Crisi e conflitto: su Carl Schmitt” in Giornale critico di Storia delle Idee (2014). Haris Ch. Papoulias (Athens, Greece) is a PhD student at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy) and Doctor Europaeus candidate (Universidad de Málaga, Spain). His research focuses on the construction of a Hegelian image theory, founded in the Science of Logic, with the intent to provide an ontological-speculative ground to contemporary issues in visual culture and theory of arts. He is a member of the scientific committee of Hegel Studies Lab, Italy (www.hegelab.com). Some of his recent publications are: “Hegel and the Image Theories of the Late Antiquity” in RAPHIR. Revista de Antropología y Filosofía de la Religión (2015); “A

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Philosophical Revision of Iconoclasm” in M. Šuvakoviü, V. Mako, V. Stevanoviü (ed.), Revision of Modern Aesthetics (2015); “Contribución a una filosofia de la imagen en el sistema del saber hegeliano” in A. García, A. Rojas (ed.), El idealismo alemán y sus consecuencias actuales (2014); “Forme di negatività nella Logica di Hegel” in Annuario Filosofico (2014). Damiano Roberi has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Torino. His main research topics are the connection of History and Nature in contemporary philosophy (E. Bloch, Th.W. Adorno, K. Löwith), as well as Giambattista Vico and Nicholas of Cusa. His PhD dissertation discusses the concept of Nature within Walter Benjamin’s thought. His publications include “Il frammento in Bloch, ‘scappatoia con motto di spirito’ dal sistema delle merci” in Cuozzo, G. (ed.), Resti del senso (2012), and “Alcune note critiche sull’interpretazione cusaniana di Hans Blumenberg.” This last article has appeared in a book he co-edited with A. Dall’Igna entitled Cusano e Leibniz: Prospettive filosofiche (2013). Søren Tinning has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Torino. His publications include: “Place, Public Space, and the Limits Defining Them: A Heideggerian Approach” in Philosophical Paths in the Public Sphere (2014); “Activity and passivity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” in Stvar/Thing – Journal for Theoretical Practices (2012). He is also the co-editor of Philosophical Paths in the Public Sphere (2014) and the present book, as well as member of the editorial staff on Trópos: Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica. Jens Sand Østergaard is a PhD student at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and a Master’s student in Psychology of Language at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His research mainly concerns scientific approaches to the study of language and cognition, but his philosophical interests also encompass phenomenology and hermeneutics, with an emphasis on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. His publications include: “Is context common ground? On conversational implication and the humorous setting” in Semikolon (2012); “Hunting: death and the signs of life” in Semikolon (2013); “Tragedy of the commons – On the negative externalities of civic association” in Semikolon (2013) and “Generational effects of cash or credit-card payment” in Semikolon (2013).