Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy 9780674238978

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Converts to the Real t t t t t t t t t t t

Converts to the Real t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t

CATHOLICISM AND THE MAKING OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Edward Baring

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, E ­ ngland 2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover art: Katie Edwards @ Getty Images Cover design: Annamarie McMahon Why 9780674238985 (EPUB) 9780674987777 (MOBI) 9780674238978 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Baring, Edward, 1980–­author. Title: Converts to the real : Catholicism and the making of continental philosophy / Edward Baring. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018041401 | ISBN 9780674988378 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenological theology. | Catholics—­Europe—­Intellectual life—20th ­century. | Phenomenology. | Philosophy and religion—­Europe—­History—20th ­century. Classification: LCC B829.5 .B3355 2019 | DDC 142/.7—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https:// ­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018041401

contents Introduction  1

part I: Neo-­Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930



1 2 3 4

The Strug­gle for Legitimacy: Neo-­Scholasticism and Phenomenology

23

Betrayal: Husserl’s Transcendental Turn and the Idealism / Realism Debate

55

An Ecumenical Atheism: Martin Heidegger’s Existential Phenomenology

85

The Vital Faith of Max Scheler

116

part II: Existential Journeys: 1930–1940



5 6 7 8

Christian Existentialism across Eu­rope

151

The Cartesian Thomist

183

The Secular Kierkegaard

211

The Black Nietz­sche

241

part III: Catholic Legacies: 1940–1950



9 10

Saving the Husserl Archives

279

Postwar Phenomenology

308

Epilogue  343 NOTES  351 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY  459 ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS  477 INDEX  481

Converts to the Real t t t t t t t t t t t

Introduction

In the beginning, “continental philosophy” was a term of abuse. The

name gained currency in the 1950s, when it lumped together a range of phi­los­o­phers who did not fit the Anglo-­A merican mold.1 Scholars distinguished “analytic” phi­los­o­phers in the English-­speaking world from their “continental” counter­parts on mainland Eu­rope. While the former used logical and linguistic analy­sis to reach secure if modest conclusions, the latter made provocative claims based upon shoddy reasoning. The value judgment is apparent in the asymmetry of the labels, defining one philosophy by its predominant method and the other by its geo­g raph­i­cal reach, as if all one needed to know about the latter was that it was studied elsewhere.2 The adjective “continental” is not even particularly accurate. Many of the most prominent figures of early analytic philosophy, such as Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap, ­were born and worked (at least in part) in the supposed heartlands of continental philosophy, and certain regions of continental Eu­rope, such as Scandinavia, have followed a dif­fer­ent philosophical trajectory than their southern neighbors. Conversely, t­ here w ­ ere and are impor­t ant centers of “continental” thinking in the United States and Britain. Despite its prob­lems, the term “continental philosophy” has stuck ­because it draws our attention to one of the most remarkable characteristics of postwar Eu­ro­pean thought: the multiple similarities among intellectual 1

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traditions in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. ­These similarities can be attributed to the way scholars from across Eu­rope and from a variety of schools have engaged with phenomenology and its philosophical heir, existentialism. Scholars have long recognized that the relationship between existential phenomenology and Marxism was a defining question of postwar thought. 3 More recently, Peter Gordon has shown how the Frankfurt School’s critical theory emerged in a close and contested relationship with existentialism.4 As the phi­los­o­pher Dan Zahavi has argued, “almost all subsequent theory formations in continental philosophy can be understood as ­either extensions of or reactions to phenomenology.”5 The question of how philosophy came to be “continental” can thus be boiled down to the question: How was phenomenology able to gain supporters across Eu­rope? By midcentury, phenomenology was truly international. At that time ­t here ­were self-­professed phenomenologists in Czecho­slo­va­k ia (Jan Patočka), France (Maurice Merleau-­Ponty), Germany (Eugen Fink), Italy (Enzo Paci), and Poland (Roman Ingarden), to name but a few. ­T hese ­weren’t isolated figures, but major voices in their home countries, such that it is not pos­si­ble to write a history of French, German, Italian, or Eastern Eu­ro­pean philosophy in the postwar period without devoting significant space to phenomenological work. Continental philosophy deserves the name, b­ ecause in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury phenomenology grew from a provincial philosophy in southwest Germany into a movement that spanned Eu­rope. This is a book about how that happened.

Philosophy and the Nation In the first de­cades of the last c­ entury, philosophical communities in Eu­rope ­were inward-­looking and parochial. True, phi­los­o­phers could draw on a shared canon, including Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, and t­ here was a niche market for introductions to the philosophical work conducted in other national contexts. But it is remarkable how many philosophers—­like Giovanni Gentile in Italy, Heinrich Rickert in Germany, and Léon Brunschvicg in France—­who dominated the philosophical institutions in their own countries merited barely a reference elsewhere.6

Introduction 3

The exceptions to this rule are instructive. The impact of Freud’s psychoanalysis on Eu­ro­pean thought was comparable to that of phenomenology, but it first found fertile ground outside of academic philosophy, in medical and artistic circles, which could boast more extensive international connections. And Henri Bergson found enthusiastic readers in Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain, yet he was unable to establish a movement with anywhere near phenomenology’s reach, influence, or staying power.7 ­There are many reasons philosophy was so provincial. Since the decline, in the eigh­teenth ­century, of the Republic of Letters, where Latin provided a common means of communication, linguistic differences have proved formidable barriers to the movement of philosophical texts. The emergence of state-­organized higher education systems in the nineteenth ­century erected further obstacles to the flow of ideas. ­Career structures encouraged phi­los­o­phers to immerse themselves in their national traditions and engage with the work of pre­de­ces­sors to whose university chairs they aspired.8 Before the end of World War II, phenomenology had to confront ­these barriers too. It is a commonplace of the reception of phenomenology in France that it was out of step with mainstream academic philosophy. In 1938 Maurice Merleau-­Ponty complained that students interested in German thought consistently failed the agrégation de philosophie, the gatekeeper for academic positions in France, b­ ecause they w ­ ere motivated by dif­fer­ent questions than the idealist orthodoxy. 9 The difficulty of breaking into national philosophical traditions is evident in the ­career trajectories of Husserl’s foreign students. A ­ fter working with Husserl in Göttingen, the Canadian Winthrop Bell taught philosophy at Toronto and Harvard, but he never published on phenomenology in En­glish, and he left academia in 1927, making his name as a historian of Nova Scotia. On fleeing the Nazis to France and then to the United States, Aron Gurwitsch found his first permanent position not in philosophy but in mathe­ matics. Returning to his hometown of Strasbourg, Jean Hering turned his attention to theology and achieved distinction as a New Testament scholar. And when Alexandre Koyré arrived in Paris from Göttingen, he left b­ ehind phenomenology narrowly defined. In the 1920s he studied the history of religious thought, before becoming a pioneer in the history of science a de­cade ­later. ­These considerations thus pose the difficulty in

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even sharper relief. How did phenomenology not only travel to other countries, but also gain traction ­there? The term “continental philosophy” hides a historical enigma in plain sight. Most accounts of phenomenology sidestep this question by fixing their attention on the phenomenological pantheon. In his classic The Phenomenological Movement, Herbert Spiegelberg adopts this approach, skimming over lesser-­k nown scholars. Dermot Moran follows suit in his more recent and other­wise excellent Introduction to Phenomenology, focusing on the most prominent figures. T ­ hese works do provide accounts of how their protagonists first became aware of phenomenological ideas, though ­here they often rely on anecdote, of which Jean-­Paul Sartre’s 1933 discussion of phenomenology with Raymond Aron over apricot cocktails is a par­tic­u­lar favorite.10 But they leave unanswered the more puzzling historical question about how their subjects ­were able to find a receptive audience for their phenomenological analyses, how they ­were able to establish themselves in intellectual cultures with dif­fer­ent philosophical traditions, and thus why they did not remain marginal voices ­there. Another strand of the lit­er­a­ture takes a finer-­grained approach to the reception of phenomenology to explain how it was able to overcome t­ hese institutional obstacles. Proponents of this method have produced a rich body of work, which informs my analyses h­ ere: George Cotkin’s Existential Amer­i­ca; Christian Dupont’s Phenomenology in French Philosophy; Stefanos Geroulanos’s An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought; Dominique Janicaud’s Heidegger en France; Ethan Kleinberg’s Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France; Mauro Mocchi’s Le Prime interpretazioni della filosofia di Husserl in Italia; Tom Rockmore’s Heidegger and French Philosophy; Rocco Rubini’s The Other Re­nais­sance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger; as well as Roberto Tommasi’s L’Essere e Tempo in Italia and Martin Woessner’s Heidegger in Amer­ic­ a. But as the titles of t­ hese books make clear, they divide up the history of phenomenology by nation. Such an approach tends to privilege local ­factors—­such as the importance of Gentilian actualism, Bergson’s intuitionism, or the migration of scholars to the United States a­ fter the Nazi seizure of power—­that cannot be readily

Introduction 5

extended to the history of phenomenology elsewhere. Impressive as ­these books are, they are designed to tell the stories of individual receptions and thus are not suited to the task of explaining why phenomenology spread—­not just to one country but to many.11 The historiography of phenomenology points to a tendency in transnational intellectual history writ large. Tracking the flow of ­people and ideas across the world, historians have demonstrated the porosity of national borders and revealed the multiple ties that bind scholars in dif­fer­ent countries.12 When examining the movement of ideas into a single country, however, historians are sometimes tempted to emphasize what sets that reception apart, and thus reintroduce the nation as a category of analy­sis ­after having rejected it as the limit of their research.13 ­There is, as we have seen, some institutional justification for treating countries separately. But if we opt for such an approach in advance, it can become a self-­f ulfilling prophecy, focusing our attention on explanations that match the scope of our research and blinding us to the intellectual communities that stretch across borders. In transnational intellectual history, we should not assume that the story breaks along national lines. In this book I endeavor to give the most prominent philosophical transfer, from Germany to France, its due. But to avoid privileging national differences, I study that reception as part of a broader pro­cess transporting phenomenology across the continent and beyond, predominantly to Italy, but also to Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This approach de-­centers explanations specific to a single national context. Many of the individuals who have been assigned leading roles in previous accounts—­Emmanuel Levinas in France, Antonio Banfi in Italy, José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, Marvin Farber in the United States— do not have the same prominence in this book, b­ ecause although they ­were influential, they exercised that influence in geo­graph­i­cally circumscribed regions. Instead I prioritize a ­factor that, though apparently marginal in each country, was nonetheless common to all and thus emerges through a pro­cess of accumulation as the single most impor­tant explanation for the international success of phenomenology in the twentieth ­century: Catholicism.

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The Universal Church Take as an example the early life and ­career of Karol Wojtyła, the ­f uture John Paul II. In 1951, when he was a young priest in Kraków, Wojtyła chose to write his second doctorate on phenomenology, analyzing the ethics of Max Scheler. Defending his thesis two years l­ater, Wojtyła admitted that Scheler’s thought could not be used as a basis for Christian ethics. He thought nonetheless that it could “aid us in the analy­sis of ethical facts on the phenomenological and experiential plane.” Unlike psy­chol­ogy, which tended to ignore questions of value, Scheler’s phenomenology paid attention to the subjective aspects of ethical life and thus brought us “closer to the experience of concrete h­ umans.” Moreover, ­because it was unable to determine objective ethical princi­ples and yet recognized their necessity, phenomenology demanded its own surpassing. It carved a path, Wojtyła thought, back to (an implicitly Catholic) metaphysics.14 Such was his enthusiasm for Scheler’s work that Wojtyła would translate Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics from German into Polish.15 In the 1960s and 1970s, Wojtyła returned to Scheler as he constructed his own personalist philosophy, one that would lead him to stand defiant in the face of Soviet Communism and to propound a “Theology of the Body,” which reshaped Catholic teaching on questions of love and sexuality.16 Wojtyła’s choice of topic and positive assessment might surprise us. Not only had he engaged with foreign ideas, Wojtyła had embraced a German philosophy only a few years a­ fter the catastrophe of World War II. The most terrible monument to the German occupation, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, lay only thirty miles outside Kraków’s city limits. Shielded from the worst of German brutality, Wojtyła had still endured significant hardship. Forced into menial ­labor for the Nazi occupiers, he only barely escaped a roundup of able-­bodied young men in 1944.17 How could Wojtyła consider Scheler a ­viable, even laudable, philosophical interlocutor ­after this experience? At first sight Wojtyła’s religious beliefs render his choice less comprehensible. Scheler was an apostate who had rejected the Catholic Church both personally and philosophically in the 1920s. Yet if we examine his context more closely, it becomes apparent that Catholicism was crucial

Introduction 7

to Wojtyła’s decision.18 Wojtyła’s religious vocation embedded him in a network of phi­los­o­phers and theologians that stretched across Eu­rope. In 1951 he had recently returned from studies at the Gregorian University in the Vatican, and a research visit to France and Belgium, where he set out to learn more about the Catholic workers’ youth movement.19 And though in the early postwar period phenomenology was only a minor philosophical presence in Poland, it had been a pressing concern for Catholic thinkers across Eu­rope for over forty years. Thanks to a recent wave of transnational studies, historians have become attuned to the continuing influence of Catholicism on the intellectual life of twentieth-­century Eu­rope. When studying a period in which many Catholics felt a tension between their confessional and national identities, the removal of national blinders in historical research reveals the religious institutions and communities that spanned multiple countries. In the last few years Samuel Moyn has shown how Catholic intellectuals ­were instrumental in forging an international discourse on h­ uman rights; James Chappel has uncovered the connections that promoted the rise of Christian Democracy as a Europe-­wide po­liti­cal force; and Piotr Kosicki has demonstrated how leftist Catholics found common purpose on both sides of the Iron Curtain ­after World War II.20 Despite its significance in ­these other realms, the claim that Catholicism played an outsized role in the diffusion of phenomenology is, at the very least, counterintuitive. Existentialism, the version of phenomenology that had the earliest and most widespread success outside of Germany, is commonly associated with atheistic thinkers like Jean-­Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. If one had to link phenomenology to a religious tradition, one might be more inclined to privilege Judaism, given Husserl’s and Scheler’s ­family backgrounds and the importance of that connection in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Moreover, nonspecialists are hard-­ pressed to name an early phenomenologist who was Catholic, except perhaps Edmund Husserl’s student Edith Stein, whom Wojtyła, as John Paul II, would canonize as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Nonetheless, once we expand our scope beyond the canon and examine the legions of now-­forgotten thinkers who engaged with the phenomenological trinity of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler, a massive infrastructure of Catholic scholars and institutions, reaching across Eu­rope and

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the world, comes into view. At the core of this infrastructure lay neo-­ scholasticism or neo-­Thomism, which had been the quasi-­official philosophy of the Catholic Church since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). By the outbreak of the First World War, neo-­scholasticism had become a global philosophical movement, whose students and teachers circulated through a vast network of seminaries, universities, and institutes stretching from Rome, across most of Eu­rope, to South Amer­ i­ca, the United States, and Asia. In all ­these contexts it was disseminated by academic and more popu­lar journals, reaching a readership that included professional phi­los­o­phers, parish priests, and the educated laity. Almost entirely neglected ­today, even by Catholic scholars, in the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century neo-­scholasticism was by any reasonable mea­sure the largest and most influential philosophical movement in the world.21 Once it was mobilized on behalf of phenomenology, neo-­scholasticism proved to be a power­f ul ally. The story of the Husserl Archives provides a telling illustration of its capabilities. Drawing on his connections in the Church, the Belgian neo-­ scholastic Herman Leo Van Breda smuggled Husserl’s papers out of Germany in 1938. A ­ fter the war, Van Breda built the Husserl Archives in Louvain into one of the most impor­tant global centers for phenomenological work. Van Breda is but one of a host of Catholic scholars, both within and outside the neo-­scholastic movement, who helped raise the profile of phenomenology in new lands. Alphonse de Waelhens (Belgium), Sofia Vanni Rovighi (Italy), Joaquín Xirau (Mexico), and Herman Boelaars (the Netherlands) might not have been considered major theorists at the time, but they did produce much of the textual resources (introductory books and articles) that facilitated the spread of phenomenology and existentialism, especially where translations ­were thin on the ground.22 The first conference on phenomenology outside of Germany was hosted by the Société Thomiste in France in 1932, and in 1946 the Catholic phi­los­o­pher Enrico Castelli or­ga­nized the first international conference treating existentialism, which culminated in a papal audience at the Vatican.23 Though it is dangerous to read too much from such numbers, a preliminary accounting suggests that self-­professed Catholic phi­los­o­ phers produced more than 40 ­percent of all books and articles on Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler written in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,

Introduction 9

and Dutch in the period before World War II, making Catholic phenomenology by far the largest constituent part of the early Eu­ro­pean reception.24 ­After 1945, Catholics ­were overshadowed by other phenomenologists, but they continued to promote continental connections, not least by translating phenomenological texts into French, En­glish, Italian, and other languages.25 And ­whether or not they wore their confessional affiliations on their sleeves, one should not forget the multiple and influential Catholic commentators, such as Henri Duméry and Henri Birault in France, Angela Ales Bello in Italy, Krzysztof Michalski in Poland, Júlio Fragata in Portugal, and Robert Sokolowski and William J. Richardson in the United States. The international reception of phenomenology cannot be reduced to the Catholic reading; it is far too large and complex a development for monocausal explanations. In this book I do not attempt to tell the ­whole story—­not for the reception as a ­whole, nor for the many thinkers I do discuss. Still, Catholics merit our attention both b­ ecause they provided the links holding together developments across Eu­rope and ­because they produced a critical mass of the early scholarship: They introduced phenomenology to many better-­k nown thinkers; they served as impor­tant interlocutors; and they provided a receptive audience for phenomenological and existential texts. That is why, in large part, they set the terms of the debate. W ­ hether Catholic or not, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, phi­los­o­phers interested in phenomenology could not ignore Catholic readings, to which they felt compelled to respond. The traces of this influence, both positive and negative, are almost ubiquitous. Levinas, for instance, dedicated his 1930 book on Husserl to the Aristotle and Aquinas scholar Henri Carteron.26 The Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka wrote one of his first articles on Aquinas’s proofs of the existence of God, and wrote one of his last, the famous “Heretical Essays,” for the Polish Catholic journal Znak.27 Herbert Spiegelberg wrote an early essay distinguishing the meaning of “intentionality” in high scholasticism, in Brentano, and in Husserl.28 Much of the early work on phenomenology in Poland was done by members of the Lvov-­Warsaw school of philosophy, especially Jan Łukasiewicz, who in the 1930s built close ties to the neo-­ scholastic Kraków Circle due to a shared interest in medieval logic.29 In addition, two of the leading figures in early American phenomenology,

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James  M. Edie and Joseph Kockelmans, w ­ ere trained in Catholic centers—­Louvain and Rome, respectively. Edie was at one time a member of the Benedictine Order; Kockelmans had studied for the priesthood but was never ordained.30 The most resolutely atheistic forms of phenomenology and existentialism are no exception. The most famous example is, of course, Martin Heidegger, who encountered phenomenology when he was studying scholastic philosophy in Freiburg. Catholic fingerprints can be found elsewhere too. Scholars have often pointed to the importance of the journal Recherches Philosophiques, and especially the contributions of Alexandre Kojève, for the emergence of an atheistic phenomenology and existentialism in France. 31 But Recherches Philosophiques was not a single-­mindedly atheistic organ. Catholic phi­los­o­phers like Henri Gouhier ­were regular contributors, and the Thomist Étienne Gilson was a member of the Comité de Patronage. Of the three editors, two—­Koyré and Charles-­Henri Puech—­had made their names as scholars of religious thought (the latter would be elected in 1952 to the chair in the history of religions at the Collège de France). When in 1931 the third and lead editor, Albert Spaier, turned down a book review ­because it was too close to Catholic “orthodoxy,” he was defending Catholic Bergsonian Édouard le Roy from attack.32 Catholics even contributed to the phenomenological awakenings of Jean-­Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir was educated at the Collège Sainte-­Marie in Neuilly and the Institut Catholique in Paris, and she prob­ably first read Husserl ­under the guidance of the historian of Catholic mysticism Jean Baruzi.33 Sartre studied Heidegger’s Being and Time in depth alongside the Catholic priest Marius Perrin, who had arranged for the book to be smuggled into the German prisoner of war camp where the two men ­were detained.34 Sartre and de Beauvoir ­were also regulars at the philosophical soirées of Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel, where, as we s­ hall see, phenomenology was a constant topic of discussion.35 In 1943 Marcel complained to Sartre that he had not been cited in the younger man’s Being and Nothingness, though he discerned ­there the influence of his analyses of the body and phenomenology of “having.”36 In a letter response, Sartre explained the lack of references by the “dogmatic” nature of his book, and claimed that he would reveal his “debt”

Introduction 11

to the older man in a ­future work. Sartre admitted, moreover, that he had borrowed far more than Marcel had noted, not least the “very idea of ‘situation’ ”: on reading Marcel, Sartre claimed, he had “understood for the first time that being, for man, is being in situation, and this is what allowed me to sense fi­nally what freedom was.”37 Even allowing for French academic etiquette, Sartre’s self-­presentation as an heir to Catholic philosophy is striking. In sum, I argue that we can speak of “continental philosophy” because phenomenology could tap into the networks of a Church that already operated on a continental scale. Starting from its home bases at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg, which ­were also centers of Catholic philosophy, phenomenology spread along Catholic networks to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and through them to the New World. The decisive role played by Catholics also helps explain the ways in which the adjective “continental” does not fit. Within Eu­rope, phenomenology has been most successful in Catholic countries, while tending to skip, at least at first, the Protestant strongholds of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Across the Atlantic, it has flourished in Latin Amer­i­ca and at Catholic universities in the United States, such as Notre Dame, Boston College, DePaul, and Duquesne.38 The geography of phenomenology is best described, not by the contours of mainland Eu­rope, but by the reach of the “universal Church.”

What Is Christian Philosophy? By claiming that Catholics played an outsized role in the reception of phenomenology outside of Germany, even in its atheistic versions, I d ­ on’t mean to argue that phenomenology is essentially Christian, and that the secular thinkers who have developed its claims in impor­tant and in­ter­ est­ing ways ­were crypto-­Catholics, blind to the true nature of their thought. First, the Catholic readings of phenomenology w ­ ere in many ways expropriations. Husserl gave l­ittle encouragement to ­those who hoped to bend his philosophy to fit a Catholic agenda. Second, as we s­ hall see, phenomenology’s compatibility with Catholicism was by no means assured, and it was the difficulty of aligning it with neo-­scholasticism that made phenomenology attractive to other religious thinkers and, ­later,

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atheists. Fi­nally, and most fundamentally, it is not clear on what basis one could declare phenomenology Christian or Catholic, ­because the concept of a “Christian philosophy” is notoriously difficult to define. At almost precisely the moment when Catholics ­were shuttling phenomenological ideas around the continent, many of the same thinkers ­were also engaged in a Europe-­wide debate about ­whether “Christian philosophy” had any meaning at all.39 From a con­temporary perspective, the most recognizable stances in the Christian philosophy debate ­were ­those taken by Émile Bréhier and Maurice Blondel. Bréhier staked his position in his History of Philosophy, published in 1927. For him, philosophy was a purely rational and thereby universal pursuit. Insofar as an idea relied on revealed doctrines or appealed to the authority of the Church, it could not be philosophical. “Christian philosophy” was a contradiction in terms. Maurice Blondel presented an alternative perspective. He thought that philosophy could demonstrate “the insufficiency of reason” and thus open itself to the super­ natural.40 Similar reasoning led Peter Wust in Germany to argue that “all non-­Christian philosophy, i.e., all philosophy as such, tends directly to the goal of becoming a Christian philosophy.”41 For our purposes, the two most in­ter­est­ing contributions to the debate ­were offered by Thomists. Étienne Gilson argued that ­there is “a revelation generative of reason.”42 He accepted the de jure autonomy of philosophy, which was “purely rational” in its princi­ples, but argued nonetheless that Eu­ro­pean philosophy was de facto inseparable from religion. Flesh-­ and-­blood Christians could not separate their faith from their philosophy, and so the former did nourish the latter, even if, ultimately, philosophical claims stood or fell on their own terms. For Gilson, the decisive Christian contribution to philosophy was the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Discerning the Christian understanding of creation in large swaths of modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant to the pres­ent, Gilson’s approach threatened to extend “Christian philosophy” far beyond what would normally be considered religious thought.43 To this maximalist definition of “Christian philosophy,” other Thomists opposed a minimalist version. The Louvain school of neo-­ scholasticism adhered closely to Bréhier’s position. But when they defined philosophy as strictly rational, they did so not to delegitimize

Introduction 13

“Christian philosophy,” but instead to grant the latter admission to serious philosophical debate. In this view, neo-­scholasticism in par­tic­u­lar was not compromised by unexamined religious presuppositions; it was purely rational. The president of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain, Léon Noël, used Husserl’s Logical Investigations to distinguish between the rational connections between ideas, and the philosophical acts that revealed ­those connections. ­Because religious motivations animated only the latter, they did “not enter as such into the objective exposition of a philosophy.” Other­wise “that philosophy would cease to be a philosophy.” For Noël, then, the dominant philosophy in the Catholic Church could not properly be labeled “Christian.”44

Philosophical Conversions The supposition that religious ideas might slip into secular philosophy unannounced, or that purportedly “Christian philosophy” might arise from the rational development of secular ideas, is crucial for my argument. For it helps answer one of the most difficult questions that this argument confronts: How did the Catholic reception of phenomenology come to influence secular thinkers? The question arises b­ ecause, no m ­ atter how international their community, Catholic phi­los­o­phers often lived in a world apart. This was particularly true of the neo-­scholastics, who felt they ­were on the outside of national traditions looking in. It is telling that some of the most impor­tant bases of French-­speaking neo-­scholasticism could be found in Belgium and Switzerland, and that significant German-­speaking centers ­were located in Holland and Austria. Within Germany, neo-­scholastics ­were integrated into the secular academic world, thanks to the Konkordatslehrstühle—­chairs of philosophy reserved for Catholic thinkers at a number of state universities. Elsewhere, however, neo-­scholastics tended to be segregated in their own institutions. Only a small number held positions of importance in secular centers of research and learning. Étienne Gilson, professor at the Sorbonne and then at the Collège de France, is an impor­tant exception. Neo-­scholastic journals read as if they ­were preaching to the choir, prob­ably ­because they ­were. Often derided as textbook writers, while laboring u­ nder the suspicion that their ­t heses ­were determined more by dogma than by ­f ree inquiry,

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it was a common complaint that neo-­scholastics inhabited intellectual “ghettos.”45 This argument has been taken up in the lit­er­a­ture on phenomenology. Christian Dupont, for instance, claims that in France ­there was a sharp divide between the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology by religious thinkers and its reception in secular philosophy.46 Does revealing how phenomenology could rely on Catholic distribution networks simply displace the quandary? Given that phenomenology was transported out of Germany and into other lands by Catholics, it remains to be explained how it crossed a much better guarded frontier: that between Catholic and secular thought. As I hope to demonstrate in this book, the Catholic reception of phenomenology was motivated by exactly this prob­lem. Neo-­scholastics sought a philosophical conversion of modernity, a movement from modern to medieval metaphysics—­idealism to realism—­which, they hoped, would be a precursor to a religious conversion back to Catholicism. To achieve this conversion, neo-­scholastics ­couldn’t be content to address the faithful. Many considered it necessary to put their religious beliefs aside and start from premises they shared with secular phi­los­o­phers. Only then could they overcome their isolation and enter into real substantive debate with the philosophical mainstream. Neo-­scholastics had confidence in their strategy, b­ ecause they w ­ ere convinced that the world incarnated a divine order, and that the institution of the Catholic Church was the worldly locus of redemption. They believed that an unprejudiced examination of this order, using the most advanced tools of philosophy and science, could convince scholars that it had a first cause and thus attest to God’s existence. That is why Noël insisted that, though neo-­scholasticism was a purely rational philosophy, it could still lead to religious conclusions. Initially, neo-­scholastics thought that Husserl’s phenomenology could aid in this proj­ect. In his two-­volume Logical Investigations from 1900 / ​ 1901, Husserl had argued that a careful description of experience demonstrated the intentionality of consciousness: consciousness was always “consciousness of ” something. As such, phenomenological intentionality seemed to bypass the distortions of idealism and provide access to the mind-­independent real. For neo-­scholastics, phenomenology could help secular thinkers recognize God’s order in the world. By engaging with

Introduction 15

phenomenology, then, neo-­scholastics hoped they could convert modern philosophy to their ends, and overturn a pro­cess of intellectual secularization they traced to the Reformation. Catholics ­were encouraged in their proj­ect by the unusually large number of personal religious conversions that punctuate the history of phenomenology. Edith Stein was drawn to Catholicism through her reading of Husserl, as ­were Max Scheler, Siegfried Hamburger, Aurel Kolnai, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.47 In 1940 the translator of Husserl into Spanish, Manuel García Morente, converted to Catholicism before taking religious vows and devoting himself to the study of Aquinas.48 If phenomenology had simply been a path to religious belief, however, it would prob­ably not have commanded the attention of so many Catholics over such a long period of time. Rather, phenomenology fascinated them ­because it led to conversions in both directions: while for some, phenomenology kindled the sparks of faith, for ­others it snuffed them out. Heidegger’s engagement with phenomenology, for instance, cultivated his skepticism about scholastic doctrines and led him to distance himself from the Church. Such was the connection between Heidegger’s philosophical commitments and changing religious belief that Husserl feared he might be branded a “corrupter [Verführer] of youth” in “arch-­Catholic Freiburg.”49 So too Max Scheler’s engagement with phenomenology can be used to understand his rejection of the Catholic faith in the 1920s just as easily as his conversion fifteen years earlier. In fact, for numerous figures in the international reception, from Henry Corbin in France to Ernesto Grassi in Italy, phenomenology and existentialism helped them think through their break with Roman Catholicism. Thomists blamed ­these developments on the key innovation in Husserl’s 1913 book, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. T ­ here he argued that the ideal of presuppositionlessness, which guided his phenomenological investigations, required the bracketing of our normal assumptions about the real world. For this reason, the intentional objects analyzed by phenomenology could not be explained by worldly pro­cesses. Instead, they referred back to a “constituting ego,” which undermined scholastic realism in ­favor of a transcendental idealism. Though this idea dismayed many neo-­scholastics, they returned to it insistently in their articles and books, trying to work out ­whether Husserl’s “conversion” back to

16

converts to the real

idealism was a necessary consequence of his phenomenological start­ ­i ng point. The very reasons neo-­scholastics considered Husserl’s idealism a liability made it a valuable tool for their co-­religionists, who sought to stretch Catholic orthodoxy to make room for their ideas. In turn it offered leverage to ­those secular thinkers who wanted to challenge the legitimacy of religious thought tout court. ­Because phenomenology confronted neo-­ scholastics with what we might call the ambiguity of conversion—­Did it open up a path ­toward scholastic truth? Or did it provide an escape route out of Catholic orthodoxy?—­their reading was able to gain traction far beyond the limits of the Catholic world.

A Note on Method The peculiar nature of conversion informs my methodological approach in this book. It is my conviction that to understand scholarly texts we need to examine the institutions in which their authors worked and the communities for which t­ hose texts w ­ ere written. This is not to say that institutions and communities impose par­tic­u­lar values and dictate lines of argument, though in some cases, of course, they do. Instead, they ­matter ­because they promote certain types of intellectual exchange over ­others. ­These exchanges are obscured by the pro­cess of canonization. Normally we read only a tiny minority of past authors, and thus isolate them from the debates in which they w ­ ere involved. But b­ ecause scholarly texts are documents of persuasion, and their arguments are crafted to appeal to par­tic­u­lar audiences, using terms that ­those audiences understand and reasons that they re­spect, to forsake investigating this context is give up a valuable interpretative tool.50 This type of contextualization helps us locate texts, but it is not, and cannot be understood as, a form of containment. As Jacques Derrida has shown, texts detach themselves from their context; they can be read and understood in new and in­ter­est­ing ways by ­people in other times and other places.51 And though one might be tempted to think that such decontextualization is in tension with or undermines contextualist study, the latter can be crucial for understanding the former. This is true for many forms of contextualization, but it is all the more so when one is studying a proj­ect

Introduction 17

of conversion. First, by emphasizing how authors appeal to t­ hose with dif­ fer­ent sets of beliefs, the proj­ect of conversion shows that ideas are not limited by intellectual and cultural bound­aries, but, with varying degrees of success, speak across them. Second, b­ ecause ­t hese authors write in order to change their readers’ minds—­which is to say, to convert them—­ their work is based on the assumption that context cannot be completely determinative. That is why historical accounts that reduce ideas to their context are so dissatisfying; they implicitly deny the belief that motivates intellectual exchange.52 The readers of a text are not the only participants who run the risk of conversion. B ­ ecause persuasion is a double-­edged sword, arguments can be just as effective on the author who wields them. In adopting a par­tic­u­lar line of reasoning, intellectuals bind themselves more or less tightly to its consequences, consequences that they do not always see clearly in advance. In this way, they make themselves vulnerable to unexpected developments and rival accounts of the philosophical implications of their ideas, implications that might contradict their original purposes. Some of the most heated debates I discuss in this book concerned the question ­whether the arguments employed by Christian phi­los­o­phers to convert the secular world in fact set their authors on the path to unbelief. When we study proj­ects of philosophical conversion, we are witness to the ways a text can emerge from within par­tic­u­lar contexts and to the ways it can break f­ ree from them. For t­ hese reasons, though this book ­will pay attention to the doctrinal authority of the Church, and thus to Vatican politics, t­ hese forces are not at the center of analy­sis. Catholic philosophy was of course influenced by papal directives, which s­ haped the terrain upon which Catholic phi­los­o­ phers operated—­opening up some possibilities while closing down ­others, and raising the stakes of par­tic­u­lar philosophical gambits. But this is not a story about the Magisterium, the Vatican’s office of doctrinal probity. Rather, it follows ­t hose intellectuals who worked within the relatively large, if shifting, intellectual space authorized by the Church, who sought to engage non-­Catholics in meaningful ways, and who ­were sometimes led astray in the pro­cess. For, as the actors in this book would attest, ideas can have a power­ful grip, and to the extent that ­those ideas lead to conversions—­from one school to another, into or out of par­tic­u­lar faith

18

converts to the real

traditions—­they also mark the point where institutional or po­liti­cal explanations of conceptual change break down. That is impor­tant, b­ ecause even though Catholic institutions helped transport phenomenological ideas around Eu­rope, phenomenology could only reenter secular philosophy once it had left t­ hose institutions ­behind.

Outline of This Book This book has a tripartite structure. In Part I, “Neo-­Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930,” I show how Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler w ­ ere implicated in debates over Catholic philosophy. A ­ fter sketching the international growth of the neo-­scholastic community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I explain the initial enthusiasm for Husserl’s phenomenology around 1910, when it was widely hailed as a “new scholasticism,” a modern convert to medieval ways of thinking. With the publication of Husserl’s Ideas (1913) and his apparent conversion back to idealism, the initial enthusiasm soured. The relationship between ­these two “conversions”—­one to the real, and the other away from it—­became the central theme in most subsequent neo-­scholastic commentary. I then show how Heidegger’s thought emerged in this context, at a time when he was studying scholastic philosophy in Freiburg: he developed his existential version of phenomenology, which foregrounded the concrete rather than the theoretical subject, in order to reconnect Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with the real. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s solution led him away from his neo-­scholastic roots and ultimately his religious beliefs. Heidegger’s development left neo-­scholastics with another ambiguous conversion to contend with. They strug­gled to understand the relationship between phenomenology, realism, and Heidegger’s atheism. Catholics read phenomenology through the lens of epochal change: for them it heralded the return of the medieval at the heart of the modern. In the aftermath of World War I, this reading took on a far-­reaching po­liti­cal meaning. When Scheler placed his phenomenology in the ser­v ice of a broad Catholic revival, most pointedly in his 1921 book, Of the Eternal in Man, it won enthusiastic adherents from a generation of young Catholics. Once again, however, this enthusiasm was tempered by misgivings about the ultimate consequences of phenomenological ideas. The agonistic

Introduction 19

ele­ments of Scheler’s thought, which had excited Germany’s Catholic youth and had attracted a range of non-­Thomist Catholic thinkers, led ­others to think that it was built on dangerously weak foundations, a judgment seemingly vindicated by Scheler’s 1923 break with the Church. In Part II, “Existential Journeys: 1930–1940,” I show how ­these three ambiguous “conversions” generated interest in phenomenology outside of Germany. In the 1930s, Christian existentialists—­like the Rus­sian émigré Nicolai Berdyaev, the Frenchman Gabriel Marcel, and the Italian Augusto Guzzo—­drew on phenomenological ideas in order to negotiate their relationship with Thomism. T ­ hese thinkers, I argue, w ­ ere caught in a contradictory status dynamic. Though in their home countries they tended to possess more cultural capital than the neo-­scholastics, they had to contend with a movement that was, to all intents and purposes, Church orthodoxy. In this situation, phenomenology proved to be a valuable resource. The very aspects of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler’s thought that had seemed a danger to neo-­scholastics in the 1910s and 1920s, and which resurfaced in the 1930s due to internal neo-­scholastic debates, offered Christian existentialists the means to justify their own ideas. Exploiting tensions in the Thomist reading, Christian existentialists provided phenomenology with an entry­way into the academic establishment in countries across Eu­rope. The Christian existentialist confrontation with neo-­scholasticism focused the early reception of phenomenology on two interlocking questions: Could Husserl’s idealism be recuperated for a realist philosophy? Was Heidegger’s philosophy a “humanism” or an account of being? In both t­ hese cases, internal religious debates produced arguments that ­were compelling to critics outside of the Church, and can thus explain how seemingly parochial readings of phenomenology came to have a broader impact. And as in the 1920s, similar questions resurfaced in po­liti­cal form. I show how Scheler’s philosophy became the center of a Europe-­wide debate over the relationship between freedom and po­liti­cal efficacy, which informed Catholic responses to Fascism and democracy. In Part III, “Catholic Legacies: 1940–1950,” I examine how the interwar reception ­shaped the canonical phenomenology of the postwar period. The questions that guided the Catholic reading—­about Husserl’s idealism, Heidegger’s humanism, and the po­liti­cal implications of

20

converts to the real

phenomenology—­became the guiding questions for a new generation of non-­Catholic phenomenologists and existentialists, as they sought to respond to and contest Catholic ideas. It would take far more than a single book to identify all the paths along which the Catholic reading of phenomenology gained broader influence. H ­ ere I discuss two, one institutional and the other intellectual. I show how Van Breda sought to downplay connections to the Catholic Church as he set about establishing the Husserl Archives as an international center for phenomenological research, and, focusing my attention on the all-­important French scene, I show how Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty w ­ ere able to exploit the tensions between dif­fer­ent Catholic readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler in the 1930s to craft their own highly influential interpretations of phenomenology—­one religious but Protestant, the other avowedly atheistic—­a de­cade ­later. As I endeavor to show, the non-­Catholic phenomenology that emerged ­after World War II should not be seen simply as a break with the initial Catholic reception, but instead as its wayward heir. Throughout this book I am interested in the Catholic reception for the light it sheds on the history of phenomenology more broadly: I argue that the neo-­scholastic reading provided the impetus and stakes for the realism / idealism debate that engulfed Husserl’s students in the 1910s and 1920s (Chapter 2); I suggest that Catholic debates lend context to the development of an existential version of phenomenology, both in Heidegger’s work (Chapter 3) and elsewhere in Eu­rope in the 1930s (Chapters 5, 6, and 7); I show how the conflicts between religious thinkers furnished the means for non-­Catholics to craft atheistic versions of phenomenology and existentialism (Chapters 7, 8, and 10); and I explain how Catholic readings helped imprint phenomenology with po­liti­cal meaning both in Germany in the 1920s (Chapter  4) and outside of Germany in the 1930s (Chapter 8), in a way that foreshadowed and s­ haped the emergence of existential Marxism in the 1940s (Chapter 10). The Catholic reception of phenomenology was a subterranean but massive structure, linking many of the most impor­tant developments in the history of twentieth-­century philosophy. It could play this role ­because, before existentialism and before phenomenology, the first continental philosophy of the twentieth ­century was Catholic.

I Neo-­Scholastic Conversions 1900–1930

1 The Strug­gle for Legitimacy: Neo-­Scholasticism and Phenomenology

Neo-­scholasticism has all the markings of an anachronism. It gained

prominence in the late nineteenth c­ entury as the Church’s philosophical response to modernity. The rise of nationalism had made t­ hose de­cades difficult for Eu­ro­pean Catholics. This was the era of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, when bishops ­were thrown in prison, confessional newspapers ­were forced to close, and priests ­were dragged away from their pulpits by officials adhering zealously to the 1873 May Laws. The growth of po­liti­cal socialism forced Bismarck into an uneasy truce with the Pope ­toward the end of the 1870s, but German Catholicism remained embattled. Liberals denigrated it as backward and superstitious, and Catholics ­were still considered by much of the majority-­Protestant population as Reichsfeinde—­enemies of the newly united Germany. In France too, ­after the briefly welcoming environment created by the conservative “Moral Order” government in the early 1870s, the anticlerical trend of the Third Republic was clear to see. Even in Italy, the Church was on the back foot. The Papal States had been one of the ­great losers in Garibaldi’s Risorgimento, and the new king, Vittorio Emanuele, looked ready to assert the dominance of state over Church. The buildings that ­housed the Collegium Angelicum at the Vatican w ­ ere expropriated by the 23

24

Neo-Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930

new Italian government in 1871, and theological faculties ­were closed in the early part of the 1870s. In the new secular climate, Catholics felt bereft of “their” ­great universities.1 Such ­were the tensions between the Vatican and the new government in Rome that on three occasions—in 1881, 1889, and 1891—­t he Pope considered seeking a new home outside of Italy.2 In all ­these cases, Catholics identified a common theme: the nation-­state sought to tame a purportedly universal Church.3 When Vincenzo Pecci assumed the papal throne in 1878 as Leo XIII, he dedicated himself to overcoming this international fragmentation, and he addressed it with par­tic­u­lar force at the intellectual level: the parochial national mindset had to be replaced by a universal Catholic one. In the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, the third of his papacy, Leo reiterated Jesus’s command to the Apostles from the Gospel of Matthew: “Go and teach all nations.” For a model, Leo looked to the M ­ iddle Ages. He nostalgically recalled a time when Aquinas’s authority had brought together “Paris, Salamanca, Alcalá, . . . ​Douay, Toulouse, and Louvain, . . . ​ Padua and Bologna, . . . ​Naples and Coimbra.”4 A revived scholasticism, he implied, could do so again. Over the next few years, Leo drew on the considerable resources of the Church to promote neo-­scholasticism as a transnational intellectual movement. He could build on a number of existing communities of scholastic learning, such as the Dominicans in Spain and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a seminary in Mainz, the Collegio Alberoni at Piacenza, and the theology faculty at the Roman College in the Vatican, where Leo himself had been trained in scholastic thought. He also received support from the influential Jesuit journal based in Rome, Civiltà Cattolica. Nevertheless, scholasticism was at the time a minority interest in the Catholic world, and the Church had to create new institutions to match the Pope’s philosophical ambitions.5 The year following the encyclical, Leo established the Papal Acad­emy of St. Thomas in Rome.6 ­Others regions of the Catholic world followed suit, and the next de­cade saw the establishment of a Thomistic Acad­emy in Coimbra, Portugal (1881); the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. (1887); the Theological Faculty in Swiss Fribourg (1889); and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (ISP) in Louvain, Belgium (1889).7 In Britain, the College at Stonyhurst in Lancashire became a center of academic



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 25

activity for English-­speaking neo-­scholastics, who made their work known in the Stonyhurst Philosophical Series. The creation of neo-­scholastic institutions encouraged a flurry of publishing activity, most importantly in a host of new journals. On the heels of Leo’s encyclical, Albert Barberis in Piacenza founded Divus Thomas, whose first volume appeared in 1880. Neo-­scholastic reviews then began to appear in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.8 ­There are a number of ­things to note about ­these publications. First, they ­were relatively indifferent to national borders. One of the most impor­tant French-­language journals, the Revue Néo-­Scolastique, was published out of Louvain (or rather Leuven), deep within Flemish Belgium. Belgium was also home to the French Dominicans, from 1903, when they ­were expelled from France, ­until 1937. The Cistercian Abbey at Le Saulchoir became their temporary base, publishing the Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques (founded in 1907) and the Bulletin Thomiste (1924). The religious community at Valkenburg in the Netherlands, which l­ater published the review Scholastik, served the German-­speaking community, especially ­after the Jesuits had been expelled from Germany during the Kulturkampf (an exile that did not come to an end u­ ntil 1904). Moreover, the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, which published articles in German, En­glish, French, and Latin, moved from Germany to Switzerland in 1923, ­because it feared that the hyperinflation would damage its international circulation.9 Second, t­ hese reviews did not work in isolation. Most of them dedicated space to summaries of their peer publications, including regular articles on the neo-­scholastic movement across Eu­rope. All featured articles by authors from other countries. Agostino Gemelli, the founder and editor of the Italian Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, for instance, wrote essays for the German Philosophisches Jahrbuch and the French-­language Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie in the first two de­cades of the twentieth ­century. His Rivista, as the title indicates, was modeled on the Louvain Revue, and the first volumes made much of the partnership. During its first de­cade of existence, Armida Barelli and Lucia Malcotti, who translated articles for the journal from French and German, ­were among the most impor­tant and regular contributors.10 Neo-­scholastics participated in a tightly knit transnational community.

26

Neo-Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930

The transnational scope of neo-­scholasticism raised the question of which language was the most suitable for scholarly exchange. Many of the neo-­scholastic journals and textbooks, including the Italian Divus Thomas, ­were published in Latin. As the Jesuit Paul Gény wrote in 1926, “Latin has the im­mense advantage of facilitating the reading of the old Scholastics, and of furnishing an instrument for international communication much more suitable than any of the artificial languages, Volapük, Esperanto, or Ido.”11 Similarly, in 1903 the Pa­r i­sian Domet de Vorges urged the use of Latin to prevent the splintering of the movement into national schools.12 Latin was the language of instruction at the Gregorian, and many in the Vatican considered it the only appropriate medium for studying scholastic philosophy. Not all agreed on the primacy of a “dead” language. A miniature storm broke out in Louvain in 1895 over its preference for French.13 For the Louvain neo-­scholastics, the use of Latin quarantined neo-­scholasticism away from other developments in philosophy. Désiré Mercier, the president of the Thomistic Institute t­ here, wrote in 1900, “The fact is that our generation has lost interest in Latin as a scientific language. To write philosophy in Latin now is deliberately to renounce being understood by the majority of our contemporaries.”14 Directives from Rome requiring the use of Latin in courses caused significant discontent in Louvain during the remaining years of the nineteenth ­century. Only ­a fter significant strug­gle did the Institute secure the right to teach in other languages: French and, in the interwar period, Flemish.15 The use of French in Louvain did not, however, condemn it to a provincial existence. It allowed the ISP to engage with the all-­important French-­speaking world and beyond. As a l­ater reviewer remarked, French was “an international living tongue” and this gave the work of the Louvain school “an elevated con­ temporary significance.”16 In any case, the Louvain school, like other neo-­ scholastics, could rely on a network of translators. By the outbreak of World War I, Mercier’s textbook, the Cours de philosophie (Philosophy course), had been translated into En­glish, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.17 Although the Church promoted the growth of a transnational neo-­ scholastic network, that growth was not even, nor did all nodes assume equal importance. In most countries, Catholics played passive roles. They



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 27

­ ere attentive to the conversation happening elsewhere, but rarely conw tributed to it directly. When in the 1930s the Kraków circle of Thomists tried to promote their version of scholasticism, updated according to mathematical logic, their innovations attracted l­ittle attention beyond Polish borders.18 The same is true of most neo-­scholastic communities outside of Europe—in Latin Amer­i­ca, Africa, and Asia. The only exceptions ­were neo-­scholastics in North Amer­i­ca (both the United States and Canada), especially ­a fter World War  II. But ­because American neo-­ scholasticism had a belated start—­its most impor­tant journals, The Modern Schoolman and The New Scholasticism, w ­ ere not founded ­until the 1920s— it did not exercise significant influence elsewhere before 1945. In the transnational neo-­scholastic community, three centers assumed dominant roles. From the beginning, Italy and especially Rome enjoyed a preeminent position; the home of the universal Church was also its most impor­tant intellectual hub, welcoming scholars and priests from around the world. Of the thirty members of the Papal Acad­emy, ten had to come from outside of Italy, and on the inaugural roster we find scholars from France, Spain, Belgium, the United States, and Germany.19 Other Roman institutions ­were equally, if not more, cosmopolitan. In 1890, of the 781 students studying at the Gregorian, ­there ­were 237 Italians, 139 French, 130 Germans, 83 Americans, 49 En­glish, 29 Swiss, and 29 Polish.20 A stint at a Roman University was a rite of passage for promising young Catholic scholars, especially ­those in religious ­orders, and so the Vatican became a thoroughfare for thinkers and ideas from around the world. Slowly, other centers arose. Mapping the importance of French as an international language, the Catholic University in Louvain became a prominent base for the transnational neo-­scholastic community. Whereas the 1893 incoming class of Louvain’s ISP included only two non-­ Belgians—­one from Vienna and one from Costa Rica—by 1914, foreign students made up one-­sixth of ­those taking the baccalaureate, and a third of doctoral students.21 Over the interwar period, the Institute became ever more diverse. In 1930, 57 of the 160 students at the Institute w ­ ere foreigners, coming from Bengal, Canada, Czecho­slo­va­k ia, E ­ ngland, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and Yugo­slavia. Of the nine students who since 1918 had earned the title Maître Agrégé—­t he

28

Neo-Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930

highest academic grade available—­fewer than half w ­ ere Belgian.22 Organ­ izing the cele­bration of the Institute’s fiftieth anniversary in 1939, President Léon Noël sent out invitations to alumni in twenty-­eight foreign countries, totaling 338 former students.23 Such was the size of the international student population in Louvain, Noël worried that the Institute would be unable to train adequate numbers of priests for the Belgian Church.24 German neo-­scholastics also occupied a privileged position in the network, but for dif­fer­ent reasons. In most other countries, neo-­scholastics found positions in seminaries or specially designated “Catholic Universities,” like the Pontifical Universities in Rome, the Institut Catholique in Paris, and Sacred Heart University in Milan. For them, the academic hierarchy reinforced the authority of the Church, and their right to teach and publish depended upon a nihil obstat, an attestation from the local diocese that their work contained no doctrinal errors. It also meant that Catholic phi­los­o­phers ­were institutionally separated from their secular counter­parts. German neo-­scholastics, in contrast, tended to teach in state universities, occupying what would ­later be formalized as Konkordatslehrstühle: philosophy chairs reserved for Catholics and charged with the philosophical training of theology students.25 For this reason, German neo-­scholastics enjoyed greater freedom from Church discipline, and closer connections to their non-­Catholic peers. It is not surprising that, in the neo-­scholastic world, intellectual innovation often originated ­there.

Modernizing Scholasticism Neo-­scholasticism was conceived as a riposte to the international fragmentation of the modern world. But the Pope did not consider it to be a retreat into the past. During his papacy, Leo foregrounded the modernity of the Church: he was the first Pope to have his voice recorded on a phonograph and be filmed; as a proponent of ralliement in the 1890s, he supported efforts to overcome an earlier hostile attitude to republicanism, especially in France; and his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum represents the first concerted papal effort to confront the social prob­lems caused by the industrial age. At Leo XIII’s election, the French republican politician Léon Gambetta remarked that though the Pope did not



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 29

openly break with the tradition, “his conduct, his acts count more than his words, and if he ­doesn’t die too early, we can hope of a marriage between reason and the Church.”26 One might be tempted to treat the Pope’s modernizing impulses as distinct from his attempts to resurrect the thought of a thirteenth-­century monk; and certainly the exact relationship of Thomism to modernity would be contested over the eighty years leading up to the Second Vatican Council, which brought an end to the dominance of neo-­scholasticism in Catholic intellectual circles. Nevertheless, Aquinas’s thought recommended itself to the Pope precisely ­because it could inform a robust Catholic response to the modern world. In par­tic­u­lar, Leo thought, it could demonstrate that science and Catholicism, far from being at loggerheads, could work hand-­in-­hand. Leo was confident that Thomism could help Catholics engage with a seemingly hostile form of non-­Catholic thought, ­because it had done so before: during his lifetime, Aquinas had been instrumental to the Christian appropriation of Aristotle. At that time, many assumed that Aristotelian philosophy and Chris­ tian­ity ­were simply incompatible, and indeed the reading of Aristotle that had made its way through to Eu­rope by way of the Islamic world, especially in the commentaries of Ibn-­Rushd (Averroës), had caused significant headaches for the Church. Ibn-­Rushd’s Aristotle propounded heretical ­theses about the unity of the intellect across all h­ umans, which foreclosed the possibility of individual salvation, and the eternity of the world, which undermined the notion of a creator God. Aquinas’s ­great achievement was to reconcile the two, showing e­ ither that Ibn-­Rushd’s conclusions ­were false (about the unity of the intellect), or that they ­were only pos­si­ble and not necessary (about the eternity of the world) and thus that they could be trumped by the givens of revelation.27 Aquinas began with Aristotle’s declaration in the Metaphysics that all ­humans, by their nature, desire to know. As essential to ­human nature, knowledge had to be good, and b­ ecause the light of reason through which that knowledge was gained was a gift from God, it could not contradict that other divine gift, religiously revealed truth. At the same time, natu­ral reason had clear limits. In par­tic­u­lar, it could furnish only the most basic of religious truths: the praeambula fidei that God exists, is infinite, and so on. Deeper (if never full) knowledge of God required

30

Neo-Scholastic Conversions: 1900–1930

beatific vision and faith. In this way, Aquinas presented faith as the perfection of natu­ral knowledge, building on and not undermining it.28 Not only did Aquinas provide a model for reconciling secular thought and religious truth, his philosophy seemed well-­placed to help Catholics co-­opt the modern natu­ral sciences. Of course, Aquinas held many views that clashed with the dominant scientific beliefs of the late nineteenth ­century. But his general approach seemed consonant with scientific methods. Unlike Plato, who thought that our knowledge of universals was innate and thus only had to be recalled (anamnesis), Aquinas followed Aristotle in asserting that all ­human knowledge flowed ultimately from sensory perception. Through a pro­cess of abstraction, ­humans could extract intelligible species from our sensory impressions of concrete existing ­things. This allowed us to grasp what they are—­their essence or quiddity. On the basis of ­these intelligible species, the mind could form concepts and then propositions, whose truth depended upon their conformity with real­ity, the famous “correspondence theory of truth.” That is, though the intellect played an active role in the production of knowledge, Aquinas shared with many natu­ral scientists the conviction that the knowledge thus produced was objective and was true to the real world. Conversely, our best understanding of real­ity, produced by the natu­ral sciences, had a role to play within a Thomist natu­ral theology, the proj­ect of proving God’s existence from His effects in the world.29 As Pope Leo put it in Aeterni Patris, Thomism did not clash with the sciences ­because “­human intelligence is only led to the knowledge of ­things without body and ­matter by ­things sensible.”30 The need to engage with modern science became a guiding princi­ple for many neo-­scholastics. According to the Belgian neo-­scholastic Maurice de Wulf, the decline of scholastic philosophy in the early modern period could be traced to its neglect of the natu­ral sciences, and a revived scholasticism would have to show its relevance by drawing on scientific discoveries.31 Neo-­scholastics tried to keep abreast of developments in the natu­ral sciences. For instance, a large number would dedicate articles to Einsteinian physics.32 Many of the leading lights of neo-­scholasticism possessed scientific credentials. Before founding the Milan Rivista, Gemelli had trained as a doctor and studied the structure of the ner­vous system ­under the f­uture Nobel laureate Camillo Golgi. He had also visited



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 31

laboratories and clinics around Eu­rope with the financial support of the Archbishop of Lodi, Ludovico Antomelli.33 In 1882 Mercier “let his beard grow [and] donned civilian clothes”34 to slip incognito into Jean-­Martin Charcot’s neurology classes in Paris, and he would fill his lectures on scholastic thought with modern scientific examples.35 The Thomistic institute at Louvain possessed a laboratory for experimental psy­chol­ogy in order to promote the rapprochement between the natu­ral sciences and scholastic philosophy.36 The neurologist Arthur van Gehuchten and the chemist Louis Henry, who w ­ ere based in Louvain, both taught courses 37 at the ISP. It was evident to Mercier that “if St. Thomas w ­ ere alive ­today, he would, like us, use the test tube and the microscope.”38

Mercier’s Progressive Thomism Thomism’s supposed compatibility with modern science did not guarantee its compatibility with modern philosophy, and according to one influential strand of the movement, the renewal of medieval philosophy entailed considerable revision. Martin Grabmann, one of the leading German historians of the ­Middle Ages, expressed it thus in a 1926 American book designed to take stock of the movement: “When a plant is to be transplanted from one place to another, it must be disengaged from its former soil and conditions of life, take root in the new soil, and thrive ­under the new vital conditions.” So too for scholasticism: it had to be sensitive to the “movements and needs of the pres­ent.”39 For t­ hese “neo-” or “progressive” Thomists, medieval thought had to be updated for the pres­ent, drawing on the best and most vibrant forms of modern thought. The leading figure of progressive Thomism was Désiré Mercier, whom we have already encountered as a proponent of both vernacular languages and an engagement with the natu­ral sciences.40 Mercier came from a large and devout f­ amily, which had fallen on hard times a­ fter the death of his ­father in 1858; his ­mother and ­sisters had to make significant sacrifices to support Désiré’s education.41 Training to be a priest in the seminary at Mechelen, he was inducted into the ontologism and traditionalism then current in Catholic institutions, but he also happened across Thomist ideas in the Institutiones Philosophicae by Salvator Tongiorgi and ­later works by Joseph Kleutgen.42

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Mercier’s study of Aquinas, which he continued in the mid-1870s in Louvain, and which l­ater informed his work as a professor at the Mechelen Seminary, thrust him into the limelight a­ fter the election of Leo XIII. In 1882 the Pope chose the thirty-­year-­old Abbé for the chair in Thomistic Philosophy at the Catholic University in Louvain, and seven years ­later provided a sum of 150,000 francs to help found the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, with Mercier as its president.43 The motto Mercier chose for the new Institute, “Nova et vetera,” expressed his hope for its program: that it would adapt medieval thought to the demands of the pres­ent, paying par­tic­u ­lar attention to modern philosophy. Mercier wrote in a 1900 article, “Averroës, Siger de Brabant, Peter Olivi are dead, they belong to history; but Kant, Spencer, Comte still live in con­temporary intellectual milieus and their spirit is everywhere in the air that we breathe.” 44 According to Mercier and his followers, one must start from presuppositions held by Thomists and modern phi­los­o­phers alike. Only then would the latter accept the former as worthy opponents. First and foremost, this required the development of a Thomistic epistemology. As many neo-­scholastics admitted, Aquinas h­ adn’t provided a fully elaborated theory of knowledge. ­T here ­were, of course, several Thomistic texts that dealt with divine and ­human knowledge, along with the criticism of sense perception, but it had never become a clearly defined problematic. In the last de­cades of the nineteenth ­century, though, epistemology seemed the defining feature of modern philosophy. Descartes had placed the evidentiary value of sense perception into doubt, and this had set the stage, in the neo-­scholastic narrative, for Kant and the positivists, who ­were then dominant.45 The mismatch between Thomistic and modern theories of knowledge made epistemology a cornerstone of progressive Thomism.46 When the Institute was founded and thus a broader curriculum became required, Mercier reserved for himself the course on epistemology—or, in his vocabulary, criteriology;47 he taught it almost ­every year from 1890 u­ ntil his consecration as Archbishop of Malines in 1906 removed him from the classroom.48 In his multivolume textbook series Philosophy Course, the volume on epistemology, General Criteriology, had the greatest impact and incited the most heated debate around the continent.49 Mercier was concerned with what he called the two “fundamental prob­lems of epistemology”: Are our judgments objective, in the sense that



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 33

they are in­de­pen­dent of the mind that thinks them? And, do they concern the real world? Though Mercier treated both questions in the book, his engagement with modern philosophy led him to focus his attention on the former.50 Mercier pitted against each other what he considered to be two modern forms of “subjectivism”: positivism and Kantianism. Positivism, Mercier argued, was a rejuvenated nominalism, for which essences, genera, and species ­were simply names used by the subject to order experience. For the positivists, laws ­were generalizations from experience, produced perhaps by the pro­cesses of habitual association. But ­because they w ­ ere merely better or worse descriptions of the world, they remained uncertain, liable to be overthrown by a new experimental fact. Mercier wanted to prove, however, that our judgments could, at least in some cases, be extended to all experience. Although we cannot be sure that, for instance, all swans are white, we can be certain that 7 + 5 = 12 in all places and at all times. “The universality of ideal propositions consists in the fact that ­there is no individual contained ­under the extension of the subject, at any point in space and at any moment in time, to which the attribute does not apply.”51 The rejection of positivism through an appeal to the universality of ideal propositions might have pointed Mercier t­ oward Kant. A ­ fter all, Kant’s transcendental deduction was supposed to ensure a priori the applicability of our judgments. But in Mercier’s pre­sen­ta­tion, Kant’s universality was not equivalent to “objectivity.”52 Kant had maintained the universality of judgments only at the cost of rooting them in the synthetic powers of our perceptive and cognitive faculties. They w ­ ere not the truths of the “­things in themselves.” In discussing Kant, Mercier declared that he wanted to determine ­whether “in our judgments of an ideal order, a blind act of synthesis produces subjectively the ­union between the predicate and the subject, or if that ­union follows the manifestation of the objective identity of predicate and subject and is motivated by that manifestation.” 53 Mercier opted for the latter: our judgments responded to the objective order of the world, not to our par­tic­u­lar way of grasping it.54 In sum, Mercier’s engagement with positivism and Kantianism was guided by a single overriding question: How is the “objectivity” of our judgments pos­si­ble? Objective judgments ­were both universal, in the sense that they ­were ensured for all pos­si­ble experience (as Kant had argued), and they w ­ ere object-­oriented, not subject-­oriented

34

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(as the positivists claimed). In this careful navigation between the traps laid by modern thought, Mercier thought he would be able to avoid the “agnosticism” to which it was drawn. To prove the objectivity of thought, Mercier started from what he saw as the internal contradictions of skepticism. ­Because the judgment “No judgment is true” is paradoxical, doubt cannot be made universal.55 But ­because some claims are clearly false, the question remains how we could distinguish truth from error. To answer this question, Mercier relied on the Jesuit tradition. Kleutgen, who had been one of the forces ­behind Leo’s encyclical, had tied his epistemology to Aquinas by referring to the latter’s De Veritate, in par­tic­u­lar q. 1 a. IX.56 In this text, Aquinas argued that knowledge could only be declared certain if the mind reflected on its own act and grasped the proportion between its judgment and the affirmed ­thing. Aquinas’s argument allowed Mercier to make a distinction between “spontaneous certainties” and “reflective certainties”:57 “In the first, the object alone attracts the attention of the cognitive faculty; in the second, it is the ­w ill that deliberately applies and holds applied the cognitive faculty to the consideration of the object to be known.”58 Spontaneous certainties ­were merely “subjective” and thus susceptible to doubt. But the mind’s reflection on its own acts allowed it to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, working out which spontaneous certainties should be accepted and which should not. Mercier dealt with Cartesian doubt from this perspective. Doubt remained valuable in the assessment of “unreflective certainties” but it could not be applied ­either to ­these certainties ­wholesale or to our cognitive faculties. Descartes’s universal doubt, including the fictions of the evil demon, was merely an artificial attempt to apply valid methodological doubt to realms where it did not belong. But on what basis could we determine in reflection ­whether our subjective certainty was justified? Mercier sought an infallible criterion (hence his term “criteriology”). According to Mercier, “reflective certainties” have a solid foundation, b­ ecause they are given in evidence that is “immediate, objective, and intrinsic.”59 His emphasis on the criterion of truth helps explain how Mercier located criteriology within the Thomistic system. According to him, it was a subfield of psy­chol­ogy. But it also shows that Mercier did not found truth on the contingent pro­cesses of the empirical mind. A criteriology would distinguish between the two cases: “I am certain that it is” and “It is certain.”60



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 35

Mercier’s argument functioned quite well for mathematical judgments and other “ideal knowledges,” which occupied him for the majority of the book. As “immediate” and “intrinsic,” the criterion of objective evidence applied first and foremost to the comparison between concepts. The truth of a t­ hing, he wrote, was the “id quod est, what a t­ hing is, its intelligible essence, abstracted from knowing if it exists or not, ­either in us, or outside of us.” 61 But his retort to the positivists and Kantians caused him greater prob­lems when trying to deal with judgments about the real world. Take, for example, empirical judgments of the form “This cup is green.” For Thomists, such judgments ­were governed by the “correspondence theory of truth,” the accord of statement and real­ity.62 The correspondence theory traditionally broke down into two parts: (1) In assessing “logical truth,” statements w ­ ere compared to the real­ity they described. (2) “Ontological truth,” in contrast, applied to that real­ity itself; one asked ­whether something was genuine (true) rather than fake. But as Mercier argued, ontological truth depended on the “correspondence between ­things and divine ideas.” For this reason, both forms of truth demanded conformity of real­ity and the intellect, one of the ­thing to ­human thought, the other of the ­thing to the mind of God.63 Yet, according to Mercier, to the extent that it was extra-­mental, the ­thing was for us a “pure nothing.”64 We ­were never confronted with the correspondence between a statement and a ­thing, let alone in a way that was “immediate” and “intrinsic” as Mercier’s criterion of objective evidence demanded.65 For this reason, Mercier argued, “the definitions of ontological truth and the logical truth that it suggests are manifestly defective . . . ​t he metaphysicians’ definition: Veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei needs at the very least to be interpreted and completed.” 66 Mercier recast empirical judgment as the relationship “between two objective pre­sen­ta­tions of one t­ hing,” between a sense impression, the repre­ sen­ta­tion of the known in the knower, and a concept that purported to apply to it.67 He argued that what seemed to be the correspondence of thought with real­ity was in fact the correspondence between two concepts, one generic and the other singular.68 Strictly speaking, the correspondence theory should read “adaequatio intellectus et rei jam mente praeconceptae.”69 As Mercier’s reformulation of the correspondence theory suggests, the criterion he had developed to solve the first epistemological prob­lem

36

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caused considerable prob­lems for his solution to the second. If truth concerned the relationship between two concepts, how could we know ­whether a judgment actually applied to real­ity70 —­whether the subject of our judgments was “real, that is realized, or at the very least intrinsically pos­si­ble and realizable in nature”?71 To answer ­these questions, Mercier relied on the princi­ple of causality. The passivity of our sense impressions showed that they could not be the inventions of the mind. Rather, they had to be caused by real ­things (choses) existing in the world. “­Every apprehension has necessarily an objective term, e­ very thought a quiddity thought, ­every imagination, ­every vision, e­very hearing, an object ­imagined, seen, or heard.”72 As we ­shall see, this account did not satisfy Mercier’s critics. Though it implied the existence of real objects, it did not tell us very much about them. Was Mercier ­really an improvement on Kant?73

Louvain Abroad The topology of Catholic intellectual networks made Louvain a model for progressive neo-­scholastics around the world. In Amer­i­ca, Bishop John Keane consulted with Mercier about the staffing of his new Catholic University in Washington, D.C., at one point trying to lure him to Amer ­i­ca.74 Ultimately Keane hired Mercier’s student Edward Aloysius Pace to establish an experimental psy­chol­ogy program in 1891.75 In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the philosophy faculty developed strong institutional ties with the ISP ­under the direction of another student, Charles Sentroul.76 In Spain, Mercier’s protégés Juan Zaragüeta and Marcelino Arnáiz would build an offshoot branch, while in Bohemia, Mercier found a like mind in Josef Kratochvil.77 The Louvain school’s most impor­tant collaborators, however, worked in Italy and Germany. The Milan school, which formed around Agostino Gemelli, had the clearest connection to Louvain. Like the Belgians, the Milanese ­were deeply invested in the natu­ral sciences. As we saw, before his 1903 conversion Gemelli had studied medicine. Though his entry into the Church marked the beginning of six years of philosophical and theological study, ­a fter 1909 he returned to his scientific interests.78 Gemelli first became interested in Mercier’s ideas while trying to relate his neuro-



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 37

physiological and histological work to his faith. He thought that Mercier would help him to “overcome the already diagnosed caesura between scientific knowledge and religious experience.”79 The beating heart of Milanese neo-­scholasticism was the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, which first appeared in 1909. As we have seen, the journal’s title was borrowed from that of Mercier’s journal, and in announcing its appearance the editors made much of the connection. An advertisement taken out in the newspaper L’Unione in September 1908 proclaimed that “the new periodical w ­ ill follow a direction perfectly consonant with that of the school of Louvain.”80 The “programma” published in the opening edition went further, identifying Mercier as the “brilliant founder of our school.”81 Alongside Gemelli, the other founding editor, Giulio Canella, was deeply engaged in Mercerian neo-­scholasticism, and helped shape the early journal.82 Other Mercerians in Milan included Giacinto Tredici, f­uture Bishop of Brescia, and Domenico Lanna.83 So close ­were the two schools that the first year of the journal can be read as a collaboration between the Belgians and the Italians, including articles by Sentroul, Noël, and de Wulf. ­After 1920 the Milanese had their version of the ISP too: the new Catholic University of the Sacred Heart with Gemelli as its rector. In Germany, Mercier’s neo-­scholasticism found like minds among the Jesuits ­r unning the journal Stimmen der Zeit and ­later the Dominican Albertus Magnus Acad­emy in Cologne, which aimed, in the words of its first president, Wladislaus Switalski, to promote “a better understanding between neo-­scholastics and modern phi­los­o­phers.”84 In the period before the First World War, however, the most impor­tant German center for progressive neo-­scholasticism was the group around Constantin Gutberlet at the Görres-­Gesellschaft, publishing in its journal, the Philosophisches Jahrbuch. Gutberlet had once been a candidate for a position at the Louvain ISP, and like Mercier he was close to Kleutgen, ­under whom he had studied in Rome.85 In the article that opened the journal in 1888, Gutberlet set its f­ uture direction. He did not think that a ­simple return to Thomas was pos­si­ble, for “the scientific methods of modernity are just as elevated above the syllogisms and limited observations of earlier centuries, as modern artillery is above the ballistics of the ­Middle Ages.” Thomism had to be upgraded for the fight if it ­didn’t want to face “­rifles

38

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and dynamite bombs” with “bows and arrows.” Though science and philosophy had been used to attack Catholicism, Gutberlet was confident that neo-­scholastics could place ­those areas of study “with full legitimacy in the ser­vice of Christian philosophy.” A ­ fter all, Gutberlet argued, i­ sn’t that what Aquinas had done with Arabic thought in the thirteenth ­century?86 ­These Italian and German neo-­scholastics embraced the major tenets of Mercier’s proj­ect. All considered epistemology to be central to the Thomistic renewal. The opening edition of the Milanese Rivista asserted that they would place “the criteriological prob­lem” at the center of their investigations, without which no philosophy “would have a legitimate place in t­oday’s thought.”87 Though Gutberlet adhered more closely to Kleutgen’s Suárezian orientation, differing for this reason on questions of ontology, his journal also took Mercier’s side in the debates that followed the publication of General Criteriology—­Mercier’s multivolume Philosophy Course, it pronounced, was one of the “most outstanding publications in philosophy in recent times.”88 And like the Belgians, the Italian and German neo-­scholastics concentrated their efforts in the first instance on Mercier’s “first epistemological prob­lem,” proving the objectivity of the ideal, and only secondarily sought to justify empirical knowledge.89 By the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century, progressive neo-­scholastics had formed a transnational network. We see a range of proj­ects across Eu­rope and the Amer­i­cas, all taking epistemology as their central focus, and trying to compete with the Kantians and the positivists on their own ground. T ­ hese progressive Thomists w ­ ere prepared to revise Aquinas in light of the par­tic­u­lar needs of the pres­ent, arguing that an engagement with modern thought would only make scholasticism stronger. For them, the letter of Aquinas’s work, suited to the needs of the thirteenth ­century, was less impor­tant than its spirit. In Mercier’s language, Thomas was to be a beacon (phare), not a limit (borne).90 At the core of this progressive neo-­scholasticism was a collaboration between Belgians, Germans, and Italians. In 1910 Emilio Chiocchetti wrote that the Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica and its “­sister journals,” the Philosophisches Jahrbuch and the Revue Néo-­Scolastique, “­were three names of a movement, identical in its fundamental direction, sketched by the immortal princi­ples of the



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 39

eternal philosophy, that . . . ​has demonstrated its potent vitality in the assimilation of the good and the true contained in ­every philosophical current, in ­every scientific advance.”91 For progressive neo-­scholastics, it was not sufficient to align their thought with modern philosophy. Their success would be judged by movement on the other side: Would secular phi­los­o­phers come to adopt recognizably “scholastic” positions? This was admittedly an elusive goal. Many remained suspicious of a form of thought that, it seemed, maintained faith and revelation as trump cards. The few moments when neo-­scholastics did receive recognition from non-­Catholics—­a relatively positive article on Mercier’s work in Kantstudien in 1902 and Gemelli’s warm reception at the 1924 International Philosophical Congress in Naples—­became neo-­scholastic lore, in part ­because they ­were so rare.92 Rather than wait for spontaneous appreciation, then, neo-­scholastics would have to seek out and co-­opt allies for themselves. In the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century ­there w ­ ere few leads. The American neo-­realists, such as Ralph Barton Perry and George Santayana, provided one source of hope. The Louvain doctoral student René Kremer wrote a dissertation on them in 1921, and many writers testified to their value for scholastic thinking. 93 In Eu­rope, the Würzburg psychological school, which had taken Wilhelm Wundt’s introspective methods and expanded them to include more complex functions like thought, attracted their interest. It encouraged the creation of experimental psy­chol­ogy laboratories in neo-­scholastic institutes around the world. But allies w ­ ere thin on the ground. That is why, when progressive neo-­scholastics encountered Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, they stopped and took notice.

Husserl’s “New Scholasticism” Husserl’s Logical Investigations from 1900 and 1901 might seem an unlikely focal point for the Catholic philosophical revival.94 Its importance had ­little to do with Husserl’s religious convictions. Husserl had been born in 1859 to a Jewish f­amily in Moravia, and converted to Lutheranism in 1886. For most of his life he identified as a “­Free Christian,” a believer unbound by the strictures of any denomination.95 ­Free Christian doctrines

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informed Husserl’s l­ater treatment of theological questions. He came to be convinced that, in the purity of the phenomenological sphere, one could discern the “immanent transcendence” of the divine stripped of its traditional accoutrements. That is why phenomenology could serve as a “nonconfessional pathway to God.” 96 But t­ hese meditations ­were mostly sequestered in his unpublished manuscripts and did not inform the first Catholic reception. In the two bulky volumes of the Logical Investigations, which did grab their attention, one searches in vain for a treatment of religious issues. Husserl focused ­there on the foundations of mathe­matics and logic, which had fascinated him since he was a boy. Nevertheless, progressive neo-­scholastics ­were no ordinary Christian phi­ los­o­phers, a label they would be at pains to reject three de­cades ­later. And Husserl’s work seemed to provide in­de­pen­dent confirmation of the claim made in Mercier’s almost exactly contemporaneous Criteriology: that it is pos­si­ble to reach beyond the subject and grasp the objective order of the world. To understand Husserl’s work and its appeal, we need to place him in relation to his teacher Franz Brentano. Brentano had been brought up in Marienberg in Germany, and, a­ fter his studies in scholastic philosophy in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, and Münster, wrote his dissertation on Aristotle (1862). He was ordained a priest two years l­ater. Brentano’s work was driven by the desire to recast psy­chol­ogy in the mold of the modern natu­ral sciences; he wanted to match them in power and exactitude. Thus, he dedicated himself to a form of empiricism: the rigorous description of ­mental phenomena from a first-­person point of view. While Brentano sought to follow the physical sciences in method, he thought that a careful description would show that the subject m ­ atter of psy­chol­ogy differed in a fundamental way. Brentano argued that ­mental phenomena, unlike physical phenomena, are intentional, by which he meant that they are always consciousness of something. Brentano introduced the term “intentionality” in his 1874 Psy­chol­ogy from an Empirical Standpoint: ­ very m E ­ ental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the ­Middle Ages called the intentional (or ­mental) inexistence [Inexistenz] of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 41

unambiguously, reference to a content, direction ­toward an object (which is not to be understood ­here as meaning a ­thing [Realität]), or immanent objectivity. Each m ­ ental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In pre­sen­ta­tion something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired.97

As this last option makes clear, for Brentano the intended object did not have to exist in the outside world. We can desire a time machine or a flying car. That is why Brentano referred to “inexistence” (existence in . . . ​) or “immanent objectivity.” For Brentano, intentionality showed how the ­human mind could grasp the objective within itself. Armed with this version of intentionality, Brentano hoped to show how a descriptive psy­chol­ogy could explain all cognitive pro­cesses, including logic and philosophy. He listed three basic types of ­mental act: pre­sen­ta­ tions, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.98 The first, the pre­ sen­ta­tion of the object, had pre­ce­dence. For instance, Brentano thought that we could love or hate something only if we first pres­ent it to ourselves. Brentano applied this princi­ple most extensively to the realm of logic. He argued that the judgment “Some man is sick” was merely a variation on the Ur-­form “­There is a sick man.” So too universal judgments such as “All men are mortal” could be reformulated as “­T here is no immortal man.” If all judgments could be transformed into existential ones, that implied that they could be reduced to the affirmation or denial of an intentional pre­sen­ta­tion.99 Through his students, Brentano gained influence throughout Eastern and Central Eu­rope. He trained Tomáš Masaryk, who would become the first president of Czecho­slo­va­k ia in 1918. He also taught Sigmund Freud. Brentano’s work found greatest success, however, in philosophy narrowly defined. Aside from Husserl, Brentano taught Carl Stumpf, who ­later gained a chair in Berlin; Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, both of whom found positions in Prague; Alexius Meinong, who became a professor in the Austrian city of Graz; and Kasimir Twardowski, who brought Brentano’s philosophy to Lvov, where it played an impor­tant role in the development of the Lvov-­Warsaw school of logic. As ­t hese ideas moved through the academic institutions of what was then the Habsburg Empire

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and beyond, they laid the groundwork for the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in Czecho­slo­va­k ia and Poland between the wars.100 Brentano’s emphasis on intentionality and immanent objectivity might have made him an attractive figure for Mercier and other progressives. That he was not the object of neo-­scholastic attention is in part a question of timing and personality. His major publications appeared before the emergence of progressive neo-­scholasticism—he retired from his position in Vienna in 1895—­and he was both too close and too far from the Church to be an exemplary figure: as a Catholic he lacked the in­de­pen­dent authority the progressives sought, and as someone who had challenged the Pope on the question of infallibility, leading to his renunciation of the priesthood in 1873 and the Church itself in 1879, he was suspect. Ironically, Brentano’s ideas began to gain traction in the Catholic world only when they w ­ ere picked up by his non-­Catholic student, Husserl. We should also recognize that Husserl’s revisions to Brentano’s theory, far from taking it further from its Catholic sources, actually rendered it more amenable to neo-­scholastics. Initially Husserl had stuck closely to his teacher. In his 1891 work The Philosophy of Arithmetic, which was dedicated to the older man, Husserl had explained the concept of “number” by a descriptive psy­chol­ogy of counting. He claimed that we had a direct intuition of smaller numbers, which arose through a reflection on the pro­cess of “collective combination” (Verbindung).101 In contrast, larger numbers (for Husserl, anything over 12) exceeded our intuitive grasp. We could know them only in a “symbolic” manner, through the application of arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, and so forth) on the more securely grounded smaller ones.102 Husserl’s emphasis on the act of combination in that book earned it a blistering review by Gottlob Frege in 1894. According to Frege, Husserl had attempted to “cleanse” our naive understandings of arithmetic “in the psychological wash-­tub.” But b­ ecause Husserl had employed psychological and not logical suds, he was not able to scrub off all traces of the subjective.103 In making this argument, Frege aligned Husserl with a broader tendency in nineteenth-­century philosophy. Thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer had argued that logic could be studied using the methodological arsenal of psy­chol­ogy. Even more radically, their



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 43

“psychologism” aimed to show that psy­chol­ogy could provide a theoretical justification of logical laws. For instance, in his System of Logic (1843), Mill had argued that the princi­ple of noncontradiction could be understood as a generalization from experience. ­Because belief and disbelief ­were mutually exclusive ­mental states, Mill thought that the inability to think that it was si­mul­ta­neously both light and dark, loud and quiet, and so on, ­shaped the logical law that propositions like “It is light” or “It is loud” could not be true and false at the same time.104 Husserl never ­adopted a fully psychologistic position. Recent scholars have shown the profound continuities between the 1891 text and Husserl’s ­later phenomenology. So too, in other works, Husserl followed Bernard Bolzano in marking the in­de­pen­dence of logic as a theory of science, or Wissenschaftslehre, from psy­chol­ogy.105 Nevertheless, even before Frege’s review, Husserl had come to doubt the explanation of the genesis of numbers he had given in The Philosophy of Arithmetic.106 In the preface to Logical Investigations from 1900, Husserl introduced his treatment of psychologism by quoting Goethe: “­There is nothing to which one is more severe than the errors that one has just abandoned.”107 The book, like the earlier text, was an attempt to achieve “a philosophical clarification of pure mathe­matics.” But this time Husserl eschewed all psychological explanations.108 Only thus, to use the title of a l­ ater essay, could phenomenology claim to be a “rigorous science.” In Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the first volume of Logical Investigations, Husserl laid out his arguments against psychologism. He showed that although logical operations ­were si­mul­ta­neously psychological acts, the two w ­ ere fundamentally dif­fer­ent in their characteristics. Psy­chol­ogy was a “factual and . . . ​a n empirical science” that developed its laws with varying degrees of precision by a pro­cess of induction from the study of real minds in action. Hence, psychological “laws” ­were approximate and only more or less probable. In contrast, logic was an a priori science that produced laws that ­were exact and certain.109 The famous syllogism about Socrates, man, and mortality was not dependent on the way a­ ctual ­humans performed the operation, and thus might be revised if sufficient numbers of h­ umans came to the conclusion that Socrates was, say, immortal. Instead it held at all times and places, with a single and irrefutable conclusion. And b­ ecause the exact and a priori could never arise out of the vague

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and merely probable, psy­chol­ogy could not provide a foundation for logic. Psychologism amounted to a “confusion of fields” and resulted in a “skeptical relativism” where “all truth (and knowledge) is relative . . . ​to the contingently judging subject.”110 To secure his distinction between logic and psy­chol­ogy, Husserl had to undertake a thoroughgoing revision of Brentano’s intentionality. Rather than using it to draw a line between ­mental and physical phenomena, Husserl followed Twardowski in using intentionality to separate the sensuous psychical moment of a ­mental act (the immanent content of experience: color, shape, and so on) from its intentional object, which was mind-­transcendent. For Husserl our experience might be made up of sense data, but when we see, Husserl argued, we ­don’t see color sensations, but “colored ­t hings”—­not just patches of green and brown, but a tree.111 By redefining intentionality in this way, Husserl was able to push back against Brentano’s suggestion that the intentional object is somehow immanent in the ­mental sphere, which Husserl worried reproduced the prob­lems of repre­sen­ta­tionalism: it begged the question how this immanent object related to the extra-­mental one.112 For Husserl, intentionality showed that consciousness was directed t­oward something that transcended the mind. More importantly, it allowed him to distinguish between acts of thought and their intentional objects. The former ­were varying, individual, transient, and real, like the mind that performed them, whereas the latter did not have to be; they could be identical, enduring, and ideal.113 “The scientific investigator . . . ​k nows . . . ​t hat he does not make [macht nicht] the objective validity of thoughts and thought-­connections, of concepts and truths, as if he ­were concerned with contingencies of his own or of the general h­ uman mind, but that he sees them, discovers them [sieht ein, entdeckt].”114 That is why, though my assertion of a mathematical equation is bound to the ­here and now (and I can state it badly), that equation transcends the h­ uman mind and is valid at all times and for all places. Husserl was not content to demonstrate the distinction between logic and psy­chol­ogy. He also wanted his Investigations to serve as a riposte to the mathematical formalists who had taken this distinction as their starting point. Mathematicians w ­ ere charged, Husserl thought, with the



The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 45

development of “all true theories.” On closer examination, however, it became clear that the mathematician was ­little more than an “ingenious technician” who applied logical rules mechanically, without stopping to think why they ­were true and how they ­were given to us. The phi­los­o­ pher, in contrast, wanted to “clarify the essence of a t­ hing, an event, a cause, an effect, of space, of time ­etc., as well as that wonderful affinity which this essence has with the essence of thought, which enables it to be thought, with the essence of knowledge, which makes it knowable, with meanings which make it capable of being meant ­etc.”115 To explain how we could grasp ideal objectivities, Husserl appealed to intuition. Husserl’s intuition cannot be restricted to the sensory perception of the real world. It was vastly more expansive than that assumed by the empiricists. As he had discussed in the Prolegomena, the species “red” was not “contained” in the concrete red object, such that we could simply filter out the other aspects, b­ ecause in that case it too would be temporally and spatially bound.116 The species “red” was not perceived, but grasped in a dif­fer­ent type of act, an intuition intentionally directed at it: what Husserl called “ideation,” accessed through a par­tic­u­lar type of “abstraction.”117 In the sixth investigation, Husserl went further, presenting what he called a “categorial intuition,” which gave us access to logical relationships that we could not simply perceive, like the “is” in “This cat is black.”118 Husserl urged his readers to put aside all our accreted assumptions and attend to this intuition, describing as carefully and fully as pos­si­ble what was given ­t here. Only thus could phenomenology become an “a priori” science that uncovered the logical concepts and relationships that are valid at all times and in all places. Although much of the Prolegomena was concerned with the distinction between the changing psychological act and its fixed intentional content, in the a­ ctual investigations of the second volume Husserl introduced another distinction: between meaning (Bedeutung or Sinn) and the object intended (Gegenstand).119 In Husserl’s famous example, “victor at Jena” and “vanquished at Waterloo” had dif­fer­ent meanings, but they referred to the same object: Napoleon. ­Under reflective phenomenological analy­sis, Husserl argued, we could redirect our attention from the intended object (Napoleon) to the intention (meaning) aiming at it. In this way we could transform intentional meanings themselves into a “class of ­‘universal

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objects’ or species.”120 Such a shift of attention went against our natu­ral tendencies and thus required significant effort and training, but the fact that meanings are always meaning for someone helped Husserl address an impor­tant question that had arisen in his analyses: If an ideal object is given in par­tic­u­lar types of intuitive acts, how are the two related? ­These more properly phenomenological analyses w ­ ere concentrated in the final two investigations. In the fifth investigation, Husserl examined vari­ous “objectifying acts” (objektivieriende Akte), through which sensory content is “interpreted” as an object.121 The acts came in many forms.122 The intentional content (what Husserl called the “­matter” of an act) could be intended in a number of dif­fer­ent ways (its “quality”), ­whether it was perceived, remembered, wished for, judged, and so forth. For Husserl, although we could distinguish m ­ atter and quality, as two “moments” of the same act they w ­ ere inseparable, and dif­fer­ent act-­qualities w ­ ere correlated with dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ta­tions of the act-­matter. An object is given to us in a dif­fer­ent way when it is remembered than when it is perceived or desired.123 In the sixth investigation, Husserl extended this analy­sis to the question of truth, which for him depended upon the relationship between dif­ fer­ent objectifying acts. The meaning of an expression was ideal, but that was not sufficient to make it “true.” So too the analy­sis of t­ hese meanings provided a “formal logic,” not a “logic of truth.” As Husserl had described in the first investigation, a name, e.g., names its object what­ever the circumstances, in so far as it means that object. But if the object is not intuitively before one, and so not before one as a named or meant object, mere meaning is all t­ here is to it. If the originally empty meaning-­intention is now fulfilled, the relation to an object is realized, the naming becomes an ­actual, conscious relation between name and object named.124

This was also the basis of truth: a meaning-­intention was true if it allowed for such a meaning-­fulfilling intuition, as was not the case, for instance, for the nonetheless meaningful expression “square circle.” False expressions ­were references without referents.125 Hence the force of Husserl’s catchphrase “to the ­things themselves.”



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Husserl’s emphasis on intentionality and intuition might seem to give phenomenology a realist hue. Nevertheless, this impression needs to be qualified in two re­spects. First, for most of the work, Husserl explic­itly focused his attention on a priori logical laws, not ­those of the empirical world.126 His work would deal with the realm of essences or “ideal objectivities,” which provided “ideal possibility—­i.e., a possibility in regard to the being of empirical cases falling ­under the general idea,” regardless of w ­ hether that idea was in fact fulfilled in real­ity.127 As Dan Zahavi has argued, the Logical Investigations are best understood as metaphysically neutral.128 Husserl privileged ideal objects ­because they ­were ­free of the contingency that was irreducible in the study of the empirical. Indeed, Husserl subjected empiricism to the criticism he had aimed at psychologism: both w ­ ere forms of relativism, which made the error of trying to derive the ideal from the real.129 Second, even in his account of truth, Husserl prioritized ideal objects over real ones. He divided truths into individual and general versions: “the former contain . . . ​assertions regarding the a­ ctual existence of individual singulars, whereas the latter are completely ­free from this, and only permit us to infer (purely from concepts) the pos­si­ble existence of what is individual.”130 The former ­were always inadequate and partial. Husserl argued that in perceptual experience we are given only one side of a physical object at a time, what Husserl called “Abschattungen” or “adumbrations.”131 In contrast, general truths allowed intuitive fullness (anschauliche Fülle). For this reason, the best form of evidence was “inner evidence,” which, Husserl claimed, was “nothing but the ‘experience’ of truth.”132 As the Husserl scholar Günther Patzig has written, the Logical Investigations constructed a “daring bridge called evidence, intended to connect judgment with fact.” But it “had the drawback, rather unfortunate in a bridge, that it ended on the same side of the river from which it began.”133

The First Reception Such quibbles would not worry progressives. They too focused on the realm of ideal objectivities, treating empirical judgments only as an afterthought.134 In fact, progressives read Husserl’s Logical Investigations as a

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striking vindication of their proj­ect, aligning with them and against the ­great bulk of secular philosophy at the time on the issue that defined their thought: Mercier’s “first epistemological prob­lem” concerning objectivity. It is telling that Husserl, like Mercier, could associate his opponents with the medieval thinkers who many thought had initiated the collapse of scholasticism: for Husserl, psychologism was the latest iteration of “nominalism.”135 Not only did his proj­ect align with theirs, his approach looked familiar. Husserl seemed to promote the type of reflection on our cognitive acts that was so central to progressive epistemology.136 The resemblance extended to some crucial details. Not least, Husserl’s account of truth looked very much like Mercier’s reformulation of the traditional correspondence theory: it assessed the relationship not between thought and ­thing, two distinct ontological domains, but instead between two intentional acts, one empty and one full.137 Husserl flagged the proximity himself. In the Prolegomena, he had addressed the objection that he was “attempting to restore the Aristotelian scholastic logic, on whose worthlessness history has pronounced judgement,” and he responded by arguing that the “discipline in question is by no means so narrow in scope, and so poor in profound prob­lems, as it is ­here reproached with being. . . . ​One may also ask ­whether our scorn for the traditional logic is not perhaps an unjustifiable after-­effect of re­ nais­sance attitudes.”138 Last but not least, Husserl had drawn on Brentano’s theory of intentionality, flagging its origins in medieval philosophy. For Catholics around Eu­rope, reading Husserl’s Logical Investigations was a revelation. As Edith Stein ­later remarked, that book gave the impression of a “new scholasticism” (Neue Scholastik), just as scholasticism was “awaking like Sleeping Beauty from its centuries-­old sleep.”139 Neo-­scholastics first took notice of Husserl’s phenomenology when it was picked up by August Messer, a psychologist in the Würzburg school.140 Messer had left the Catholic Church in the mid-1900s and was generally hostile to what he saw as Catholic dogmatism.141 His work nonetheless remained close to the progressive form of neo-­scholasticism, and Catholic phi­los­o­phers around Eu­rope read him with continued interest.142 In his 1908 Sensation and Thought, Messer drew on Husserl’s intentionality to distinguish between a “psychological and a logical treatment of thought.” As Messer argued, when fifty students in a class think the Pythagorean



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theorem, “we have 50 individual experiences of thought (admittedly of a very complex type) but only one thought (proposition).”143 Following Messer’s discussion, Husserl was identified as a fellow traveler by a number of neo-­scholastics, the most impor­t ant of whom was Joseph Geyser. Geyser was not a particularly innovative or exciting thinker, at least in the opinion of his contemporaries. When the gaunt and dour Geyser arrived at a conference, a colleague remarked that he looked as “arid [dürr] as his philosophy.”144 Nevertheless, he had considerable influence ­because he had a foot in both the neo-­scholastic movement and mainstream German philosophy. He had earned doctorates from the Gregorian in Rome and from Munich (1892 and 1896, respectively).145 And like many progressive neo-­scholastics, he was particularly interested in psy­chol­ogy. In 1897 he completed his Habilitation (second doctorate) ­under Theodor Lipps.146 Though from 1904 ­until 1916 he taught as an Extraordinarious and then Ordinarius Professor of Philosophy at Münster, the Munich connection brought Geyser into contact with phenomenology. While in Munich, he was a regular participant in the Lipps circle, which, as we ­will see, became an impor­tant center of the early phenomenological movement.147 Between 1917 and 1924 he was Husserl’s colleague at Freiburg, ­after which he returned to Munich to take the chair of Catholic philosophy.148 Geyser was not immediately taken by Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In his first treatment, he dismissed them as a form of “actualism,” meaning that Husserl placed too much emphasis on the act of judgment.149 Messer’s discussion, however, led Geyser to reconsider his position. His 1909 Princi­ples of Logic and Epistemology: An Investigation of the Forms and Princi­ples of Objective True Knowledge150 was an extended attack on psychologism, or more precisely anthropologism, which related truths to the subjective capacities of ­humans. Such an approach, Geyser averred, led straight to “agnosticism.”151 In language very close to Mercier’s he asked, “When ­humans speak of truth, do they mean merely the general necessities of h­ uman thought, or do they denote the grasping of a state of affairs as it is in itself?”152 Though Geyser assured the reader that he had never wavered on this point, on the opening page of the book he identified Husserl as a guiding light.153 ­Later in the book, Geyser was effusive in his praise: Husserl was “groundbreaking and astute,” and

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had “broken the psychologistic spell,” in order to return objectivism to the center of philosophical debate.154 Like Messer, Geyser focused on Husserl’s intentionality, which distinguished the content of consciousness, a realm of sense (Sinn), from the psychological acts from which it arose, even if it never existed without ­these.155 Such an approach allowed Geyser to examine the question of supratemporal (überzeitliche) “validity” (Geltung), rather than existence.156 As Geyser understood it, a judgment “was valid [gilt]” when the intentional content of thought (a meaning) was fulfilled by the intuition of an object.157 In this way the realm of sense (Sinn) could act as a “norm” for psychological acts of judgment. But ­because sense was not itself psychological, the laws governing it ­were not ­those of psychological causality, but instead “laws sui generis et ordinis.”158 The differences between the psychological and logical realms meant that Geyser also explic­itly rejected the neo-­K antian positing of a “super-­individual ego,” to explain the universality of judgment.159 Similarly, Geyser’s logic did not concern the “special doctrines of knowledge,” such as the “question of the real­ity of the outside world.”160 Though Geyser connected Husserl’s position to the correspondence theory of truth, he recognized that the “agreement” of meaning with the intended object (Gegenstand) was ensured only if the object was grasped in “immediate evidence,” which excluded the empirical.161 As for Mercier, Geyser preferred examples that came from mathe­matics. He remarked at the end of the book that he could only make the briefest of gestures t­ oward judgments of existence, but it was sufficient, he thought, to have shown that “in the ­human sciences ­there is a set of truly objective and absolutely generally valid knowledge.”162 Geyser still had some objections. Recalling the concerns that had initially made him skeptical, he worried that Husserl had not been sufficiently strict in distinguishing “intentions” and “contents of judgment” from “acts of judgment.” This threatened to undermine Husserl’s division of logic from psy­chol­ogy.163 But over all, Husserl’s philosophy marked an impor­tant resurgence of scholastic objectivity in the relativist world of modern thought. Referring directly to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Geyser wrote with satisfaction that “in the most recent logic and psy­chol­ogy the concept of thought pro­cesses approaches again the old teachings.”164



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Messer and Geyser w ­ ere both professors in German state universities, attuned to developments in contemporaneous philosophy. But their participation in Catholic networks meant that their writings had resonance across Eu­rope, and news that neo-­scholasticism had found a modern ally in Germany quickly spread to other centers of the movement. The Belgian Léon Noël, who had studied u­ nder Mercier at the ISP from 1894– 1899 and became a professor t­here in 1905, met Geyser at a meeting of the Görres-­Gesellschaft in 1909, and wrote the first article on Husserl’s phenomenology in a language other than German the following year.165 In his 1910 paper “The Frontiers of Logic,” Noël again placed intentionality at the heart of his analy­sis.166 Husserl had challenged psychologistic thinking by teasing apart the “psychical act” and its intentional “content.” The latter was an “ideal object” governed by logical laws.167 Husserl’s analy­sis allowed Noël to relate it to the Louvain program, right down to the definition of truth, which was the “superposition” of the “intention” and the “intuition” of the intended object, both parts of thought. Noël was explicit about the connection: Husserl had come close to “the theory of objective truth that has been presented many times in this review [the Revue Neo-­Scolastique de Philosophie].”168 Noël expressed with satisfaction “the existence, in the milieux most up-­to-­date with con­temporary psy­chol­ogy, of a movement of which the course, in many re­spects, is parallel to our own.”169 Husserl’s phenomenology was attractive to Noël for another reason. The progressives had proposed marrying the old and new, where the return to medieval thought would be achieved by working through the modern critical tradition. Husserl seemed to exemplify this development. He was a philosophical insider who had come to embrace scholastic ideas. As Noël put it, linking his work to another Brentano student, Carl Stumpf, Husserl was “a convert.”170 Referring to Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, Noël recounted how Husserl had left b­ ehind his earlier psychologism. In his trajectory Husserl demonstrated how a careful working through of modern philosophy could lead one to the neo-­scholastic position. As a consequence of Noël’s interest, a small group of students gathered around him in Louvain to study phenomenology, among them René Kremer. At around this time Kremer began his doctoral thesis on Husserl, “Edmund Husserl’s Logic and Phenomenology,” which he did not

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complete u­ ntil 1919 ­because of the war.171 Other ISP students brought news of phenomenology back to their home countries. The Polish priest Konstanty Michalski in 1911 completed a thesis on Husserl’s criticism of psychologism, again drawing attention to its proximity to Mercier’s version of neo-­scholasticism, especially with regard to the understanding of truth.172 ­After completing his degree, Michalski returned to Poland, where, as rector of Jagiellonian University in Kraków during the 1930s, he used his work on medieval logic to build ties between the neo-­ Thomists and the Lvov-­Warsaw school, a connection which spurred on the reception of phenomenology in the country.173 Noël’s work attracted the attention of the Italian neo-­scholastics. In 1910 it merited an analy­sis by Gemelli in the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, and in 1911 it sparked a discussion of Husserl in one of Gemelli’s first long articles.174 Gemelli linked Husserl to Stumpf, both of whom deserved praise for defending “transcendental logic from the attacks of psychologism” and liberating the question of knowledge from “subjectivism.”175 The language was familiar. Gemelli’s discussion was a rerun, almost word for word, of parts of Noël’s article, which he cited at the end. Following Noël, Gemelli touched on the importance of intentionality for the grounding of objectivity, and he discussed the relationship between Husserl’s “ideal object” and the scholastic theory of truth. Over the next c­ ouple of years Husserl made a number of appearances in the Milan Rivista. In a 1911 review of Geyser’s Princi­ples, Emilio Chiocchetti warmly encouraged neo-­scholastics to read Husserl.176 That same year, Armato Masnovo claimed that Husserl’s essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” showed how “modern thought liberates itself, slowly but resolutely, from so many prejudices. H ­ ere it is pos­si­ble to find a good sign for the f­ uture of neo-­scholastic philosophy.”177 Gemelli was at the forefront of this movement, citing Husserl several times over the next few years.178 Gemelli’s and Noël’s discussion of Husserl then informed the work of Marcelino Arnáiz in Spain. Arnáiz had translated Mercier’s book on con­temporary psy­chol­ogy into Spanish and was one of his greatest promoters on the Iberian Peninsula. True to his interests, Arnáiz kept up-­to-­date with work being done in other neo-­scholastic centers. In his 1914 Psy­chol­ogy Founded on Experience, which according to Teresa Vilariño Picos “was diffused widely in the Hispanic world,” Arnáiz



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used Gemelli’s and Noël’s articles to integrate Husserl into a discussion of the Würzburg school.179 Again he presented the German as a convert (convertidos), an ally of the neo-­T homists in the b­ attle of objectivism against psychologism.180 Noël’s piece came back full circle to the German-­speaking world. It was cited by Martin Grabmann on April 14, 1913, during his inaugural lecture as professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Vienna, which was published the same year as The Pres­ent Value of Research in Medieval Philosophy. That Grabmann might have become aware of Husserl’s thought through Noël’s article suggests that the transnational bonds linking one neo-­scholastic to another ­were often more robust than ­those linking them to secular phi­los­o­phers writing in the same language. Grabmann claimed that the greatest advantage of historical research was that it “shows us fi­nally the way to the development and utilization of scholastic philosophy for the philosophical questions and strug­gles of the pres­ent.”181 Grabmann referred h­ ere to the progressive Thomists, both Cardinal Mercier in Louvain and the Milan school. Against ­those who ­were pessimistic about modern philosophy, lacking faith in the “capacity for the philosophia perennis’s further development and organic growth,” ­t hese neo-­scholastics had seen in “the g­ reat thinking of Aquinas . . . ​a source of light for our times.”182 Grabmann was confident that “the intellectual world of the ­great scholastics and the real wisdom of modern philosophy ­don’t oppose each other as much as is often asserted.”183 As evidence, Grabmann pointed to Husserl and the Würzburg school. Both demonstrated the “return from logical psychologism to an objectivist logic,” which brought modern epistemology in line with scholasticism.184

Conclusion The multilingual treatments of Husserl between 1909 and 1914 draw our attention to the ­great fa­cil­i­ty with which neo-­scholastic networks could circulate philosophical ideas around the continent. In a chain of references moving from Messer, through Geyser and Noël, to Michalski, Gemelli, Arnáiz, and Grabmann, word of the new philosophical movement echoed around neo-­scholastic Eu­rope. Husserl benefited from this transnational network ­because his Logical Investigations seemed to be a

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brilliant confirmation of progressive neo-­scholasticism: he was the prodigal son, a modern phi­los­o­pher who on his own initiative had realized the errors of his ways and returned to the objectivism of medieval philosophy. As the German neo-­scholastic Wladislaus Switalski wrote in 1926, Thomists saw phenomenology as a “volte-­face” in philosophy. Husserl’s work rendered the “modern thinker more responsive to the Scholastic way of putting and clarifying prob­lems.”185 We should beware of overstating this early reception, however, for two reasons. First, at the time Husserl was just one phi­los­o­pher among many who attracted the interest of neo-­scholastics. And though the reaction to Bergson’s work was far more negative, his work elicited a considerably greater response, with books published in Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere. Even among ­those thinkers who ­were positively received, Husserl’s work was almost always mentioned alongside, and often subordinated to, o­ thers—­notably Messer and Külpe from the Würzburg School.186 Second, and more impor­tant, in retrospect the neo-­scholastics’ engagement with phenomenological ideas between 1909 and 1913 would look like a flash in the pan, more impor­t ant for the way in which it framed ­later readings than for promoting phenomenology itself. In 1913 the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica announced with ­great excitement the publication of Husserl’s new journal, the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. The brief notice was a promissory note; the editors undertook to provide a fuller analy­sis, especially of Husserl’s contribution, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, in a subsequent edition.187 That longer review, however, never appeared. For when neo-­scholastics came to examine Husserl’s book more closely, they discovered that his thought had developed in a new and troubling direction—­not only rendering phenomenology dangerous, but threatening to bring down the entire progressive proj­ect.

2 Betrayal: Husserl’s Transcendental Turn and the Idealism / Realism Debate

In the years following the appearance of his Logical Investigations,

Husserl worked quietly at his new post in Göttingen, publishing only one article—­for Heinrich Rickert’s new journal, Log­os—­which expanded his earlier refutation of psychologism to include historicism.1 This public silence, however, was not the result of intellectual inactivity. Husserl’s thought was undergoing a transformation. The g­ reat innovation of the period was the epoché, which neutralized the naive presuppositions of the “natu­ral attitude,” allowing us to examine objects as they are given to us in pure immanence and thus to “clarify” their sense.2 ­Because transcendent objects are given in adumbrations and thus never exhaustively, only immanent experience provided the self-­evidence Husserl required. At first sight the epoché might not seem a dramatic departure from the Logical Investigations. In that earlier text, Husserl had also emphasized the presuppositionless description of the given, and had turned attention away from the empirical world. T ­ hese procedures had helped him demonstrate that we can intuit ideal essences. Recast as the Wesensschau (intuition of essences), and opened up by an “eidetic reduction,” such analyses ­were still crucial to the 1913 Ideas.3 Husserl even raised the possibility ­there that the epoché might leave “the world as Eidos” and other 55

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“sphere[s] of essential being” intact.4 He quickly clarified, however, that this was not the path he intended to take. The “general justification of the eidetic” could only be a first step, for Husserl no longer believed that transcendent essences gave themselves in apodictic self-­evidence.5 That level of certainty, he now thought, could be found only in the immanent experience of one’s own conscious acts.6 To justify the analyses that he had carried out in the Logical Investigations, then, Husserl had to dig deeper.7 Whereas in 1900–1901 he had bracketed existence to turn attention to a realm of ideal objectivities, by the time he wrote the 1913 Ideas Husserl saw the epoché and its radicalization in the “transcendental” or “phenomenological reduction” as means for moving back from that realm to the purity of transcendental consciousness. In §49, Husserl took this argument to its extreme conclusion. Whereas we are able to imagine the absolute annihilation of the world (Weltvernichtung), we are unable to envision a world without a subject. For this reason “consciousness, considered in its ‘purity,’ must be reckoned as a self-­contained system of being, as a system of Absolute being, into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape.”8 Transcendental subjectivity had absolute priority, and the real world was dependent upon it. Rather than real­ity being accessible through the intentionality of consciousness, now that real­ity was, “absolutely speaking, nothing at all, it has no ‘absolute essence’ whatsoever, it has the essentiality of something which in princi­ple is only intentional, only known, consciously presented as an appearance.”9 On this basis, Husserl would soon come to label his phenomenology in Ideas a “transcendental idealism.”10 Husserl’s developing thought led him to rewrite the Logical Investigations; he published a second revised version in 1913 and 1921.11 But exactly what all this meant for his broader philosophy was unclear to many readers. Take the theory of subject-­object correlation, which Husserl had developed in the fifth and sixth Logical Investigations. As we saw, Husserl had discussed ­there the correlation between act-­quality (­whether it is a wish, an assertion, a memory, and so on) and act-­matter (the way an intentional object is given to us): in dif­fer­ent “objectifying acts” the object is presented to us in dif­fer­ent ways. In the 1913 Ideas the broad outlines of this theory remained much the same, though Husserl had developed the argument and employed a new terminology. For instance, as before, he

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showed that in perception physical objects are given in adumbrations: “to remain for ever incomplete ­after this fashion is an ineradicable essential of the correlation ­Thing and Thing-­perception.”12 When we perceive a ­table, for instance, we are confronted by a par­tic­u­lar sensory given (the hyle), the “real” (reell) content of experience. Nonetheless, we ­don’t perceive the (non-­intentional) hyle. We perceive a ­t able from one side. Husserl labeled this “table-­as-­perceived” the noema. If we examined our perception carefully, we would realize that the noema includes a “horizon,” reference to a further set of adumbrations—­for instance, the ­table viewed from other ­angles—­which we experience as “empty,” but which might gain intuitive fulfillment if we change our position. Linking all ­these adumbrations together was an ideal “X,” by virtue of which we see them, despite their diversity, as pre­sen­ta­tions of the same ­table.13 In the Logical Investigations, Husserl had argued that the intentional object was ­shaped as an objective unity in the stream of consciousness by “noetic” acts of consciousness. For this reason, even in 1901, Husserl had talked about the “constitution” of the object through the acts of the subject. But that at that time it was clear that he meant by this the ways in which the subject allowed the object to manifest itself. The epoché and transcendental reduction, however, seemed to unbalance ­these analyses, moving from the evenhanded analy­sis of subject and object in their correlation, to the asserted “primacy” of the former, the way it “bestows sense.” This suggested to many readers that Husserl had settled on a constructive idealism. As Robert Sokolowski has written, Husserl’s argumentative approach and emphases easily led to the conclusion that constitution was a form of “creation, where subjectivity simply produces real­ity out of its own self.”14 Already within Ideas, Husserl resisted this conclusion, taking pains to distinguish his “transcendental idealism” from other versions. Phenomenology, he made clear, was not a subjective idealism, where the self was author of the world. Thanks to the epoché, the transcendental subject could not be identified with the empirical subject, and so the transcendental constitution of real­ity could not be seen as the willful creation of the ­human mind. Husserl had worried that he had come dangerously close to such a position in the Logical Investigations, and soon afterward he rejected the idea that the acts with which objects ­were correlated could be

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understood in psychological terms. Instead one had to abstract from concrete m ­ ental acts, just as he had abstracted from their concrete content, to gain access to their essences, which ­were not part of the world. More importantly, Husserl explic­itly distanced his work from “Berkeleyan idealism,” where the objective world was merely a “subjective illusion.” As he repeated throughout the book, the objects of consciousness w ­ ere given as transcendent, distinct from the mind that thought them. For instance, ­because the noema of perception includes a “horizon,” it was clear from a phenomenological analy­sis that the perceived object exceeded any par­tic­u­lar impression we might have of it. The rediscovery of transcendence within the immanence of inner experience explains why Husserl thought that his phenomenology, instead of denying the real world, merely clarified its meaning.15 The constitutive aspects of phenomenology did not clash with its descriptive method. Husserl remarked in a 1934 letter, “No ordinary ‘realist’ has been as realistic or as concrete as I, the phenomenological ‘idealist.’ ”16 The difficulty of Husserl’s position was compounded by textual ambiguities in the book. As Elisabeth Ströker has shown, in Ideas Husserl slipped between transcendental and mundane registers.17 On the one hand, when Husserl suggested that transcendental subjectivity was a “region of being,” distinct from other regions, he was relying on a mundane understanding of ­these terms.18 According to such a pre­sen­ta­tion, the epoché and reduction, which trained our attention on consciousness, should be understood as restrictions, prohibiting consideration of the real world of physical objects and other transcendences. This could easily lead to the conclusion that the neutralizations of the epoché and phenomenological reduction brought us to a detached subjectivity. On the other hand, Husserl argued that the distinction between inner and outer was a product of the natu­ral attitude, which had been put out of play in the transcendental reduction. From this perspective, the epoché did not bracket real­ity. It bracketed the naturalistic and scientific assumptions with which we normally burden that real­ity. It should be understood not as a shift in attention, but as a change in attitude, the pro­cess by which we recognize our beliefs about the world as beliefs. That is why Husserl could argue that we have not “lost” anything ­a fter the reduction. Instead we have “won the ­whole of absolute being, which

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properly understood conceals in itself all transcendences, ‘constituting’ them within itself.”19 While the mundane reading of Husserl’s epoché suggested a world-­ denying idealism, the transcendental reading offered impor­tant correctives to this view. First, it suggested that although the epoché bracketed certain existence claims as uncriticized presuppositions, ­these ­were not excluded by right from the transcendental sphere. They might be reestablished through rigorous phenomenological analy­sis. The epoché and reduction could be understood as methodological and provisional. Second, this reading raised the possibility that the epoché and reduction did not bring us to a detached and worldless subject. In the unpublished Ideas II, which he had composed at about the same time as the first volume, and then in l­ater works, Husserl showed how the transcendental realm could be understood to include corporeality and intersubjectivity. A close examination of consciousness would demonstrate that we are embodied beings within a community, which undercut the criticism that Husserl’s phenomenology was a solipsistic idealism.20 This textual ambiguity was complicated by another ambiguity concerning the status of the “transcendent” object discovered in pure consciousness.21 If, ­after the reduction, we experienced the object as transcendent, did that mean that the object transcended (was distinct from) the noema—­the perceived, ­imagined, desired “as such”?22 That is what Husserl seemed to suggest at certain moments in Ideas. In introducing the term “noema,” Husserl described it as “ ‘meaning’ [Sinn] precisely as it lies ‘immanent’ in the experience of perception, of judgment, of liking, and so forth.” According to this logic, the noema was governed by princi­ ples that w ­ ere entirely separate from ­those governing the transcendent object. Husserl took the example of a tree: “The tree plain and s­ imple, the ­thing in nature, is as dif­fer­ent as it can be from this perceived tree as such [the noema].” Whereas “the tree plain and ­simple can burn away . . . ​ the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence—­cannot burn away. It has no chemical ele­ments, no forces, no real properties.”23 Distinguishing the noema from the real object, Husserl argued that the former should be understood as the means through which the subject is related (sich beziehen) to the latter.24 The noema thus served as a sort of intermediary.25 This reading often went along with the

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restrictive interpretation of the reduction, but it provided a way to save Husserl from his idealism. The implication was that the epoché and reduction had turned the phenomenologist’s gaze to the realm of sense, and thereby away from the realm of existence. But that meant that we could distinguish the constitution of the noema from that of the transcendent object. The acts of the transcendental subject merely ­shaped the meaning of the object. Husserl’s phenomenology of meanings left open space for a metaphysics of being. At other moments, however, Husserl suggested that the noema stretched to include the real intended object. Indeed, when Husserl had first related the noema to meaning (Sinn) in the passage quoted above, he made certain to add that this should be understood “in a very extended [erweiterter] meaning of the term.”26 Husserl felt the need for such precautions ­because he did not want to pres­ent the noema and extra-­mental ­thing as separate, which raised the question of how they w ­ ere related. Such questions had bedev­iled “sign” theories of perception b­ ecause they suggested that “two realities must confront each other, whereas only one of ­these is pres­ent and pos­si­ble.”27 In line with his earlier criticism of Brentano and repre­sen­ta­tionalism, Husserl argued that “the spatial t­hing that we see is, despite all its transcendence, perceived. . . . ​We are not given an image or a sign in its place.”28 That is to say that in the noema, the t­hing was given in propria persona, albeit intended in dif­fer­ent ways (from dif­fer­ent perspectives, in dif­fer­ent types of acts).29 The intentional content or “meaning” of the act was only one part or “phase” of the noema, which also included a “noematic nucleus,” the “pure X.”30 It would be wrong to imagine that ­there was a distinct “­thing” lying beyond the reach of phenomenological analy­sis. Similar arguments allowed Husserl to criticize the Kantian notion of a “­thing in itself.” This latter reading of the noema could support an idealist interpretation of Husserl’s Ideas in the sense that it denied that t­ here was a real­ity that escaped our constitutive powers. But it also allowed a realist interpretation. It showed that we grasped the transcendent object directly within immanent experience, not a pale imitation or an intermediary meaning. As such, constitution could not be thought of as a form of subjective creation. It was better understood as the condition of the possibility of the object’s manifestation, what allows the transcendent to appear as

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transcendent, the real to appear as real. Constitution involved both subjective and objective poles.31 It is significant that Husserl would sometimes downplay the role of the subject in this pro­cess, discussing how the object “constitutes itself.”32 ­Later Husserl would further limit the idea of constitution by referring to a primordial “facticity” or Urhyle, which was prior to any participation of the ego and which motivated it.33 Much of the textual ambiguity in Ideas would be cleared up ­a fter World War II as scholars began to examine the totality of Husserl’s texts, including his unpublished manuscripts. But for scholars in the early twentieth ­century, the 1913 work was a Rorschach test—­open to a range of dif­fer­ent and often conflicting interpretations, which reflected its readers’ concerns and anx­i­eties as much as the philosophical content of the book. In this light we can perhaps imagine circumstances u­ nder which neo-­scholastics would have embraced Ideas. The book was idealist only in a specific sense, and in his account of perception ­there Husserl seemed to promote an immediate realism, arguing that t­here was no “repre­sen­ta­tion” mediating between self and ­thing. Moreover, the earlier Logical Investigations could not be cast as unequivocally realist. Husserl had been prepared to accept the label “idealism” for that book, in the sense that he had distinguished a realm of ideal meanings from a realm of psychological meanings.34 From this perspective we can identify strong lines of continuity between the two: Husserl had embarked on his transcendental proj­ect in order to clarify the sense of his earlier eidetic analyses, and thus to secure the discoveries of the Logical Investigations. In demonstrating how a modern transcendental philosophy could show how we grasp objects and ideas that transcend the ­human mind, Husserl’s Ideas might have been read as another modern conversion, a new meeting between nova et vetera. But this was not to be, at least not at first. The publication of Ideas was experienced by neo-­scholastics as a betrayal—­both of Husserl’s earlier work and, by implication, of their own proj­ect. In the initial aftermath they fixated on the way the “new scholastic” of 1901 had restyled himself as an heir to Descartes and Kant, ­those thinkers who, according to the neo-­ scholastic narrative, had set modern philosophy on a path to de­cadence. They cast Husserl’s intellectual development as a conversion from realism to idealism, fixating on the infamous §49, and homing in on his asserted

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priority of immanent consciousness over the real, existing world. 35 And they came to read the epoché and reduction as the means by which Husserl had excluded consideration of the real world, rather than as a first step ­toward the clarification of its meaning. To the extent that they deemed Husserl’s work redeemable, they argued that it needed to be embedded in a metaphysics, which would supplement the phenomenological analy­sis of ­human knowing and meaning with an account of existing being. That is, for neo-­scholastics, the subtleties of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy mattered less than the fact that it was presented as an idealism.

The Strict Thomist Challenge to Progressive Neo-­Scholasticism To understand why progressive neo-­scholastics settled on this one-­sided reading, we need to make a brief detour to the Vatican. Leo XIII had died in 1903, and his successor, Pius X, had a­ dopted a more hostile attitude to modernity. As the historian Jürgen Mettepenningen has written, following Pius  X’s accession, “Leo XIII’s response to the call for a philosophical foundation for theology, as a means to allow the Church to enter into dialogue with modernity on a philosophical-­theological basis, evolved into a philosophical ‘superstructure’ with modernity as the e­ nemy.”36 The new direction became clear when in 1903 Pius placed the modernist theology and biblical criticism of Alfred Loisy on the index of prohibited books. In 1907 the Office of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition condemned key parts of his work, especially ­those “dangerous errors concerning the natu­ral sciences, the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and the principal mysteries of the faith.”37 Loisy was excommunicated in 1908. But he was merely an example for the Church. Other so-­called modernists—­such as Maurice Blondel, Lucien Laberthonnière, George Tyrrell, Ernesto Buonaiuti, and Salvatore Minocchi—­hoped for a similar renewal of Catholicism. They also saw Thomist orthodoxy, especially that presented by journals like La Civiltà Cattolica and taught in the Pontifical Universities, as an obstacle. The modernist crisis resulted in the promulgation of a papal decree in 1910 requiring all Catholic bishops, priests, and professors to take an “antimodernism” oath, and led to the proclamation of twenty-­four

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Thomistic T ­ heses in July 1914 that would stand as the irrefutable basis of all philosophy.38 Thus what began as criticism of historicist theology, a criticism embraced by thinkers across the scholastic spectrum, mutated into a wide-­ranging repudiation of modern thought. Such tendencies allowed Loisy, in his published response to the Pope, to figure his expulsion from the Church as an attack on the modernity tout court: “Now the positions have been taken: the Roman Church, relying on the idea of absolute revelation . . . ​refuses any concession to the modern spirit, modern science, and modern society . . . ​the divorce is complete.”39 Though the modernist crisis did not implicate the progressive neo-­ scholastics directly and ­there was no real danger of condemnation, it did give them cause for concern. Louvain neo-­scholastics ­were often associated with Blondel, whom Mercier had helped protect from ecclesiastical censure, and the question of history, around which the modernist crisis revolved, was also central to their work.40 Maurice de Wulf and Martin Grabmann, associated with the Louvain school and the Görres-­ Gesellschaft, respectively, took the lead on the historical study of scholasticism in a way that many of their Thomist opponents strongly resisted. For this reason, the Louvain school had to respond to the crisis with g­ reat care. In a lead article for the Revue Néo-­Scolastique from 1908, Mercier praised Loisy’s condemnation.41 But he suggested that the prob­lem was not so much that the modernists had paid attention to modern thought, but rather (using a criticism that was more often hurled in the other direction) that they had “obeyed too docilely.”42 ­Later in the same edition, Noël also addressed the controversy, agreeing that Loisy had merited the Pope’s censure. In attacking Loisy, however, Noël did not endorse the split between Catholicism and modern science and philosophy that Loisy had diagnosed. He suggested instead that it was Loisy’s assertion of such a split that was dangerous, providing arms to Catholicism’s opponents. According to Noël, Loisy’s attack should make the Church redouble its efforts to engage with modern philosophy. Catholic thinkers had to combat Loisy’s conclusions by refuting his premise.43 Despite ­these attempts to insulate the progressive proj­ect from the modernist fallout, the crisis emboldened Mercier’s critics, including ­those in Rome, in Germany around the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, and in Paris at the Institut Catholique and the Revue

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Thomiste. T ­ hese neo-­scholastics rejected Mercier’s “progressive” proj­ect, and instead proposed a “strict” or “paleo-” Thomism, which placed utmost value on fidelity to Aquinas’s texts. Much of their criticism concentrated on Mercier’s reformulation of the correspondence theory as the comparison between two concepts, not between a concept and real­ity. For them, Mercier’s strategy for challenging the reigning positivism of the day, and thus for securing the objectivity of logical truth over and above the empirical, had led him a ­little too close to idealism. In other words, Mercier’s response to the first epistemological prob­lem had left him weakened and vulnerable in his response to the second. While Mercier in Louvain prioritized the “ideal world” of essences, his critics, like Edmond Domet de Vorges, Albert Farges (both l­ ater named to the Papal Acad­emy), and Émile Peillaube, affirmed the priority of the sensible, reemphasizing observation and existential judgments.44 It is in this context that we can understand the tectonic shifts in progressive neo-­scholasticism in the years leading up to World War I. As strict Thomists increasingly challenged Mercier’s ideas, some progressives began to argue that they needed a new approach. The first rumblings ­were heard in Italy. The inaugural volume of the Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica had appeared in 1909, right in the m ­ iddle of the modernist crisis, and this revealed tensions within its editorial team from the start. In 1910 Gemelli was asked to use his scientific authority to defend the miracles at Lourdes, a defense that resulted in a book and a book tour around Italy the following year.45 While Gemelli remained critical of the strict Thomist line, he was increasingly uncomfortable with the Louvain position.46 Gemelli’s intellectual shifting embarrassed Canella, who felt it necessary to resign from the journal. Gemelli was left as the sole editor.47 Their falling out has a scandalous epilogue. Once war broke out, Canella enlisted in the Italian army; he was reported missing in action in 1916. Ten years l­ater his wife, Giulia, declared an unidentified amnesiac in a ­mental hospital to be her long-­lost husband. Despite numerous ­trials, which revealed the man to be the petty criminal Mario Bruneri, Giulia Canella lived with him, and they had three c­ hildren. The story served as the inspiration of Luigi Pirandello’s 1929 play Come tu mi vuoi. The changing leadership at the Rivista coincided with developments in secular philosophy that also encouraged a rethinking of progressivism.

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The positivists, who had absorbed so much of the neo-­scholastics’ time and energy only a de­cade before, no longer appeared the most pressing opponents. Instead a self-­confident idealism, exemplified by Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce in Italy, the neo-­K antians in Germany, and Léon Brunschvicg in France, had taken center stage. 48 Mercier had focused his energies on proving the objectivity of judgment (the first epistemological question). But in the changed climate, this was no longer the point of contention. In his famous attack on scholasticism from 1909, Gentile had declared that he “agreed with Mercier. . . . ​Thomist truth is not our relation with t­ hings, but rather our relation with ourselves.”49 The real ­battle now lay elsewhere, and Mercier’s criteriology was not equipped to fight it.50 In response to t­ hese changes Gemelli laid down the gauntlet to his Belgian and German counter­parts. In a 1912 article written for the Louvain journal and then republished with some modifications in the Philosophisches Jahrbuch the following year, Gemelli suggested that changing times required a rethinking of the neo-­scholastic proj­ect.51 ­Because positivism “was disappearing,” scholasticism needed a “new orientation”: “What is the point of wasting energy and time to fight the d ­ ying?”52 As before, it was necessary to confront modern philosophy bravely, work through its claims, in order to guide it back to the truths of scholastic thought. But now neo-­scholastics needed to redirect their energies to the defense, not of objectivity—­“­there, ­there is common ground”—­but of realism, from the first to the second of Mercier’s epistemological prob­lems. Homing in on the weak point of Mercier’s system—­How could we ensure the “adaequatio rei et intellectus”?—­Gemelli explic­itly related his argument to the debate between strict and progressive Thomism.53 The new orientation was realized in works by Emilio Chiocchetti engaging with Gentile and Croce and emphasizing the importance of the “concrete concept,” the work of Amato Masnovo, who prioritized the grasp of ­actual existing ­t hings over the ideal in his “realist subordinatism,”54 and Francesco Olgiati, who ­after Canella’s departure was Gemelli’s main collaborator at the journal. 55 Though Olgiati paid lip ser­v ice to the progressive stance, according to van Riet his positions “recalled the old dogmatism” and “­were inspired by The Crisis of Certainty of Msgr Farges.”56 The ruckus in Milan also provided an opportunity for younger

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scholars, who ­were more critical of the Louvain line. In 1910 M. Gentile (not related to Giovanni) remarked on the poverty of Mercier’s proof of the real­ity of the object of judgment: “The princi­ple of causality assures us only of the existence of an object, not of the conformity of our concept with it.”57 What is crucial ­here is not that the Milanese embraced a strict Thomism—­t hey did not—­but rather that in the wake of the modernist crisis they focused on what strict Thomists had regarded as the central weakness of the progressive proj­ect: they shifted their attention from the defense of objectivity to the defense of realism.58 This re­orientation was influential elsewhere. Christian Schreiber, who in the first years of the new ­century had praised Mercier highly, criticized him in the 1914 edition of the Philosophisches Jahrbuch for his reliance on the princi­ple of causality to prove the real­ity of the object of judgment. Reiterating arguments previously put forward in strict Thomistic journals like the Revue Thomiste, Schreiber argued that the causality argument only proved the “existence of an in some way constituted non-­ego . . . ​If I adopt the standpoint of negative general methodological doubt, who guarantees that this conclusion of the exterior world is not the result of only a psychological predisposition?”59 Mercier’s work was also being reconsidered in Belgium. As Schreiber wrote, “even in the most elevated circles of the Louvain school, the so-­called ‘Louvain’ solution to the fundamental epistemological prob­lem is being seen as inadequate.”60 Already by 1905 Mercier’s student Charles Sentroul had sought to pose Mercier’s ideas in realist terms. He argued that “the words ­thing or essence, pos­si­ble being, and existing being express ­under three dif­fer­ent ever more comprehensive aspects, that which responds to the s­ imple notion of being: ens. Indeed, the word being expresses properly the actuality of existence. . . . ​Nothing can be called being, even as a ­simple essence, without implying at least some relationship with ­actual existence. It is in this sense that the real, in the full sense of the word, expresses what exists.”61 Sentroul criticized Mercier’s assimilation of empirical judgments to ideal ones on this basis. Sentroul’s concept of being transcended the distinction between the real and the ideal, rooting them both in existence. The most impor­tant development in the Louvain school, however, was that orchestrated by Noël, who in the years following Gemelli’s call for a

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new orientation had embarked on an ambitious revision of Mercier’s epistemology.62 Writing in 1926, Noël asserted that we must remember the date of Mercier’s work and recognize the “growing distance which separates us from the end of the nineteenth ­century” when it was written. The advance of philosophy—­“Positivism is dead, Kantianism has gone back to the objective idealism of its founder”—­meant that neo-­scholasticism also had to change.63 Mercier’s work was valuable, Noël argued, not for the specifics of his doctrines, but instead for his approach: “To seek in present-­day discussion the points of insertion where the old Thomistic thinking could gradually enter, prove itself fruitful, form alliances, grow young again by the intusception of fresh sap—is not such the formula, to-­day as yesterday according to which scholastic philosophy must advance?”64 The first results of this revision can be seen in a paper published in 1913 in the Annales de l’ISP, titled “Note on the ‘Prob­lem’ of Knowledge.” As in the other reformulations, Noël focused his attention on the relationship between the ideal object, which was understood as objective, and the real­ity to which it was supposed to apply. Repeating many of Mercier’s own arguments, Noël considered Aquinas’s definition of truth as correspondence: As it was traditionally presented the correspondence theory made the prob­lem of truth “insoluble. We never know anything except by knowledge, thus we can only compare the known object to a known object, and if the known object is an image, we w ­ ill only compare im65 ages.” Noël suggested, however, that the difficulty only emerged as such ­because phi­los­o­phers relied on a spatial meta­phor dividing inside from out. That is why he placed the word “prob­lem” in quotation marks in the title. We could, Noël suggested, think of the relationship between the real and consciousness in a dif­fer­ent way: “When I know the real, the term immediately given to consciousness is the real object. To reach that object, ­there is no need for any reasoning, but only the full consciousness of what it knows.” Such an argument, “the doctrine of St. Thomas,” was, Noël asserted, “the only one that closes the door to idealism.” 66 By reflecting on the act of consciousness, we could come to the certainty that phenomena “are quite simply that t­ hing, not in its entirety and not in all its aspects, but ­under one aspect which is nonetheless inseparable from it.”67 In the 1920s Noël would call his theory “immediate realism.”

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Coping with Betrayal Other f­ actors, of course, played a role in the changing neo-­scholastic attitude to phenomenology. In August 1914 Louvain was a victim of the German offensive, which laid waste to the library, and Mercier became one of the most prominent critics of the German occupation. In the French-­speaking world, German thought quickly became taboo. But though t­hese developments may have contributed to its intensity, the content of the neo-­scholastic dispute with phenomenology was ­shaped by the cumulative effect of two shifts: Husserl’s transcendental turn and progressive neo-­scholasticism’s new orientation. ­Because progressives had to contend with the accusation that their earlier thought had made them vulnerable to idealism, they ­were profoundly perturbed by the explic­itly idealist trajectory of a thinker to whom they had yoked their proj­ect. Husserl’s conversion to transcendental idealism lent weight to the argument that the progressive strategy for proving the objectivity of knowledge had led them to sacrifice the real world, just at the time that this was being presented as the philosophical sin of modernity. Over the next few years, neo-­scholastic readings of Husserl’s phenomenology crystallized around this sense of betrayal. At the very least, Thomists had to weigh the value of Husserl’s philosophy for proving the objectivity of thought against its idealist dangers. Thus, while figures like Grabmann could continue to refer to phenomenology as the resurgence of scholasticism in modern philosophy, o­ thers w ­ ere more circumspect.68 In a 1921 article for the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, Jacques Maritain presented Husserl as one of a very small number of bright spots in German philosophy, which had other­wise fallen into chaos. Husserl, according to Maritain, had “energetically defended the irreducible originality of logic . . . ​[and] reduced psychologism to absurdity, showing the impossibility of the consequences at which it arrived.” But though he praised the work of Ideas, Maritain worried that “for [Husserl], objective being remains of a purely ideal nature.”69 The Jesuit Caspar Nink, writing for Scholastik in 1928, spoke for many when judging Husserl’s work: It was “very valuable! Except that one should avoid in the evaluation of Husserl’s claims every­thing that flows from his ac­cep­tance of platonic ideas.”70 Particularly impor­tant for the neo-­scholastics was the question

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of the Wesensschau, the aspect of Husserl’s thought that ­under a dif­fer­ent name had first attracted them to phenomenology. It was the subject of numerous discussions in Germany and elsewhere during the 1920s, treating the relationship of the phenomenological intuition of essences (seen as too direct and thus prone to idealism) to scholastic abstraction (founded on existing real­ity).71 The twin changes in Husserl’s position and neo-­scholastic philosophy posed a par­tic­u­lar challenge for ­those who had embraced phenomenology earlier. As we have seen, in his 1913 “Note on the ‘Prob­lem’ of Knowledge,” Noël had responded to the new orientation in neo-­scholasticism and shifted his attention to an “immediate realism.” Given my account above, one might imagine that Noël could have drawn on Husserl’s Ideas in his argument. But instead Noël presented phenomenology as a sign that psychologism was no longer a pressing issue.72 Husserl went from being a valuable ally in the current ­battle to an indication that attention needed to be focused elsewhere.73 In the 1925 edition of the essay in his Notes on Thomist Epistemology, Noël removed the reference to Husserl altogether. When he did mention Husserl, his remarks w ­ ere tinged with ambivalence. In a 1926 article for the recently founded American journal The New Scholasticism, he claimed that Husserl’s phenomenology had led his followers to lose “all interest in real­ity itself.”74 So too Noël’s student René Kremer put aside his dissertation on Husserl, which was never published. Phenomenology still cropped up in his writing, both in t­hose books and in the regular “epistemological bulletins” he wrote for the Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie, but it was not the main focus of his work.75

Xavier Zubiri: A Supplemental Metaphysics It is worth discussing at greater length three attempts to cope with the ambivalent relationship between neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology: ­those of Xavier Zubiri, Joseph Geyser, and Edith Stein. Zubiri was impor­ tant for a w ­ hole generation of phenomenologists in Spain, including, José Gaos, the prolific translator of Husserl and Heidegger’s works. A seminarian who was a priest for about fifteen years, Zubiri began his education at the height of the modernist crisis. The crisis was felt particularly acutely at the bilingual College of Santa Maria in San Sebastian, Spain,

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which Zubiri had entered for high school. It was run by the French Marianist order and staffed in large part by teachers who had fled France ­a fter the suppression of religious ­orders ­there at the beginning of the c­ entury.76 The Marianists had educated Blondel, and the Catholic Bergsonian Édouard le Roy had taught at the ­sister school, the Collège Stanislas in Paris. When such allegiances ­were no longer acceptable, Marianist professors leaned t­ oward the progressive strand of neo-­scholasticism. In a series of lectures in 1909, Zubiri’s philosophy professor Domingo Lázaro identified the Louvain school as exemplary of the intellectual regeneration that Catholicism required. Afterward, Mercier’s Philosophy Course became regular reading material for the young Zubiri, alongside the work of Spanish Mercierians Juan Zaragüeta and Marcelino Arnáiz, who first introduced Zubiri to Husserl.77 While Zubiri retained an interest in modernists like Laberthonnière and Blondel—in a letter from the period he admitted, “My ideas, always turned more to what we could call the limit of what is admissible, plunge my spirit into a continual crisis”78 —­h is official education brought him even closer to Louvain.79 ­A fter studying ­under Zaragüeta directly at the Madrid Seminary from 1915–1918, and a short stint attending Ortega y Gasset’s classes at the Central University in Madrid, in 1920 Zubiri went to Louvain, where, u­ nder Noël’s direction, he wrote his licentiate: “The Prob­lem of Objectivity according to Edmund Husserl, I: Pure Logic.”80 Based upon this work, and ­after a brief time in Rome, in 1921 Zubiri would submit his doctoral dissertation at the Central University in Madrid: Essay on a Phenomenological Theory of Judgment. It was the first extended treatment of Husserl in Spanish.81 ­Later he traveled to Freiburg to study with Husserl and Heidegger in person.82 Zubiri’s licentiate thesis conforms in many ways to the early Louvain reading. Focusing predominantly on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, it upheld the ideal of objectivity against the Kantians and the positivists, and spent most of its energies clarifying Husserl’s criticism of psychologism and his theory of intentionality.83 Zubiri did embrace what he called the “phenomenological reduction,” but claimed that it brought Husserl from the realm of contingent facts to that of immutable and eternal essences.84 Drawing explicit parallels with Aquinas, Zubiri wrote that rather than contemplating the object, “the intellect can aim at its own act, and

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thus we have an intentio secunda.” In this case “the object loses . . . ​its ontological character and acquires a character of pure virtuality: it is a pure essence.”85 In his account Zubiri chose to bypass the prob­lems raised by Husserl’s intellectual development. In the thesis he mostly ignored ­those aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology that other Thomists attacked. For instance, he did not discuss transcendental constitution, and he was guided predominantly by the Logical Investigations. But Zubiri nonetheless made a number of gestures ­toward this development, pointing to moments where Husserl had gone wrong: “He ­will push this autonomous character of intentionality too far, which ­will lead phenomenology ­toward a form of idealism.”86 Zubiri also suggested that Husserl had insufficiently distinguished between the critical and descriptive viewpoints, so that his pre­sen­ta­tion of logic came close to “dogmatism.”87 The criticisms would come out more clearly in Zubiri’s doctoral dissertation, which he defended the same year in Madrid. Zubiri still cleaved to Mercier and the Logical Investigations in asserting the existence of a realm of ideal objects, which ensured the objectivity of thought. “If ideal objects are not contents of consciousness, and some of t­ hose objects (mathematical objects, for example) are not existent realities in the external world . . . ​it ­will turn out that t­ hose ideal objects belong neither to consciousness, nor to the world. They are a third world sui generis; the world of ideas, as Plato would say.”88 But now Zubiri started to won­der ­whether Husserl was able to account fully for this ideal realm. He added in a footnote, “­There remain profound traces of subjectivism in Husserl’s work, which in my opinion can only be avoided by a critical incorporation of certain scholastic-­Aristotelian notions into con­temporary philosophy.”89 Zubiri’s doubts that Husserl’s phenomenology was an apt ally for Mercier’s philosophical proj­ect quickly expanded to include that proj­ect too. Writing to a mentor in 1921, Zubiri admitted that “­after six years of philosophical and historical criticism to found an ideal, I see that my spirit falls from fatigue and exhaustion, letting itself be tossed around by the waves of an irremediable agnosticism.”90 In a review of Brentano five years ­later, Zubiri argued that modern thought had only demonstrated that ­things are in­de­pen­dent of consciousness. The real task for the “con­temporary soul,” he argued, was to reach “real being.” 91 That is why, around 1928,

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Zubiri sought a realist corrective to phenomenology. He recalled in 1980, “For phenomenologists, ‘­things’ ­were the objective and ideal correlate of consciousness. Now this seemed insufficient to me. . . . ​During that phase of my thought, I was concretely attracted by questions of ontology and metaphysics. Thus, phenomenology effaced itself slowly in my mind, and became an abandoned source of inspiration.”92 This realist tendency only strengthened in the “metaphysical phase” of Zubiri’s thought ­after 1944, during which he presented philosophy as a study of “the real qua real.”93

Joseph Geyser: The Divine Subject Zubiri chose to keep Husserl’s early investigations separate from the ­later transcendental phenomenology, and thus when he followed neo-­ scholastic trends to consider questions of existence, he appealed to other philosophical schools. Phenomenology had to be completed by a (non-­ phenomenological) metaphysics. In Germany, however, Catholics faced Husserl’s transcendental idealism head on. B ­ ecause he was largely responsible for the first enthusiastic reception of Husserl, Geyser was compelled to respond quickly and decisively to the shifts. In his 1916 book, New and Old Ways of Philosophy: A Discussion of the Princi­ples of Knowledge with Reference to Edmund Husserl’s Attempt at a New Foundation, Geyser provided an overview of Husserl’s thought, suggesting that it was a synthesis of Descartes and Aristotle. Geyser was generous in his pre­sen­ ta­t ion, recalling Husserl’s role in breaking the “psychologistic spell.” But he reserved some critical words for Husserl’s idealism, and declared that he wanted to refound Husserl’s thought “on realistic ground.”94 As Kurt Huber has written, h­ ere Geyser’s early polemic against psychologism “took a backseat to the criticism of transcendental idealism.” In other words, Geyser joined other progressives in following the new orientation.95 Husserl, according to Geyser, had parted ways with Aristotle and the scholastics over the question of “real universals.” Whereas the “old way” had asserted that “essences” (Wesen) ­were “ ‘objects’ not simply in the sense of ideal objects of knowledge, but in the sense of real entities,” Husserl ­adopted what Geyser called a “transcendentalism.”96 Husserl’s

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transcendental perspective could be traced, according to Geyser, back to the distinction he made in the Logical Investigations between meaning and object.97 The former was ideal in the sense that it was atemporal.98 For this reason, Husserl assumed, it could be neither part of temporal real­ity nor a real (temporal) part of consciousness. And, eschewing traditional Platonism and Christian options, Husserl denied that it could be found in a topos ouranios or in the mind of God.99 For Geyser, then, Husserl’s decision to root meaning in the “transcendental” realm was simply a recognition that it did not fit anywhere ­else. Geyser thought that this was only a verbal solution. His criticism was based on a flat-­out refusal of the transcendental. First, Geyser declared himself unable to understand what a transcendental realm might be. “If something exists,” he argued, “it exists ­either in consciousness or outside of consciousness,” tertium non datur.100 The inescapability of this option implied that Husserl was unable to secure his division between meanings and psychic acts, and thus his transcendental phenomenology always threatened to collapse into a descriptive psy­chol­ogy.101 Second, Geyser rejected Husserl’s idealism. He distinguished phenomenology from ontology. While “the notion of nature and the knowledge [of it] grounded ­there” was dependent upon “sensations, perceptions, and intentional acts of thought,” this was not true of “nature itself.”102 Taking the princi­ple of causality, Geyser asserted that t­ here also occurred some causal pro­cesses “of which no-­one has sense impressions, and thus also which no one perceives.” Clocks tick even when we ­aren’t at home, leaves fall from a tree even if no one is looking. And yet, according to Geyser, taking a rather narrow view of Husserl’s correlationism, ­t hese pro­cesses could not be classed as real in phenomenology. Consequently, Husserl was unable to explain how such unseen pro­cesses ­were “effective” (wirksam). The recognition of such pro­cesses required a form of real­ity that was in­de­pen­ dent of all ­human experience.103 To provide his solution to the prob­lems in Husserl’s theory, Geyser turned to Suárezian ontology. Each object, he argued, had both essence (Sosein) and existence (Dasein), but ­these ­were not ­really distinct: “Essence does not have existence, but is itself existing.” For this reason, “the splitting of the entity . . . ​into its essence and existence is the work of an abstracting perception.”104 If existence and essence ­were ultimately inseparable, the

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epoché could not fully exclude the former, and so, though h­ umans ­were able to grasp an essence, that did not mean that subjectivity was its constituting source. To argue his point, Geyser chose an entity that, he suggested, was constituted by the ­human subject: emotion. But according to Geyser, the act by which a subject constituted its emotions was dif­ fer­ent from the act by which it “knew” (erkannt) them.105 That is, Geyser used the example of emotions to argue that one could analytically distinguish knowing and constituting, holding open the possibility that other objects “known” by the ­human subject could exist in­de­pen­dently of it. ­Human subjectivity constituted the meaning of its objects, but not ­those objects themselves. To explain the constitution of the latter, Geyser appealed to divine creation. In an argument that could equally apply to Husserl, Geyser asserted that “Kant’s proposition, that the understanding is the creator of nature, contains deep truth. But this understanding is not the limited h­ uman log­os, but the infinite, eternal, divine mind, which can recognize with absolute clarity and order the w ­ hole multiplicity of 106 necessities and possibilities.” The identification of the transcendental subject with God solved the two prob­lems Geyser thought he had identified in Husserl’s phenomenology. First, it allowed Geyser to explain the atemporal nature of essences without concocting a new transcendental sphere. B ­ ecause God stood above time, the objects constituted by divine consciousness could be atemporal.107 Second, the divine subject could, through the pro­cess of ­free “creation” (Schöpfung), both grant existence to merely pos­si­ble objects and institute causal laws in nature.108 God was thus the foundation of real, temporal existence, which was in­de­pen­dent of ­human understanding even if we could still access it. In short, for Geyser the appropriate solution to the prob­lems of Husserl’s idealism was the belief in God. Responding to this interpretation in 1916, one of Husserl’s collaborators, Alexander Pfänder, declared that, while philosophically rich and sharp, Geyser was ultimately a “fanatical firebrand” (fanatischer Feuergeist).109

Edith Stein: A Foundation in Faith The most famous and influential confrontation between Husserl and scholasticism was Edith Stein’s contribution to Husserl’s Festschrift, published in 1929. Stein had first encountered Husserl in her readings of the

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Würzburg school while a student in Breslau, and this experience led her to study with the “Master” himself in Göttingen.110 ­Later Stein would be Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg. Already in Göttingen Stein found threads in Husserl’s work drawing her to Catholicism, and during this period she came u­ nder the influence of Max Scheler.111 Stein l­ater wrote that “phenomenology” showed her the way into “the majestic t­ emple of scholastic thought.”112 That intellectual conversion led to a personal one in the late 1910s. Particularly impor­tant for this ­were Stein’s friendships with other phenomenologists, especially Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, and she was baptized in 1922 while visiting Conrad-­Martius at her orchard farm in Bergzabern.113 From 1925 onward, at the instigation of the Jesuit Erich Przywara, Stein started translating Aquinas, starting with the text that served as the linchpin for the progressive proj­ect: De Veritate.114 As she wrote in a letter to Roman Ingarden, in studying scholasticism, she and Przywara had the same goal: “a confrontation between traditional Catholic and modern philosophy.”115 The translation brought out the commonalties between phenomenology and Aquinas. According to the phi­los­o­pher Peter Wust, it “presented to modern phenomenologists, still bound by subjectivism, the greatest phenomenologist of the objectivist ­Middle Ages as a clear mirror of their own ideas.”116 Like the neo-­scholastics, however, Stein was profoundly disappointed by Husserl’s Ideas, which for her threatened to collapse into solipsism.117 Her doctoral dissertation on empathy strengthened already existing doubts about Husserl’s idealism, in that it posed each subject as equally an object for other subjects, and opened up the question of au­then­tic religious consciousness.118 When she arrived in Freiburg as Husserl’s assistant, she increasingly came to clash with his positions. In a February 1917 letter to Ingarden she asserted that she had experienced “a breakthrough. Now I imagine I know pretty well what constitution is—­but with a break from idealism. An absolutely existing physical nature on the one hand, a distinctly structured subjectivity on the other, seem to me to be prerequisites before an intuiting nature can constitute itself.” This reading, she ­didn’t hesitate to note, was phenomenological “heresy.”119 Stein’s conflicted relationship to her teacher motivated the essay “Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas: An attempted Comparison,” which was published in the 1929 volume of the Jahrbuch celebrating Husserl’s seventieth birthday. Stein had first

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composed the essay as a conversation between the two men: Aquinas appeared at Husserl’s door ­after the guests at the former’s birthday party had all departed. Heidegger, as editor of the Festschrift, had rejected the first version, and Stein rewrote it in a more formal style. Yet the sense of a confrontation between two worldviews remains in the final document.120 Starting off by claiming Aquinas’s hidden influence on Husserl through Brentano (an influence asserted in the original version by Aquinas himself),121 Stein structured the essay around a series of oppositions, between a defining characteristic of modern philosophy and what she presented as a broader and more satisfactory medieval version: Stein opposed critical to dogmatic philosophy; egocentric to theocentric thought; ontology (of essences) to a realist metaphysics (which took existence into account); phenomenological to scholastic intuition. The foundational division concerned reason: both phi­los­o­phers placed their trust in it, but Thomas’s was a “super­natural” (übernatürliche) version. ­Because Husserl denied any reason beyond that to which h­ umans have access, the stepwise progression of natu­ral reason governed his account. But the insuperable limitations of humanity meant that Husserl was never able to achieve the certainty and foundation he was looking for, causing him to embrace ever more radical forms of the reduction, first to essences and then to pure consciousness. According to Stein, this was a futile search for an ultimate ground that pushed Husserl into the dead end of transcendental idealism. If the intemperate desire for secure knowledge led Husserl into the enclosure of consciousness, Stein needed to find another way to access the real. She found such an access in Aquinas, for whom true and certain knowledge could be founded on faith (Glauben). Faith, according to Stein, was our way of participating in divine knowledge: “The w ­ hole truth is that t­ here is a knowledge that grasps fully, that is not an infinite pro­cess, but an infinite peaceful plenitude.”122 Such divine knowledge both marked the limits of and could supplement the knowledge won by natu­ral reason. Stein’s reliance on faith to guide philosophy solved for her some of the central prob­lems of Husserl’s phenomenology. Philosophy did not need to search for solid ground, b­ ecause it was already given to one in faith. Philosophy did not need to begin with a criticism of knowledge—­a proj­ect that would never achieve certainty, according to Stein—­because it was

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already furnished with a guiding metaphysics. Moreover, the subject did not construct the objects of our experience. Instead, ­human subjective constitution was secondary to and dependent on divine creation, and this allowed the in­de­pen­dence of the objects of knowledge that Husserl had too hastily put to one side. “God imparts to ­every being what it is and the manner of its being [Wesen], its essence and existence, but he also imparts to it, in accordance with its essence and existence, the extent and manner of its knowing and striving, the truth and perfection which it can attain.” Consequently (and ­here Stein echoed Geyser), a Catholic philosophy would be theo-­, not ego-­, centric.123 Stein does diverge from the classic neo-­scholastic critique on one major point, and she refers to this divergence obliquely. She argued that “it is quite understandable why phenomenological and scholastic methods gave a superficial impression of being basically at odds. The scholastic method (if we speak only of natu­ral knowledge) involves the logical pro­cessing and exploiting of sense experience. The phenomenological method is supposed to be an immediate beholding of eternal truths, which for scholasticism is reserved for the blessed spirits, and indeed, if we take ‘immediate’ in the strict sense, for God himself.”124 But Stein was keen to downplay the distinction. Both forms of thought ­were based on sensation, understood broadly; both required a form of abstraction moving from the singular individual to the generic essence; and both emphasized the passivity of the understanding. Where they differed was in the question of the immediacy of the knowledge, which Aquinas only granted h­ umans with re­spect to a small number of princi­ples, but the scope of which Husserl wanted to increase dramatically.

Beyond Neo-­Scholastic Circles The complex and changing relationship between neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology might seem to be of only parochial interest. Nonetheless, it had reverberations far beyond Catholic circles: it helps us understand the fascination with realism in general and Thomism in par­tic­u­lar among many of Husserl’s students, from both Munich and Göttingen; and it left its mark on the reception of phenomenology in mainstream philosophy. For the first point, Edith Stein’s work is particularly instructive, ­because

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even though she counts as one of the most prominent thinkers who brought phenomenology and Thomism together, she started out squarely in the former camp. Her trajectory is exemplary of that of other of Husserl’s students, including Hedwig Conrad-­Martius and Gerda Walther.125 In the Logical Investigations, Husserl had suggested that phenomenology required the “resolute cooperation among a generation of research-­ workers.”126 Such cooperation began, according to the my­thol­ogy of the phenomenological movement, when the young scholar Johannes Daubert jumped on his bike in 1902 and rode the one hundred kilo­meters from his home in Brunswick to Göttingen to meet the new master.127 ­Under his influence and that of Alexander Pfänder, Munich, where Daubert was studying, quickly became a center for the new thinking; and the Akademischer Verein für Psychologie, first or­g a­n ized by the psychologist Theodor Lipps—­ whom Husserl had criticized in the Logical Investigations but who took many of Husserl’s innovations on board—­came to be a hub for the new phenomenology. The psychological club met on Fridays during the semester at a local café or restaurant, discussing Husserl’s work and adopting phenomenological approaches to a range of subjects.128 Then in Göttingen, in part due to the “Munich invasion” (students from Munich transferring to study directly with Husserl), a new phenomenological group formed, which included Adolf Reinach, Moritz Geiger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, and ­later Edith Stein.129 Influenced by the Logical Investigations, t­ hese students applied phenomenological analyses to a wide range of questions: ethical, ­legal, social, and more.130 As for the progressive neo-­scholastics, Husserl’s first students ­were initially not interested in the question of the existence of the outside world. The phenomenologists’ song (Phänomenologenlied), composed for a 1909 gathering of the Göttinger Philosophische Gesellschaft, was clear on this point: How philosophy blooms, Since it has become phenomenology, One reduces the world, And places existence in question, Holding to essences, essences Holding to essences, essences.131

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Husserl’s students ­were quite happy to keep the reduction to essences (eidetic reduction) and epoché, which ­were for them a condition for the uncovering of objective knowledge.132 But they refused the more radical, transcendental reduction, which, like the neo-­scholastics, they saw as undermining the first step by emphasizing the productive and creative powers of the subject.133 As Avé-­Lallemant, a scholar of the Munich school, has written, they directed their energies ­toward “the analy­sis of essences” (Wesensanalyse), while Husserl was more focused on “intentional analy­sis” (Intentionalanalyse).134 This orientation led to Scheler’s charge that Husserl’s students w ­ ere simply d ­ oing “picture book phenomenology” (Bilderbuchphänomenologie). Rejecting the subject-­ centeredness of Husserl’s new phenomenology, many instead took their lead, as Spiegelberg has suggested, from Adolf Reinach.135 When Stein wrote that, in Göttingen before the war, “all the young phenomenologists ­were confirmed realists,” she meant realism in this sense: They considered the objects of knowledge (­whether real or ideal) to be in­de­pen­dent of the subject.136 Similarly, the early members of the movement valued phenomenology ­because it allowed them to address religious questions, ­whether from Catholic or Protestant perspectives. In the last months before his death on the battlefield in World War I, Reinach converted to Protestantism and turned phenomenology to the analy­sis of religious experience.137 Gerda Walther applied phenomenology to the personal and mystical experience of God.138 ­Others, like Hans Reiner, Jean Hering, and Maximilian Beck, related their phenomenological research to their religious convictions. In addition to the Catholics among Husserl’s students—­like Siegfried Hamburger, Aurel Kolnai, and Dietrich von Hildebrand—­several ­others, including Alexandre Koyré, seriously considered conversion.139 Of this group, many came close to the neo-­scholastic position, in par­tic­ u­lar ­those in the “Bergzabern Circle,”140 which gathered on the small fruit farm inherited by Theodor Conrad and his wife, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, shortly a­ fter their wedding in 1912. This is where Stein supposedly converted.141 Conrad-­Martius developed a theology from her phenomenological analy­sis of the natu­r al world, arguing that its objective intelligibility pointed to the existence of a divine creator.142 As a consequence of this argument, Conrad-­Martius became interested in scholasticism.143 During

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the war she collaborated with Scheler and other members of the Göttingen Circle on the short-­lived Catholic-­leaning periodical Summa.144 And though the Rus­sian émigré Alexandre Koyré remained suspicious of the Thomists, he did enter into a deep engagement with the Franciscan tradition up through Duns Scotus, which, he asserted in his 1921 Descartes and Scholasticism, was of g­ reat importance for the emergence of modern philosophy. A contemplation of the scholastics allowed Koyré to deal by proxy with Husserl’s transcendental turn.145 In a letter to Herbert Spiegelberg in 1953, Koyré wrote that Husserl had inspired in him an “interest for the objectivism of Greek and medieval thought. . . . ​I inherited from him the Platonic realism that he discarded; the antipsychologism and the antirelativism.”146 Koyré’s interest in the legacies of the ­Middle Ages led to his early work on Hegel, the precursor for Kojève’s famous course on the German thinker in the 1930s, and equally led to his burgeoning work in the 1930s on Galileo and the scientific revolution.147 In a 1924 review of Koyré’s Descartes book, his friend and fellow Husserl student Jean Hering remarked on the increased interest in scholasticism among non-­Catholic scholars, and asked rhetorically: “How can one not see this new orientation as a symptom of a revolution in the order of thought itself, which w ­ ill manifest itself even more when the disciples of Bergson and Le Roy in France, and t­ hose around Husserl and Scheler in Germany, have beaten down the last fortresses of con­temporary psychologism that have obscured for us t­ hose edifices of earlier centuries that ­were constructed by thinkers for whom the truth was a given, and not a creation of the spirit?”148 Not only did many of Husserl’s early students share philosophical interests with the neo-­scholastics, they followed a similar intellectual trajectory, one that helps explain why they too came to see Husserl’s Ideas as a “turn” away from realism. Initially focusing on eidetic analyses, ­after World War I they became increasingly interested in the question of existence. Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, for instance, in her 1923 Realontologie, published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, tried to expand Husserl’s eidetic analyses to encompass the real, uncovering what she called “­actual real­ity” (wirkliche Wirklichkeit);149 and ­because such a Realontologie only uncovered the possibilities for existence, it needed to be supplemented by metaphysics, which addressed

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factual real­ity directly.150 One of the most prominent critics of Husserl’s idealism was Theodor Celms, who had studied u­ nder Geyser.151 Most famously, Roman Ingarden wrote extensively and critically about Husserl’s development in his 1929 “Remarks on the ‘Idealism-­R ealism’ Prob­lem.” Husserl’s idealism was not necessary, Ingarden thought, but followed from his exorbitant application of the reduction and (as Ingarden saw it) his understanding of constitution as a form of creation.152 We can explain the close parallels between the early phenomenologists and neo-­scholastics by the fact that many of the former had begun their philosophical training in Munich. At the Ludwig Maximilian University, one of the two chairs of philosophy was reserved for Catholics. Up ­until 1912 it was held by Georg von Hertling, the neo-­scholastic co-­founder of the Görres-­Gesellschaft, and, for a short time t­ oward the end of the First World War, Reichskanzler. The chair was then refounded officially as a Konkordatslehrstuhl, held first by Clemens Bäumker, and then, ­after 1924, by Joseph Geyser.153 The existence of the chair in Catholic philosophy meant that ­there was a strong Catholic presence among the phi­los­o­phers training in Munich, many of whom participated in Lipps’s circle.154 The proximity of the “Munich school” to neo-­scholasticism was a leitmotif in Catholic articles about phenomenology. Matthias Thiel argued in Divus Thomas that “the adherents of the same philosophical movement diverge entirely on even the most fundamental questions, such as the prob­lem of real­ity.” Though Husserl had come to embrace idealism, his “co-­founder” Scheler regarded even critical realism a “half-­way mea­ sure” and urged “an in-­part-­blunt realism.”155 In the 1925 edition of the Philosophisches Jahrbuch, Helmut Burgert could claim that most phenomenologists ­were “realists, even many theists.”156 In Belgium the same year, René Kremer wrote with satisfaction that although “the method of Husserl’s disciples is sometimes a l­ittle rapid, it often rejoins traditional analyses.”157 The neo-­scholastics ­were not alone in remarking on the proximity of their ideas to phenomenology. For many looking in from the outside, the two philosophies ­were closely connected. Already, in the 1910 essay “Psychologism and Logicism,” Wilhelm Wundt had linked Husserl’s phenomenology to neo-­scholasticism.158 Wundt set the trend for the interwar period. In his discussion of a “new M ­ iddle Ages,” the itinerant Rus­sian

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phi­los­o­pher Nicolai Berdyaev referred unfavorably to the “gnosiology” of his time, singling out, among o­ thers, Husserl. This movement was akin to “neo-­scholasticism,” he argued, ­because it turned its sights on the “anthropology” of the Re­nais­sance and had hoped to f­ree man from “the trammels of his own restrictions” and thereby give him “over to the power of something non-­human.”159 Similarly, Berdyaev’s compatriot Lev Shestov remarked on the links between the two schools in his 1925 article “Memento Mori.” ­T here he built up a comparison between medieval scholasticism and Husserl’s phenomenology: Both tried to find an ultimate foundation for philosophy, the former in the authority of the Church, the latter in the authority of reason. Regarding Husserl’s attempt to establish the “object and pretensions of science,” Shestov wrote that “the vocabulary of Husserl could be perfectly well replaced by that of Aristotle and his Catholic apologists.”160 In 1924 the Stanford professor Henry Lanz, the man who ­later provided a model for Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, linked Husserl and the Mercier school, and in 1931 the Italian Armando Carlini drew attention to the parallels between phenomenology and “Aristotelian-­scholastic ideas.”161 Even where scholars wanted to foreground the differences between phenomenology and scholasticism, they still felt compelled to note the association. Giulio Grasselli, who had studied at Gemelli’s Sacred Heart University, framed a 1928 article on phenomenology with a discussion of its transformation from an object-­oriented ontology along the lines of Aristotle to a subject-­oriented ontology of Kant and Hegel, who showed that “beyond thought and its laws ­there can be no objectivity and thus separate being.”162 With Husserl, especially in Ideas, “the world would reveal itself in its ideal, platonic substance.”163 Nevertheless, according to Grasselli, Husserl was excessively conceptual in his understanding of real­ity, something that Grasselli attributed to his intellectual sources: “Husserl repeats from scholasticism many aspects of its formalism.”164 We find a similar recognition in Amer­i­ca. In 1929 and 1930, the religious scholar Julius Seelye Bixler, freshly back from research in Freiburg, argued for the relationship between Husserl’s thought and scholasticism in a pair of articles for the Journal of Religion and the Harvard Theological Review, again while emphasizing what was new.165 “It has not been difficult for a discerning Catholic author to point out that [Husserl’s] work

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has much in common with Catholicism’s heritage, through Aquinas, from Aristotle.”166 Charles Serrus, the Marseille logician who was an early interpreter of Husserl in southern France, admitted that Husserl’s philosophy contained “Thomist and Aristotelian ele­ments” and that for this reason it was necessary to “attach Husserl as Wundt did to the neo-­scholastic current.” Serrus cautioned, however, that “Husserl did not subscribe to that Thomist theory which made the intellects as dif­fer­ent as the individuals themselves, and which related the unity of minds in knowledge to the unity of the objective truth. He is, moreover, ‘immanentist,’ and despite his concern to consider always a living and concrete intellect, ­there remains ­there too much of the Kantian impregnation.”167 More aggressive was the Italian Antonio Banfi, who was an influential early interpreter of Husserl in Italy, discussing him in the 1923 book Philosophy and Spiritual Life (1923) and in two articles dealing directly with phenomenology published ­later that year in the Rivista di filosofia. In ­these articles, Banfi highlighted Husserl’s development, relating the focus on ideal objects in the Logical Investigations to the l­ater transcendental idealism.168 As he put it, t­ here was a “profound continuity” in Husserl’s itinerary.169 Banfi was based in the neo-­scholastic stronghold of Milan. He was even a candidate for the chair in the history of modern philosophy in 1930 at Gemelli’s university ­there. In his application, he foregrounded his work on the “most impor­tant currents of con­temporary philosophy,” listing the neo-­K antians and phenomenology. Banfi placed third, which was especially galling b­ ecause the top two w ­ ere inside candidates and both w ­ ere offered positions as extraordinary professors. ­There was ­little love lost between the neo-­scholastics and a thinker who was an ardent critic of their realism.170 The rejection led to a rather ugly public exchange between Banfi and the leader of the Milanese neo-­scholastics. Banfi vehemently rejected Gemelli’s claim that neo-­scholastics engaged in meaningful ways with post-­K antian philosophy.171 Arguing that neo-­ scholasticism should be excluded from the “live currents of con­temporary modern thought” b­ ecause of its “radical metaphysical dogmatism,” Banfi took the Thomist reading of phenomenology as a sign that any supposed rapprochement between modern and medieval thought was based on “profound misunderstandings.”172

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Conclusion The early reception of Husserl’s phenomenology, both in Germany and beyond, led to its close association with the Leonine revival of Catholic philosophy. For a few short years Husserl and the neo-­scholastics, both heirs to Aristotle, w ­ ere seen as allies in a b­ attle against the deeply engrained subjectivism of modern thought. By 1913, however, the cumulative effect of Husserl’s transcendental turn and the neo-­scholastics’ new orientation created the impression that Husserl had broken the alliance. Where once the two schools had come together in the positing of ideal objectivities, now the neo-­scholastics’ re­orientation ­toward the real clashed with Husserl’s purported idealism. The realism / idealism debate should be placed in this context. It resulted, not simply from Husserl’s development, but also from the changing standards to which he was held. Regardless of the cause, phenomenology now confronted neo-­scholastics as a prob­lem. They had to work out w ­ hether it could be saved (perhaps by wresting it from the hands of its founder) or ­whether it needed to be discarded altogether. The vari­ous responses to this question would shape the ­future reception of phenomenology outside of Germany, as neo-­ scholastics and other phi­los­o­phers strug­gled with its legacy. Before we leave this moment of crisis, it is worth examining one more neo-­scholastic attempt to grapple with Husserl’s thought in the period between 1910 and 1916. For though he was only a bit player in the early neo-­scholastic debates over phenomenology, ­those debates would resonate in ­later Eu­ ro­pean intellectual history ­because they had ­shaped the interests and arguments of a young student of Catholic philosophy in Freiburg: Martin Heidegger.

3 An Ecumenical Atheism: Martin Heidegger’s Existential Phenomenology

In early 1916 plans w­ ere u­ nder way for filling the chair in Catholic phi-

losophy at the University of Freiburg. The chair was one of only six in Germany—in addition to Bonn, Munich, Münster, Würzburg, and Strasbourg (since 1871 part of the German Reich)—­and the previous occupant, Arthur Schneider, had left for the Strasbourg chair in 1913. Martin Heidegger was one of the hopeful candidates, having received intimations of support from Schneider, as well as the dean of philosophy, Heinrich Finke.1 When the position opened up, Heidegger had recently completed his doctoral dissertation, and he chose his next research topic—­Duns Scotus—in large part to fit the demands of the chair.2 From 1913 to 1916 Heidegger focused his scholarly energies on gaining the professorship in Catholic philosophy. Even given this preparation, it is remarkable that the twenty-­six-­year-­old Heidegger should have been a serious candidate. His hopes can be explained in part by the history of the chair. Originally a position in the theology faculty, its occupant was charged with the philosophical training of theology students. In 1901, due to academic changes ­after the end of the Kulturkampf, the chair was transferred to philosophy. The shift in institutional position caused a number of prob­lems. On the one hand, as 85

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a condition of the transfer, ordained priests w ­ ere excluded from consideration, and the theology faculty had no further influence over the appointment, a state of affairs that had caused considerable controversy in the early part of the c­ entury.3 On the other hand, the philosophy faculty felt uneasy about the post, an uneasiness that came to the surface in 1911 when an ill-­fated proposal sought to combine the philosophical seminars of the Catholic and non-­Catholic chairs: “No professor of scientific [wissenschaftlichen] philosophy can be forced to lead a seminar together with the holder of a confessional chair designed purely for Catholic theologians.”4 Caught between two antagonistic communities—­theologians and philosophers—it was very difficult to find suitable candidates. The first occupant, Adolf Dyroff, left in 1903 ­after only two years, and his successor, Johann Uebinger, was often sick, meaning that the chair’s teaching commitments ­were only intermittently fulfilled. By 1911, when Uebinger fi­nally retired, the philosophy faculty was anxious to find a more permanent and suitable candidate, and they settled on Arthur Schneider. Schneider’s appointment, however, was more a sign of the weakness of the applicant pool than a ringing endorsement of his qualifications. As the committee charged with making the hire had noted, he ­hadn’t published much, and they explained their choice by noting that “the number of men, who without being priests are suited to be teachers of Catholic theologians, is proportionately very small.”5 With only five other chairs in Germany supporting early-­career scholars in Catholic philosophy, ­there was a dearth of good candidates. Schneider’s departure in 1913 raised this difficult question again. That year the search seemed hopeless. In the end the commission halfheartedly put forward Clemens Bäumker and Dyroff as candidates, admitting that, b­ ecause of the comparatively low salary, neither was likely to take the position. Importantly for our purposes, the commission explic­itly rejected Joseph Geyser, ­because of what they judged to be the poor quality of his work. At this point the priest Engelbert Krebs, who had just met Heidegger and had been impressed by him, mused about the younger man’s candidacy: “It is a shame that he ­wasn’t this far advanced two years ago. We would have needed him now.”6 Without any plausible option, the commission turned to Krebs to fill the position on a temporary basis, “­until a truly capable scholar of the subject emerges from the laity.”7



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In 1916, ­after one and a half de­cades of uncertainty, the philosophy faculty was determined to find a long-­term solution and was prepared to overlook what previously had been disqualifying attributes. This situation raised the hopes of Krebs, Heidegger, and Geyser. It seems that by 1915 Finke had started to consider relaxing the rule against priests, for which he had previously been one of the fiercest advocates.8 With the chair vacant now for two years, youth would no longer count so much against Heidegger. The search committee was also willing to look more favorably on Geyser’s scholarship. The question was what ­factor would be ignored: priesthood, inexperience, or an uninspiring publication rec­ord. Eventually the committee opted for the latter: on June 22, 1916, Geyser was offered the position. The decision can be in part understood by the 1913 debate. At the end of the hiring report that year, in which Geyser had been explic­itly rejected, we can see more positive references to his current scholarship, which had been better received.9 Bäumker had made a similar claim in his reference letter: Geyser’s recent work made him a passable choice.10 In addition, Heinrich Rickert, who had been an unwavering opponent of Geyser’s candidacy, had moved to Heidelberg in 1915, and his replacement, both in the chair for philosophy and consequently on the search committee, was Edmund Husserl.11 It is true that Husserl was dismissive of Geyser in private correspondence, but Geyser was in many ways an ally, and in the new report, which Husserl co-­signed with Finke, he took a very dif­fer­ent stance, praising both Geyser’s scholastic leanings and his “serious efforts to enter into the vibrant philosophy of the pres­ent, and participate in its research.”12 In addition, for reasons that ­will become clear, Finke had become less enthusiastic about Heidegger’s work. Geyser was put forward as the only candidate. The report suggested that in the unlikely event that Geyser should not accept the Ordinarius-­ Professur, Heidegger would be offered the position at the level of Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer).13 Geyser accepted and arrived in Freiburg the following year. The very real possibility that Heidegger might have been chosen for the chair, and the hopes he had invested in that possibility over the previous three years, made the news devastating for him. It played a crucial role in Heidegger’s growing sense of estrangement from neo-­scholasticism, an estrangement that would push him closer to Protestantism, and

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eventually to declare his philosophy “a-­theist.” Heidegger’s wife, Elfride, confided in Krebs in 1918, “My husband no longer has his faith in the Church.”14 Heidegger himself admitted to his friend the following year, “Over the last two years I strug­gled for a basic clarification of my philosophical positions. . . . ​Epistemological insights extending to the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me.”15 But while his development can and has been seen as a break, Heidegger’s attempt to secure the chair of Catholic philosophy, the rejection, and his ­later estrangement from neo-­scholasticism are better considered as dif­ fer­ent stages in the same intellectual pro­cess: a working through of the contradictory and changing relationship between neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology. In fact, as I ­w ill argue, this is the critical context for understanding the emergence of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, which found its most canonical articulation in Being and Time (1927). In his work before 1913 and especially in his doctoral dissertation, Heidegger was a progressive neo-­scholastic, who matched in his questions, approaches, and engagement with phenomenology other progressives like Joseph Geyser, Agostino Gemelli, and Léon Noël. ­Because he was so embedded in this intellectual tradition, he was deeply affected by the shockwaves that passed through it at that time: Husserl’s transcendental turn and Gemelli’s call for a “new orientation.” For other progressive neo-­scholastics the two developments pulled in dif­fer­ent directions, accentuating the opposition between neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology, but Heidegger thought, at least initially, that the former could be used to address the latter. The provocation but also brilliance of Heidegger’s 1916 thesis on Duns Scotus lay in the way it drew on Husserl’s noetic-­noematic correlation in order to explain how we could move beyond the realm of essences and grasp existence.16

The Neo-­Scholastic Heidegger As is well known, Heidegger had originally planned to become a priest, and in 1909 he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Feldkirch, Austria.17 A ­ fter only two weeks, however, Heidegger gave up this training, citing heart trou­ble, and by 1911 had put aside his ambition of taking vows.18 The



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change in vocation did not signal an intellectual shift, and he set himself on the path to become a neo-­scholastic phi­los­o­pher. In 1913 he won a grant from the von Schaezler Foundation for the study of Thomism, the only nonpriest ever to be awarded it.19 In a 1914 letter asking for the grant to be renewed, he dedicated himself to the “ser­vice of researching and teaching Christian-­Scholastic philosophy.”20 Indeed, up u­ ntil 1916 scholasticism was the dominant influence on Heidegger’s work.21 When he presented his second doctoral thesis (the Habilitation) to the Freiburg philosophy department in 1915, in the required curriculum vitae he declared that despite his interest in modern philosophy, his “basic philosophical convictions remained t­ hose of Aristotelian-­Scholastic philosophy.”22 This history notwithstanding, the vast majority of scholars have sought to dissociate Heidegger’s thought and neo-­scholasticism. Most identify the real starting point for his thinking as the moment he left neo-­ scholasticism b­ ehind. For them, the neo-­scholastic period is at best irrelevant. Representative of this move is Theodore Kisiel’s masterly On the Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, still the most authoritative account of Heidegger’s thought before 1927. Kisiel follows suggestions by Hannah Arendt and argues that 1919 marked the “zero point of Heidegger’s development” when he “first found himself, when he first became Heidegger.”23 In Kisiel’s view, the experience of war and the religious conversion away from Catholicism led Heidegger to think through what three years ­later he would call a “hermeneutics of facticity.”24 When scholars have extended their analyses back to Heidegger’s pre-1919 works, they have been concerned to mark the differences ­between them and neo-­scholastic fare. Van Buren talks about a “neo-­ neo-­scholasticism,” and John Caputo argues that no one would be justified in calling Heidegger a scholastic.25 For ­these scholars, Heidegger’s embrace of Husserl in the early part of the de­cade was part and parcel of his move away from his co-­religionists. Bernhard Caspar, a prominent scholar of the early Heidegger, has argued that Heidegger found the “­matter [Sache]” of his thinking “prompted by Husserl’s Logical Investigations and the insufficiency of his earlier preoccupation with scholasticism.”26 Some interpreters even cast Heidegger’s expressions of allegiance to neo-­ scholasticism, as in his 1915 curriculum vitae, as cynical moves calculated to win the chair of Catholic philosophy.27

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The exclusion of Heidegger from the community of neo-­scholastics, however, is based on a reductive understanding of the latter.28 In par­tic­u­lar, in their analyses, scholars have almost uniformly ignored the progressive neo-­scholastics, who are more difficult to fit with the standard ste­reo­ type as preachers of a closed system who deliberately ignored post-­K antian thought and relied for their authority more on Church power than reason.29 To take just the most obvious comparison, Joseph Geyser is rarely discussed except in passing and then dismissively. In rigorous accounts of Heidegger’s philosophical development, he generally cedes to the Catholic theologians Carl Braig and Hermann Schell.30 The neglect is not without reason. As we have seen, at the time Geyser was nearly universally discounted as an unoriginal and staid thinker. In the years before 1914, Heidegger too was critical of the details of Geyser’s work, both in print and in correspondence with Rickert. According to his ­brother Fritz, Heidegger first read Geyser’s 1909 Princi­ples of Logic and Epistemology in the summer of 1911,31 and he referred to it in a 1911 article, analyzing it in greater detail the following year.32 Heidegger disagreed with Geyser on a number of questions: He considered Geyser’s criticism of the “supra-­individual self [überindividuellen Ich],” as formulated by the neo-­K antians, “not quite correct,” b­ ecause that ego should be understood “purely logically as the system of valid [geltende] forms of knowledge,” in a way that ­wasn’t that distant from Geyser’s own analyses.33 In a criticism he would ­later turn against Charles Sentroul, he charged Geyser with ignoring the transcendental-­logical interpretation of Kant by Hermann Cohen, Rickert, and ­others.34 Further, Heidegger considered Geyser’s attempt to link truth to the fulfillment or not of an intention ill conceived, an excessively “subjective” account of logic, especially as Geyser prioritized the affirmative judgment and saw negation as derivative, whereas Heidegger considered them to be of equal logical stature. 35 But though Heidegger challenged the details of Geyser’s thought, he embraced its major goal: rethinking scholasticism in the light of modern philosophy.36 In publications before 1916, Heidegger refers often and positively to that proj­ect.37 It is telling that on this point he quoted the Mercierian Maurice de Wulf: “Neo-­scholasticism is mobile like every­t hing that lives: the stopping of its evolution would be the sign of a new de­ cadence.”38 Like Geyser, the young Heidegger was a progressive neo-­



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scholastic, in Mercier’s mold, and took a similar position in the broader debates over the ­future of Catholic philosophy. In his references he appealed to this end of the neo-­scholastic spectrum, as well as to scholars who w ­ ere seen as fellow travelers, such as Külpe and Messer.39 Heidegger would prob­a bly have agreed with Thomas Sheehan’s assessment that Geyser was a “second-­rate neo-­Scholastic professor,” but in the period before World War I the prob­lem was the former, not the latter, part of the judgment.40 Like the progressive neo-­scholastics, Heidegger was concerned to make Catholic philosophy in­de­pen­dent of all religious doctrine, ­because it was also supposed to be available to nonbelievers as a rational propaedeutic to faith.41 As he wrote in a 1911 article, “philosophy, in truth a mirror of eternity, t­ oday often only reflects subjective opinions, personal moods and wishes.” In contrast to this, he implied, Catholicism presented “truly presuppositionless scientific work.”42 Neutral reason should, according to Heidegger, lead away from the emotional subjectivism of modern thought to eternal truth. Quoting Görres, Heidegger assured the reader that if you “dig deeper . . . ​you ­will hit upon Catholic ground.”43 This orientation also lends context to his medieval sources: an appeal, not to the strict Thomist Dominicans, but instead to the progressive Franciscan school, which emphasized pos­si­ble being (essentia) over the act of existence.44 Heidegger’s connection to progressive neo-­scholasticism makes sense of what other­w ise might seem a confused stance with re­spect to modernism.45 As we saw, progressives criticized modernism while remaining concerned that the deployment of Church authority to crush it would undermine their efforts to renew the scholastic tradition. Heidegger likewise agreed that modernism was philosophically misguided and damaging. He presented himself as a resolute antimodernist in many early articles, such as t­ hose he wrote for the ultramontanist Heuberger Volksblatt from 1909–1910. In the short pieces he published in the Catholic journal Der Akademiker over the next few years, we see a familiar criticism: modernity led to the fragmentation of philosophy into subjective worldviews.46 Still, Heidegger was dismayed by the means the Church used to combat modernism. He bristled at Pius X’s antimodernism oath, suggesting sardonically in 1914 to Krebs that a better approach would be to replace the brains of in­de­pen­dent thinkers with “Italian salad.”47

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The young Heidegger was not a modernist, but like the progressive neo-­scholastics he did think that medieval thought needed to be nourished by the insights of modern philosophy. The return to scholasticism required the path through, not the stark rejection of, post-­K antian thought.48 Not only did Heidegger embrace the progressive proj­ect, he promoted a renewal of scholastic philosophy that ran parallel to that proposed by the Louvain school. Like Mercier and quoting Geyser, Heidegger agreed that “epistemology has become the ‘fundamental science.’ ”49 This is why Heidegger, like many other progressive neo-­scholastics before 1913, was attracted to Husserl, who seemed to offer a return to the tradition from within the modern epistemological tradition. Some scholars have even suggested that he was introduced to Husserl’s work by Arthur Schneider, who would l­ater hold the chair in Catholic philosophy.50 In any case, Heidegger first read Husserl as part of a broader and transnational enthusiasm for phenomenology among progressive neo-­scholastics.

The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism (1913) Heidegger’s proximity to the progressive neo-­scholastics is clearest in his 1913 dissertation, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism, which he published in 1914. Though psy­chol­ogy seemed to be on the retreat in philosophy in general, given the successes of the transcendental-­logical reading of Kant and Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger claimed that psychological prejudices stubbornly persisted in the “special prob­lem of logic.” Many logicians who had explic­itly rejected psychologism, Heidegger thought, ­were nonetheless unable to extricate themselves from it fully. In the body of his dissertation, Heidegger addressed the work of Wilhelm Wundt, Heinrich Maier, Franz Brentano, and Theodor Lipps. Heidegger hoped that, through a careful understanding of t­ hese psychologistic theories, he would be able to “determine exactly the concept of psychologism in its content,” and consequently find a way to banish psychologistic prejudices for good.51 The details of Heidegger’s arguments against the individual thinkers are not impor­tant h­ ere, so ­we’ll only look at his most troublesome case: Theodor Lipps. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Lipps had reformulated his



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ideas in light of Husserl’s criticisms in the Logical Investigations. In his Manual of Psy­chol­ogy (1903) Lipps distinguished psychological “content [Inhalt]” and “object [Gegenstand].”52 In the example that Heidegger presented, when I long for a friend, I have “his picture before my mind [Seele].” But according to Lipps, I do not long for the picture (content) but rather for the “friend” (object).53 By teasing apart content and object, Lipps could argue that the latter need not be psychological. Heidegger claimed that even though Lipps had shifted attention to the object of judgment, he ­hadn’t fully expunged subjective ele­ments from his theory. In Lipps’s account, the object imposed “demands [Forderungen]” on the subject (for instance, the demand of the “­rose” to be thought as “red”). The demand was like a “call [Ruf ]” that the subject had to “hear [hören].” The judgment thus ultimately depended on the subject’s act, her “recognition [Anerkennung]” of the demand.54 Though Lipps tried to avoid psychologism by making this the “experience of the supra-­individual self,” Heidegger argued that as an act (Akt), it could only be individual, and so psychological.55 Heidegger’s reading of Lipps is exemplary of his arguments elsewhere in his dissertation. Heidegger came to define psychologism as any theory that treated judgment as a “psychical real­ity, a pro­cess [Vorgang], an act, an activity [Tätigkeit], which integrates itself into the structure of psychical real­ity.” ­Because t­hese acts took place in time, they could never explain the atemporality required by logic. In this way, psychologism was a “question [Fragestellung],” which in logic involved the “misrecognition of the par­tic­u­lar real­ity [Eigenwirklichkeit] of the logical object.” Asking what the psychological under­pinnings of logic ­were was like asking the weight of a geometrical curve.56 According to Heidegger then, one could only avoid psychologism by denying that acts ­were essential to logical judgment.57 We, of course, perform acts when making a judgment, but the judgment itself has to be in­ de­pen­dent of ­those acts. In the final pages of his dissertation Heidegger sketched a theory that met this requirement. He took the example of the judgment “The book cover is yellow” considered in dif­fer­ent situations: spontaneously arising while looking at the book, deliberately evoked to compare with a gray cover, remembered to compare to a yellow pencil, or reflected upon in its absence. The differences between ­these examples,

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of the subject’s “state of consciousness [Bewußtseinslage]” and “circumstances [Umstände],” allowed Heidegger to abstract away from the individual acts involved. Across this variety, he argued, we could identify “a constant f­ actor,” one that is “per­sis­tent and identical.”58 This constant ­factor, the “yellowness [Gelbsein] of the cover,” did not belong to the psychological realm, ­because as Bergson had shown, we could never repeat the same psychical state of consciousness. Nor was it part of the real world. The bookbinder can touch the yellow cover, Heidegger asserted, but “never the ‘yellowness of the cover.’ ”59 In addition, this yellowness ­couldn’t be metaphysical (understood ­here as supersensible), ­because in line with the scholastics, Heidegger claimed that we could not know the metaphysical directly. Rather, it had to belong to a separate realm, that of “meaning [Sinn],” which was ordered by the categories of true and false. This resulted, according to Heidegger, from the fact that meaning “contained relations”: that between an object (the cover) and a “determining meaning content” (yellowness), which ­either held (gilt) or did not.60 Its “reality-­form [Wirklichkeitsform]” was not “existence” but “validity [Gelten].”61 Though much of Heidegger’s argument follows from the work of Rickert’s student Emil Lask, t­ here are a number of aspects h­ ere that locate it squarely in the progressive neo-­scholastic camp.62 First, like Geyser and Noël, Heidegger deployed Husserl as part of a broader criticism of psychologism. When Heidegger acknowledged his debt to Husserl, he used the same formulation that Geyser had used three years earlier, in almost certainly an unacknowledged quotation: Husserl’s Logical Investigations had “broken the psychologistic spell.” 63 Second, like them, Heidegger drew on Husserl’s work in order to posit a realm of ideal objects or meaning (Sinn), which w ­ ere or ­were not valid (Gelten), and ­were entirely in­de­pen­ dent of the subject’s acts.64 The judgment was “registered [erfaßt]” by the subject but not “altered” by it.65 Heidegger’s criticism of Geyser is in fact merely an extension of this argument: turning the latter’s own weapons against him. By locating truth in the fulfillment of an intention, Geyser had (like Lipps) contaminated the realm of meaning with subjective acts. Third, like the progressive neo-­scholastics, in this early text Heidegger was more interested in justifying the objectivity of our judgments than in



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showing that they applied to real­ity.66 As Heidegger wrote l­ ater, an essential difficulty with the phenomenon of “validity [Gelten]” is that it was undecided between two meanings: the validity of “ideal being” and the validity “of the Object”—in Lask’s language, “Hingelten.”67 In the dissertation, Heidegger ­doesn’t distinguish between the two. Though many of his examples dealt with judgments about the outside world (the book cover is yellow, it’s raining), he did not discuss the prob­lem of how they could be determined as valid.68 In the final paragraph of the dissertation, he noted that only ­after working out a “pure logic” could one address “epistemological prob­lems” about how “to determine securely the way to know . . . ​the vari­ous forms of real­ity [Wirklichkeitsweisen].”69 That task was left for ­future studies. The overriding concern with the objectivity of judgment left its mark on Heidegger’s reformulation of the scholastic correspondence theory. Heidegger’s early treatment of this theory has often led scholars astray. When in a 1914 review of Charles Sentroul’s Kant and Aristotle Heidegger rejected Sentroul’s attempt to ground the logical theory of truth (the truth of our ideas) in ontological truth (the truth of the object), he is often assumed to be rejecting neo-­scholasticism in toto.70 But as we saw in Chapter 2, Sentroul’s argument was an attempt to address the prob­lem that Mercier had raised (that we can never compare a ­mental object with an extra-­mental one) without endorsing Mercier’s w ­ holesale reformulation of the scholastic theory. But Heidegger argued that Sentroul’s solution was inadequate—it merely “presented [this prob­lem] a second time in a sharpened form.”71 Ironically Heidegger’s focus on the prob­lem of objectivity is nowhere clearer than in an essay that, according to its title at least, sought to prove the existence of the outside world: “The Real­ity Prob­lem in Modern Philosophy,” published in the progressive neo-­scholastic Philosophisches Jahrbuch in 1912. On the opening page, Heidegger dismissed the idea that only the mad would “doubt the real­ity of the exterior world.”72 Given the direction of modern idealist philosophy, it was necessary to take the question of realism seriously again.73 But while Heidegger’s paper explic­itly addressed the question of real­ity, the argument followed his criticism of psychologism. In its citations—­Külpe, Geyser, Messer, Husserl—­t he

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paper adheres to the neo-­scholastic reading of phenomenology on precisely this issue, and for which Geyser’s Princi­ples of Logic and Epistemology was the unavoidable reference. For Heidegger the real­ity prob­lem was twofold. The first prob­lem was the “positing of an outside world that is in­de­pen­dent of consciousness.”74 Despite the argument that the concept of “mind-­independent being” was contradictory, b­ ecause concepts ­were necessarily thought, Heidegger asserted that it was still pos­si­ble to distinguish between the “psychical existence of a concept and the ideal being of its content.”75 Further, the argument that we build knowledge only out of “the facts of consciousness” ignored “objective, ideal princi­ples” without which the world would appear to us as an “orderless sequence of perceptions and repre­sen­ta­ tions.”76 The crucial point ­here is that the argument for the “positing” of the outside world turned out to be founded on objective idealities: “ideal being” and “ideal princi­ples.” This tendency to focus on objectivity over existence is confirmed in Heidegger’s approach to the second part of the real­ity prob­lem: the “determination of the real.” He took his cue from the “phenomenalists,” who conceded that the exterior world exists but argued that we have no direct access to it; it is an “unknown X.” They thus thought that we could deal with “­things only in their subjective guises.” But while Heidegger agreed with this analy­sis, he objected to the conclusion the phenomenalists drew from it—­that our comportment to the world was a “modifying” one. Further, as Külpe had argued, ­because it was pos­si­ble at least to think chaos, it could not be true that the categories ­were necessarily tied to thought.77 Rather, Heidegger concluded, the “laws of thought are the laws of its objects.” Kant’s Copernican revolution was a fantasy. But again, we should note, Heidegger focused on “the lawfulness that is in­de­ pen­dent of the experiencing subject.”78 The only time Heidegger turned his attention directly to existence rather than objectivity, he ran up against the same charge that strict Thomists had leveled against Mercier. Heidegger asserted that sense impressions ­were caused by the outside world, but he admitted that the causality princi­ple was a thin one: “Nothing is yet implied about the quality of the cause which elicits [our sensations].”79



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Duns Scotus, 1916 The pinnacle of Heidegger’s neo-­scholastic period, his Habilitation (second dissertation) on Duns Scotus, followed closely on the heels of the first dissertation from 1913; Heidegger defended it in 1915.80 In the intervening period, however, the landscape of progressive neo-­scholasticism had dramatically shifted. Progressive neo-­scholastics like Noël and Gemelli had redirected their efforts away from proving the objectivity of judgment, ­toward arguing for its purchase on real­ity, from the first to the second of Mercier’s “fundamental epistemological prob­lems.” Gemelli’s programmatic article demanding the “new orientation,” we should remember, had been published in the Philosophisches Jahrbuch in 1913, just as Heidegger was completing his first dissertation. So too Husserl’s publication of Ideas that year had been a shock to ­those neo-­scholastics who had identified in his trajectory modern philosophy’s return to its medieval roots. Husserl’s emphasis on the constituting subject seemed to betray the objectivism that neo-­scholastics had found so appealing in the Logical Investigations. As a neo-­scholastic who had dedicated his doctoral work to the value of phenomenology for demonstrating the objectivity of logic, Heidegger must have been greatly troubled by the two shifts. His response to them would be determinative for the ­future development of his thought. In his Habilitation, Heidegger followed other neo-­scholastics in shifting his attention from demonstrating that truths w ­ ere objective to showing how they pertained to “true real­ity [wahre Wirklichkeit],” the prob­lem he had deferred in 1913. His solution to the prob­lem, however, took Heidegger in a very dif­fer­ent direction. Heidegger anchored judgment to existence by following Husserl down the very path that had shocked other neo-­ scholastics.81 Heidegger would waver between this faithfulness to and betrayal of progressive neo-­scholasticism u­ ntil the decision for the latter was made for him: in 1916 when Geyser, not Heidegger, was awarded the chair of Catholic philosophy. Much has been made in the secondary lit­er­a­ture of Heidegger’s claim that his Habilitation presented a “principally new means of dealing with medieval scholasticism.”82 Heidegger declared that he would use modern philosophy, especially phenomenology, to read Duns Scotus. But while

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this approach was novel, it should not be seen as revolutionary in the neo-­ scholastic context.83 As we saw in Chapter 1, many progressives, such as Mercier, Gemelli, and Geyser, ­were concerned to update scholasticism with judicious reference to modern philosophy. O ­ thers, like Grabmann and de Wulf, dedicated themselves to the rigorous historical study of medieval thought. The two parts of progressive neo-­scholasticism moved along separate lines, but ­were nonetheless complementary. Recognizing the historicity of medieval philosophy was of a piece with recognizing the need to adapt it to the modern age. Heidegger’s approach in the Habilitation, a work that we must remember was undertaken to win him the chair in Catholic philosophy, brought together ­these two strands. Heidegger recognized, citing Grabmann, the necessity of purely historical work on scholasticism and reasserted its importance for modern philosophy.84 But he also drew attention to the need to revise medieval thought. Medieval thought, Heidegger argued, was based upon “the absolute surrender and impulsive immersion in the delivered material of knowledge.” In the ­Middle Ages, “the value of the ­matter / ​(object) dominates the value of the self / (subject).”85 Such an orientation meant that medieval philosophy lacked the sense of method (Methodenbewußtsein) peculiar to the modern age, as one could see by the per­sis­tence of authoritative ideas (Autoritätsgedanken) and the high value given to tradition. That is why, Heidegger complained, it ­didn’t see “prob­lems as prob­lems.”86 This was particularly troublesome for a comparison with phenomenology, ­because, Heidegger argued, the scholastic fixation on “metaphysical realities” made the phenomenological reduction “impossible.”87 Nevertheless, Heidegger argued that the history of philosophy presented a set of variations on the same themes, ­because the philosophical “spirit [Geist]” was endowed with a “persisting identity.” By meditating on this identity one could place changeable religious, po­liti­cal, and cultural f­actors to one side. 88 When one examined medieval texts from a purely philosophical perspective, oriented by the prob­lems that medieval and modern philosophy shared, history would be no longer “the ­simple past” but instead “the most effective spur to minds.”89 At this level, and despite his earlier reservations, Heidegger made it clear that “in the scholastic type of thought, perhaps most strongly in it, t­ here thus lie hidden



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moments of phenomenological reflection.” Duns Scotus’s philosophy, in par­tic­u­lar, manifested “unmistakably modern traits.”90 Given this framing, it should not be surprising that the first half of Heidegger’s Duns Scotus book should fit well into the neo-­scholastic proj­ect. In fact, in its arguments it does not stray too far from his Psychologism dissertation. Heidegger concentrated his analy­sis on the realm of logical sense (Sinn), which could be approached through the analy­sis of the transcendental “Verum.”91 As before, the “absolute primacy of valid sense” allowed Heidegger to divide it sharply from the psychical and real realms.92 To the extent that sense could be understood as “being in the soul” (ens in anima) this has to be understood as “noematic sense”: “intentionality as the correlate to consciousness is not separable from consciousness and yet not r­ eally [reell] contained within it.”93 Further, the act of the subject in judgment was merely the means by which the subject came to know the sense of judgment (Urteilssinn).94 The realm of sense was also distinct from the real world. As before, the “est” of the judgment, the copula, was not an “existence [existieren]” but rather a “validity [gelten].” 95 Since the realm of logical sense was intentional, its study resulted from a “shift of the gaze” from objects in real­ity onto the intentional content itself. Heidegger, like other neo-­scholastics, identified this as a “secunda intentio.”96 In the second part of the book, however, Heidegger broke new ground, addressing the question that now occupied center-­stage in progressive circles: given the distinction between the realm of logical sense and the real world, how was their interaction, in empirical judgments, to be understood? How can we know real existing being? 97 This was the greatest challenge to progressive neo-­scholasticism, the point at which Mercier (and in 1912 Heidegger) had appealed to the causality princi­ple, for which he had been so roundly attacked. And it is ­here that Heidegger would make his most impor­tant intervention. Heidegger had presented the realm of sense not simply in the language of validity, but also of intentionality. Now he would mobilize that language, drawing explic­itly on Husserl’s Ideas. The key to explaining how we could know existence lay not in the theory of valid sense (Sinn) and judgment, but rather in Scotus’s (or rather Erfurt’s) theory of meaning (Bedeutung).98 Judgments, Heidegger

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affirmed, ­were constructed out of meanings, for “only in and through connections in meaning (Bedeutungszusammenhänge) can we know something about objects and facts.”99 Meanings ­were embodied in sentences (Sätze). But sentences and meanings w ­ ere not the same t­hing. Sentences w ­ eren’t in themselves true or false. As chains of written or spoken signs they belonged to the real world, and thus ­either existed or did not. That is why understanding language required a “meaning-­conferring act [bedeutungsverleihender Akt],” “an act sui generis, through which the word gains its content.” This act distinguished reading words in an unknown foreign language and reading t­ hose that ­were comprehensible to the reader. As Heidegger elaborated, ­these acts “find their point of departure genet­ically in the thinking subject. Their real existence is located in the subject, their content in meaning.”100 Heidegger found support for this interpretation in Scotus. As Scotus had written, the modus significandi (meaning form) had two aspects, active and passive. Heidegger summarized: The modus activus is the meaning-­act [Bedeutungsakt] as a per­for­ mance of consciousness; it is named thus, b­ ecause the bestowal of meaning by the registering consciousness is a ‘quasi-­negotiation.’ The modus passivus is the result of this per­for­m ance, the objective [gegenständliche] correlate of the act . . . ​the immediate given [Gegebenheit], insofar as it is registered meaningfully [bedeutungsmäßig], that is formed.101

Heidegger then translated Scotus’s argument into the language of Husserl’s Ideas from which he quoted the following passage: From a noetic perspective, the title of “expressions” should designate a par­tic­u­lar layer of acts, to which all other acts have to adapt in a certain way, and with which they need to merge, such that each noematic sense of the act [Aktsinn] and consequently its inherent relationship to objectivity (modus essendi) in the noematic of the expression (modus significandi passivus) is formed “conceptually.”102

That is, Heidegger came to agree with Husserl that the forms of meaning ­were constituted by acts of consciousness.



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This might seem a concession to Husserl’s idealism, but Heidegger saw, far more clearly than other neo-­scholastics at the time, that the noetic-­ noematic correlation worked both ways. As he continued, ­these noetic acts in turn w ­ ere determined by a par­t ic­u ­lar “material,” in this case, the modus intelligendi passivus, or the object as grasped by the thinking subject.103 Moreover, Heidegger thought that the noetic-­noematic correlation could be extended beyond the “subjective” modi significandi and intelligendi.104 For, like the modus significandi, the modus intelligendi also had a noetic aspect: a modus intelligendi activus, which was determined by a modus essendi, the “generally experiencable . . . ​‘concrete’ [‘handfeste’] real­ity.”105 Heidegger thus sketched a zigzag pattern: the real ­thing (modus essendi passivus) determined how the ­mental act (modus intelligendi activus) constituted its object (modus intelligendi passivus); this object in turn determined how the signifying act (modus significandi activus) produced an expression (modus significandi passivus). Digging down through t­ hese layers of constitution, Heidegger could argue that meaning had its “ultimate foundation [letzte Fundament]” in real­ity.106 The point ­wasn’t to show that ­there was a resemblance between expressions, thoughts, and real­ity, ­because as Heidegger argued, the act “meant” the real in its own par­t ic­u­lar (eigentümliche) way. Nevertheless, that act was still “founded in objectivity,” what Heidegger called the “princi­ple of the material determination of any form.”107 The last section of the book applied this analy­sis of the vari­ous forms of meaning, like nouns, pronouns, verbs ­etc.108 Husserl’s argument about the correlation between noesis and noema, combined with Scotus’s multi-­layered analy­sis, allowed Heidegger to go beyond Mercier’s restriction to the apprehended (the modi significandi and intelligendi) and thus answer the question that since Gemelli’s 1912 call for a “new orientation” had come to preoccupy progressive neo-­ scholastics: how w ­ ere our judgments related to the real? As Heidegger remarked, his analy­sis had provided the means to explain how “ ‘unreal [unwirkliche]’ ‘transcendent’ sense [Sinn] authenticates true real­ity and objectivity. . . . ​Through such a transcendental-­ontic framing of the concept ‘object,’ the prob­lem of the ‘application’ of the categories loses its meaning.”109 The irony was that while the noetic-­noematic correlation led

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Husserl to assert the constituting power of the subject, it led Heidegger in the other direction: it showed how our constituting acts w ­ ere determined by being. Heidegger’s reliance on Husserl’s correlationism brought him onto difficult and dangerous territory for a neo-­scholastic. Even progressive neo-­ scholastics had responded negatively to Husserl’s 1913 Ideas and the priority it gave to subjectivity. Heidegger had explic­itly rejected the appeal to the subject’s acts in his Psychologism dissertation, and Husserl’s new appeal to them would lead to Geyser’s about face in the 1916 New and Old Ways of Philosophy. Heidegger’s Habilitiation thus stands at the parting of the ways of progressive neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology. Heidegger tracked the progressive shift from a concern with ideal objectivities to the question of the application of our categories to real­ity, but he performed this shift by cleaving to Husserl’s analy­sis in Ideas, whose assertion of the subject was anathema for other neo-­scholastics. In the conclusion of his Habilitation, added only for the 1916 publication, and prob­ably written ­after he had been informed that he had been denied the chair in Catholic philosophy, Heidegger doubled down on the subjective aspects of his analy­sis.110 While rejecting “transcendental idealism” in broad terms, Heidegger asserted that an examination of the vari­ous “layers of acts [Aktschichten]” had opened up a “path to subjectivity.”111 Indeed, Heidegger thought, the importance of ­these acts for the emergence of meaning, and consequently for the theory of judgment, suggested that the ultimate solution to epistemological questions depended upon an understanding of the being of the subject. “In the long term philosophy ­can’t do without its own optic: metaphysics. For the theory of truth this means the task of a final metaphysical-­teleological interpretation of consciousness.”112 Heidegger had noted in the body of the book that the modus essendi also had a noetic aspect, a modus essendi activus, through which consciousness “was intentionally referred to the objective.” This modus essendi activus had to be pretheoretical, b­ ecause it was formally distinct from the modi intelligendi and significandi. Moreover it corresponded to the form of the modus essendi, which as Scotus had argued was given “sub ratione existentiae,” in the form of “existence [Existenz].”113 The noetic correlate to real existing being was not thought, but lived experience.114



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Heidegger thematized this modus essendi activus in the conclusion. It implied that the “epistemological subject” (that of the modi intelligendi and significandi) was founded on a richer and concrete form of subjectivity (the modus essendi activus). Correlatively, the seemingly abstract logic of the scholastics was embedded in the broader structures of medieval life. For instance, though the concept of analogy appeared simply as a “faded and rather meaningless textbook concept [Schulbegriff ],” it expressed the deeper experience of medieval humanity and its primordial relationship to God. That is why Heidegger could argue that the scholastics s­ houldn’t be opposed to mystics like Meister Eckhart, but instead read together: “Philosophy as a rationalistic figure detached from life is powerless. Mysticism as irrational experience is aimless.”115 This figuring of the subject as fundamentally concrete showed that it could not be atemporal—­t he “living spirit” was “essentially historical spirit in the broadest sense of the word.” Consequently, history and its “culture-­philosophical-­teleological interpretation must become a meaning-­ determining ele­ment for the category prob­lem.”116 It is not surprising that his first published essay a­ fter the Habilitation should have taken the question of historical time as its theme.117 Unlike Husserl in Ideas, Heidegger came to see the subject not as pure consciousness but instead as concrete and temporal.118 We can now understand Finke’s 1916 choice between Heidegger and Geyser. Heidegger’s first dissertation had not diverged in any significant way from Geyser’s 1909 Princi­ples of Logic and Epistemology. If anything it was a more accomplished response to the same prob­lems. But both men had reacted to the twin re­orientations of progressive neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology in works that they submitted to the hiring committee for the chair in Catholic philosophy in 1916. What­ever their relative philosophical merits, the comparison of Heidegger’s Habilitation with Geyser’s New and Old Ways of Philosophy can only have brought the orthodoxy of the former into doubt. Heidegger sought to produce a realist phenomenology by drawing on Husserl’s theory of constitution and the noetic-­noematic correlation from which it emerged. But Geyser’s book had suggested that Husserl’s appeal to ­human constitution was the latter’s greatest error, and he had sought to realign phenomenology with Catholicism by locating the constituting subject in the creator-­God.

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That is, whereas in 1915 Heidegger might well have considered his work to be in line with the norms of Catholic philosophy, drawing as it did on a thinker who had been endorsed by neo-­scholastics to answer a question that they considered pressing, Geyser’s book, representative of a developing Catholic consensus, placed Heidegger beyond the pale.119 Finke did not leave any rec­ord of his reaction to Heidegger’s Habilitation, but we can infer what he might have thought from other neo-­scholastic responses to it.120 The book was reviewed almost exclusively by Catholics. Even the review in Kant- ­Studien in 1925 was written by the progressive neo-­scholastic Wladislaus Switalski, and the review for the Historische Zeitschrift was written by Adolf Dyroff.121 The reviews ­were on the ­whole positive. Catholics responded enthusiastically to Heidegger’s account of the realism question and his transformation of phenomenology. J. Klein, writing for the Theologische Revue in 1918, for instance, appreciated the relationship Heidegger had constructed between the modus significandi and the modus essendi—­that is, the material determination of form.122 In a 1917 roundup of scholastic treatments of modern philosophy in the Catholic journal Hochland, Matthias Laros identified Heidegger’s work alongside Switalski’s as a sign that Catholics w ­ ere engaging positively and rigorously with modern thought, rather than dispensing with it in tired and pat formulas.123 More enthusiastic still was Erich Przywara. In his 1923 The Divine Secret of the World, Przywara identified phenomenology as modern philosophy’s “path home [Heimweg]” to the old “philosophia perennis.”124 While some phenemenologists followed Husserl in turning to the transcendental subject, Przywara named “Heidegger and his emerging school” as part of a group which “seeks to carve a path from the transcendental subject to the transcendent object, i.e., real real­ity.”125 It was perhaps for similar reasons that a 1925 Spanish encyclopedia described Heidegger’s work as “conceived according to the ideas of eclectic neo-­scholasticism.”126 Despite ­these encouraging signs, most neo-­scholastics w ­ ere troubled by Heidegger’s prioritization of concrete subjectivity. Klein worried that Heidegger remained too modern in his interpretation of Duns Scotus, especially in the idea that the object was “determinable through knowledge.”127 The distance Heidegger had moved from neo-­scholastic orthodoxy was further underlined by J. Feldman in his review of the book for



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Theologie und Glaube. Feldman highlighted the “danger of seeing the old inheritance through modern spectacles,” and suggested that in this re­ spect Heidegger’s doctrine of judgment compared unfavorably with Geyser’s.128 Adolf Dyroff argued that the attempt to approach scholasticism through modern philosophy was necessarily “one-­sided.”129 It was prob­ ably for ­t hese reasons that both Klein and Partenius Minges, writing for Franziskanische Studien in 1917, refused Heidegger the title “neo-­ scholastic,” declaring him to be “an adherent of modern German philosophy.”130 Heidegger’s work on Duns Scotus had crossed a line. Even though he had followed other progressives in promoting a rapprochement between medieval and modern thought, Heidegger, it was widely agreed, had gone too far.131 Rather than encouraging the conversion of modern critical philosophy to scholasticism, he had achieved the reverse. Heidegger was not a suitable candidate for the chair in Catholic philosophy.

Heidegger’s Religious Shifting ­ fter 1917 Heidegger published nothing for a de­cade, a silence that would A be broken only with the appearance of Being and Time. Heidegger’s development in this period is complicated, but our understanding has been aided by the appearance of his courses, first as a privatdozent at Freiburg, and ­later as professor at Marburg. ­These new sources have informed a sizable shelf of detailed and valuable scholarship from which I take my lead in the following paragraphs. I am particularly interested in following the development of the two themes from the Duns Scotus book that can be related to the new orientations of progressive neo-­scholasticism and phenomenology: (1) Heidegger’s elaboration of a pretheoretical and historical form of subjectivity; and (2) Heidegger’s concern with the question of (in par­tic­u­lar, existing) being. In the period a­ fter 1916 the alliance between mysticism and scholasticism, concrete life and formal theory, which Heidegger had carefully constructed in the final pages of his Habilitation, started to break apart. Whereas in the Habilitation the emphasis on life had been seen as the mystical complement to scholasticism, its legitimating ground (“Philosophy as a rationalistic figure detached from life is powerless”), now scholasticism

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and life w ­ ere presented as opposed.132 Perhaps thinking of the way he had been treated in Freiburg, Heidegger argued that scholasticism was antagonistic to mystical affirmation.133 In the undated note “The Religion Apriori” (prob­a bly from 1917), Heidegger presented Catholicism as a “dogmatic enclosure of propositions and proofs,” an “ecclesiastical statute with police power,” that overpowered the subject. Scholasticism “within the totality of the medieval-­Christian world of experience endangered exactly the immediacy of religious life, and forgot religion for theology and dogma.” Now, Heidegger presented mysticism not as scholasticism’s complement but as a necessary “opposition movement [Gegenbewegung].”134 Take, for example, a course Heidegger gave in 1919.135 In the final meeting Heidegger declared, “Phenomenology is the investigation of life in itself . . . ​in it no theories are in dispute, but only genuine insights versus the ungenuine. The genuine ones can be obtained only by an honest and unreserved immersion in life itself in its genuineness, and this is ultimately pos­si­ble only through the genuineness of a personal life.”136 He argued that this pretheoretical foundation contested objective science, which threatened to still the flow of experience. Theoreticism, and by implication scholasticism, was distant from life and barren.137 This shift motivated Heidegger’s famous letter to Krebs in 1919 that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Already in 1917 it allowed Husserl to claim that Heidegger had “freed himself . . . ​from dogmatic Catholicism. Soon ­after that he drew all the conclusions and cut himself off—­unequivocally, energetically, and yet tactfully—­from the sure and easy c­ areer of a ‘phi­ los­o­pher of the Catholic worldview.’ ”138 Heidegger’s reading of Husserl seems to have been the crucial catalyst in his growing estrangement from Catholic thought. As Heidegger wrote in his 1919–1920 lecture course on the “basic prob­lems of phenomenology,” one of the “innermost tendencies” of phenomenology was the “radical liberation” from Aristotelian science, which had dominated scholasticism.139 The key, as we have seen, was Husserl’s new understanding of intentionality and his emphasis on the constituting role of the subject. But, as in Heidegger’s Habilitation, this was not the theoretical subject, which had been at the center of Husserl’s early work, but a concrete one, appropriate to the concrete modus essendi passivus with which it was correlated. To understand this subject, Heidegger turned to a tradition of Christian mysticism, including



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Meister Eckhart, Bernard de Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, and Augustine, to whom he devoted a 1921 course, focusing on Augustine’s analy­sis of the “cor inquietum [restless heart]” as the fundamental and pretheoretical ­human religious experience.140 Heidegger’s reading of Augustine also allowed him to refigure the basic movement of intentionality, one adequate to this pretheoretical experience, as “care [cura].”141 Heidegger’s break from Catholicism coincided with a new interest in Protestant theology, which he considered more attentive to this primordial religious experience. Heidegger seems to have read Luther first as a seminarian in 1909,142 but ­after 1916 he engaged with a broader range of Protestant thinkers, including Rudolf Otto, Franz Overbeck, and Søren Kierkegaard.143 The Protestant tradition, in par­tic­u­lar Schleiermacher and Dilthey, provided Heidegger with resources for understanding the historicity of religious experience, which had shown itself to be so impor­ tant in the Duns Scotus work.144 In sum, Protestant thought provided material for what Heidegger in 1923 would come to call the “hermeneutics of facticity.”145 In 1923 and in recognition of ­these developments, Husserl prescribed a move from Catholic Freiburg to Protestant Marburg, where Heidegger became friends with the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann saw him as a fellow spirit. In a letter written to Hans von Soden on December 23, 1923, Bultmann described his new colleague: Heidegger “comes from Catholicism, but is entirely Protestant . . . ​he has not only an excellent knowledge of scholasticism but also of Luther.”146 In his contributions to Bultmann’s seminar in the academic year 1923–1924, Heidegger took Luther’s criticism of the scholastics as his central theme, opposing the “theology of the cross [Theologie des Kreuzes]” to the scholastics’ “theology of magnificence [Theologie der Herrlichkeit].”147 While certain threads in Heidegger’s thought seemed to be drawing him ­toward Protestantism, o­ thers could be considered the residues of his Catholic past, not least Heidegger’s concern with ontology. As we saw in the Duns Scotus book, Heidegger’s “Protestant” appeal to the concrete subject was in the ser­vice of a new ontology, a proj­ect that had aligned Heidegger with emerging trends in progressive neo-­scholasticism, and through that even some strict Thomists. Heidegger had argued that the noetic-­noematic correlation explained how knowledge was determined

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by, and thus pointed to, an ineffable modus essendi. ­After 1919 this idea provided the foundation for Heidegger’s strategy of “formal indication,” the idea that our pretheoretical understanding of being could be pointed to by an other­wise empty theoretical language.148 The ontological motivations of this analy­sis came to the forefront in Heidegger’s courses on Aristotle during 1921–1922.149 At around this time he began to formulate the distinction between the ontic (the factual analy­sis of t­ hings) and the ontological (their mode of being).150 Though Heidegger undertook this ontology by detaching it explic­itly from scholasticism—we see around 1922 the first forays into the “destruction” of the history of ontology151—­for observers at the time, at least, Heidegger’s concern with being marked his thought as Catholic. Oskar Becker would see Heidegger’s wrestling with it as “only a new scholasticization,”152 and one of Bultmann’s students would suggest that Heidegger’s focus on Aristotle in Marburg made him a “Catholic outsider” in a “solidly Protestant town.”153

An Ecumenical Atheism Heidegger’s thought as it developed beyond the Habilitation thus pres­ ents a curious confessional mix, both Catholic and Protestant—­more curious still ­because already by 1921 he had explic­itly denied that it was religious. He argued at that time that “philosophy must be a-­theistic in its radical self-­questioning. It must not dare, precisely ­because of its fundamental tendency, to have or determine God.” As Judith Wolfe has shown, in contrast to religious phenomenologists, like Reinach and Stein, who in their analy­sis of ­human religious experience posited the existence of God, Heidegger concentrated exclusively on the h­ uman moment, what Wolfe has called Heidegger’s “eschatology without eschaton.”154 Instead of an opening and rising ­toward the divine, a final quiet resting place for Augustine’s “cor inquietum”—­the ac­cep­tance of which for Heidegger could only come from outside of philosophy—­Heidegger prioritized the wholly immanent “being-­towards-­death,” God replaced by the nothing, theology by philosophy.155 The development of Heidegger’s “a-­theism” has generally been read along confessional lines.156 Some scholars explain it through Heidegger’s



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engagement with Protestantism: Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, and ultimately Luther.157 In contrast, o­ thers see Heidegger’s atheism as a result of his appeal to a supposedly neutral, and perhaps Catholic, ontology.158 Both explanations tell part of the story. In Heidegger’s most famous treatment of the question, the 1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” he marked his distance from theology by casting the latter as an “ontic” science in contrast to “ontological” analyses. Such an appeal to the ontic-­ontological distinction allowed Heidegger to discount the appeals to faith and God in Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard as ontic contaminations of their thought. B ­ ecause ontology was prior and fundamental, it could not be guided by religious princi­ples. Theology could not be the terminus a quo of philosophy, an account of the sinful state from the perspective of the state of Grace that would prepare the subject for receiving the truth of the Gospels.159 The theological neutrality of philosophy has precursors in Heidegger’s early Catholic period. Already in 1910 he had suggested that Catholicism presented a “truly presuppositionless” science. As I argued, in this Heidegger followed the progressive neo-­scholastics like Noël, for whom philosophy was a tool of conversion, a path from agnosticism to Catholicism, and thus could not rely on articles of faith. It is significant that in his published writings, apart from a brief moment in the Habilitation, Heidegger very rarely referred directly to God.160 Even in 1916 he recognized that the medieval orientation ­toward the transcendent was incompatible with modern, immanent philosophy.161 But unlike the neo-­scholastics, Heidegger refused the idea that, starting from neutral premises, philosophy could lead us to God—­that theology was philosophy’s terminus ad quem.162 In a 1924 seminar on Luther, Heidegger argued that the “corruptio of the being of man ­can’t be understood radically enough; this in contrast to Scholasticism, which had always spoken of an attenuated corruptio.”163 ­Human finitude was so radical that it could never work out theological truths on its own. In this way, Heidegger drew on Protestant ideas to challenge the neo-­scholastic notion of philosophy as a path to God, and drew on Catholic ideas to challenge the Protestant argument that philosophy should start from the fact of faith. McGrath sums up the result of this confessional confluence: “Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity is what a theologian of the Cross would

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expect to find in an au­then­tic philosophy that had ‘suspended’ the revelation: a rebellious humanism and a cele­bration of finitude.”164

Being and Time (1927) ­ hese developments, vis­i ­ble in Heidegger’s courses and in a ­couple of T aborted publications, w ­ ere first introduced to the broader philosophical community in the 1927 publication of Being and Time. Heidegger had written the final draft over a few short weeks the year before in order to have his promotion to full professor approved by the Prus­sian Minister of Science, Art, and National Education.165 In the book, Heidegger framed his analy­sis by the question of being. Being and Time opens with a quotation from Plato’s Sophist: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.”166 The radical nature of Heidegger’s proj­ect meant that he needed to put aside any accreted presuppositions from the history of philosophy. Previous ontologies, such as that of the scholastics or of Descartes, w ­ ere “fixed bod[ies] of doctrine,” which betrayed the primordial experience from which they emerged, even if that experience could still be, with the right approach, read ­t here.167 This is why Heidegger’s proj­ect of reviving the question of being demanded as its corollary a “destruction” of the ontological tradition. For Heidegger the meaning of being could not be addressed immediately. At the end of the introduction, Heidegger provided an outline of his proj­ect, of which the text published in 1927 would cover only a small portion.168 Most importantly for us, the proj­ect of a general ontology, promised for the third division of the first half, was deferred, never to be completed as planned: as Herbert Spiegelberg has noted, Being and Time is an “astonishing torso.”169 In the published version Heidegger limited himself to clarifying the question. Like all questions, the question of being comprised three moments: what is asked about (the Gefragte), what is interrogated (the Befragte), and what is found out through that interrogation (the Erfragte).170 Heidegger’s Gefragte was being, and the Erfragte, the meaning of being (Sinn von Sein), was deferred in Being and Time. Heidegger’s ­great innovation, as he understood it, was the identification



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of the m ­ iddle term: the Befragte. What entity could one interrogate to uncover the meaning of being? The clue, for Heidegger, lay in the question “What is ‘being’?” The fact that we could ask such a question, using the verb “is,” suggested that we already must already have a sense of what “being” meant.171 Being was disclosed to us in our engagement with the world, our encounters with ­things and other ­people, which ­were already infused with practical concerns and values, already endowed with meanings. That is what Heidegger meant when he said that we are “thrown”: We find ourselves in and open to a world of meanings that preceded us. Heidegger called this openness, and thus that entity “which each of us is himself,” “Dasein.”172 Dasein, Heidegger wrote, “in its being, has a relationship ­towards that being,” and for this reason it was a prime lead in his investigation.173 He summarized: “Fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise,” must be sought in the “analytic of Dasein.”174 Over the next 400 pages, Heidegger would provide such an analytic, introducing in the pro­cess many of his most influential ideas: being-­in-­the-­World, Mitsein, the “one,” authenticity and inauthenticity, among ­others. Now, Dasein clearly ­didn’t have a fully developed conceptual understanding of being, what for Heidegger would count as an “ontology.”175 If that had been the case, Heidegger’s proj­ect ­wouldn’t have been necessary. Instead Dasein had what Heidegger called a “pre-­ontological” or “vague average understanding.” For example, we grasp the world more fully in instrumental engagement, wielding a hammer or sitting on a chair, where being is “readiness-­to-­hand,” than in theoretical reflection, “being-­ present-­at-­hand.”176 In line with his emphasis on the pretheoretical sphere, Heidegger displaced Husserl’s intentionality onto being-­in-­the-­world and “care” (Sorge)—­“Care as the being of Dasein”177 —­which preceded and undergirded our “relationship” to the world as knowing subject to known object.178 For all the many developments over the preceding de­cade, the broad outline of Heidegger’s argument in 1927 should recall the Habilitation. ­There we saw how “concrete real­ity” was correlated with a modus essendi activus, a pretheoretical form of subjectivity, which grounded all our judgments about the world. So too in Being and Time Heidegger described Dasein in terms of “existence,” a language that, as Kisiel has

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shown, was only a­ dopted in the final draft,179 but that echoed the 1916 work: Heidegger had claimed ­t here that the modus essendi activus had the form of “existence.”180 Given the genealogy I have offered h­ ere, it is telling that at the conclusion of the first division of Being and Time, Heidegger returned to the question of truth, and especially the correspondence theory, which had preoccupied him in the earlier writings.181 Again Heidegger homed in on the central prob­lem: Did one compare a m ­ ental repre­sen­ta­tion with real­ity (strict Thomist position) or with another repre­sen­ta­tion (the early progressive position)?182 Heidegger now rejected both possibilities: “Repre­sen­ta­tions do not get compared, e­ ither among themselves or in relation to the Real T ­ hing.”183 As Heidegger understood it in 1927, the trou­ble with both formulations was that they remained at the level of the “present-­at-­hand”: a present-­at-­hand object and a present-­at-­hand repre­sen­ta­tion. Instead Heidegger proposed that truth depended upon disclosedness: “To say that an assertion ‘is true’ signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ in its uncoveredness,” or “aletheia.”184 Moreover, as Heidegger argued, recognizing Dasein as being-­in-­the-­world made the question about w ­ hether ­there was an “outside world” meaningless. That world was disclosed “along with the being of Dasein.” Only by de-­worlding Dasein could it be doubted.185 Heidegger’s elaboration of Dasein’s pre-­ontological understanding of being thus neatly solved the prob­lems with the progressive neo-­scholastic theory of truth. But even though this argument was able to refute the skeptics, it came at a price: Heidegger si­mul­ta­neously rejected the idea of timeless truth. If truth was rooted in Dasein as disclosedness, and Dasein was temporal, truth must also be temporal.186 “That ­there are ‘eternal truths’ ­will not be adequately proved ­until someone has succeeded in demonstrating that Dasein has been and w ­ ill be for all eternity.”187 Instead Heidegger argued that “both the contention that t­here are ‘eternal truths’ and the jumbling together of Dasein’s phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ with an idealized absolute subject belong to ­t hose residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded.”188 The discussion of truth thus raised the question of temporality, and marks the turning point of the book: a shift from “being” to “time.” The



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existential structure of Dasein implied that “as long as Dasein exists, it must in each case, as such a potentiality, not yet be something.”189 Dasein was constituted by such possibilities; it was, Heidegger said, freedom (Seinkönnen). This freedom meant that a study of everyday Dasein could never grasp it as a w ­ hole. Dasein gained ­wholeness only in death. Heidegger expressed the challenge in the following antinomy: “As long as Dasein is as an entity, it has never reached its ‘wholeness.’ But if it gains such ‘wholeness,’ this gain becomes the utter loss of being-­in-­the-­ world.”190 For Heidegger, this implied that the only way to grasp Dasein as a w ­ hole was to confront its being-­towards-­death (Sein zum Tode). Such confrontation was irreducibly personal. As Heidegger explained, death was Dasein’s ownmost “potentiality-­for-­being.” Death was what Dasein ­couldn’t escape, and it was “nonrelational,” meaning that each of us experienced it alone.191 To be sure, we mostly try to ignore our deaths. Such “inauthentic” flight characterizes our everyday existence.192 But, Heidegger argued, it is also pos­si­ble to confront death “authentically” and accept our mortality.193 Only in this au­then­tic being-­towards-­Death did Dasein become accessible in its totality, and only thus could the question of the meaning of its being be addressed.194 In a long and complicated argument, Heidegger claimed that an au­then­tic being-­towards-­ death revealed that the “primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality.”195 In Heidegger’s Being and Time, we can see the fraught development of the two confessional strands that we noted earlier: an ontological proj­ect, continuous with his early Catholic studies, and an analy­sis of Dasein, continuous with his investigations into Protestant religious experience in the period a­ fter 1916, which would explain how being disclosed itself to us. In the confluence, neither remained unchanged. On the one hand, Heidegger’s ontology required first the destruction of the ontological tradition, especially scholasticism, and foregrounded a temporality that undercut scholasticism’s claim to have founded a philosophia perennis. On the other hand, Heidegger’s analy­sis of Dasein emphasized an account of its “being” that was indifferent to Protestant accounts of faith. Being and Time, as an ontological analy­sis of Dasein, is located at the uneasy interface of ­these two confessional strands. Heidegger summarized his proj­ect in a December 1927 letter to Bultmann: “My work

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aims for a radicalization of ancient ontology and at the same time for a universal extension of it in relation to the region of history. The foundation of this problematic is formed from the exit from the ‘subject’ in the correctly understood sense of ­human existence [menschlichen Daseins]. . . . ​ Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard are philosophically essential for the development of a more radical understanding of Dasein . . . ​Aristotelian-­ scholasticism for the strict formulation of certain ontological prob­lems.” The methodology that would link ­these disparate ele­ments together was, Heidegger argued, Husserl’s phenomenology.196

Conclusion In the period before World War I, neo-­scholastics embraced phenomenology. In Noël’s terms, Husserl was a convert, not ­because he had come to accept Catholic doctrine, but rather ­because his ideas seemed to perform the philosophical correlate: return modern philosophy to the objectivism of medieval thought. But as Heidegger’s trajectory suggested, conversion was not a one-­way street. As formulated in Ideas, Husserl’s thought was just as apt to lure neo-­scholastics away from the tradition, even to the point of apostasy, as bring secular phi­los­o­phers into the fold. Writing to Rudolf Otto, Husserl admitted as much: “My philosophical influence has ­after all something remarkably revolutionary: Protestants become Catholic, Catholics Protestant.”197 The prob­lem for neo-­scholastics was that the two conversions w ­ ere intimately related. ­Because Husserl’s work was a bridge connecting modern thought back to the medieval tradition, it also opened up a path away from scholasticism. And it is not clear that one would know in which direction one was traveling. Heidegger embraced Husserl’s transcendental philosophy as a means to answer a pressing neo-­scholastic question. In this way, his Habilitation could be seen as a sign of his allegiance to Catholic philosophy. Yet this embrace ultimately led to his exclusion from the movement. As more neo-­scholastics wrestled with Husserl’s ideas, increasingly in conversation with Heidegger’s, the radical undecidability of ­t hese conversions—­ phenomenology as both ­great promise and irreducible danger—­became the guiding problematic, generating interest in phenomenology far beyond Germany’s borders. By then, however, the stakes had risen, ­because



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phenomenology was no longer regarded as an obscure academic philosophy. It is one of the g­ reat ironies of the Catholic reception that, only a few years ­after neo-­scholastics had identified it as a danger to the faith, phenomenology came to be hailed by other Catholics as the cornerstone of a general religious revival, where salvation—­not only of individual souls, but also of entire socie­ties—­was in the balance.

4 The Vital Faith of Max Scheler

T

he fall 1923 Conference of the Association of Catholic Academics (Akademikerverband) was originally planned for Essen, home of the Krupp industrial empire in the heart of the Ruhr.1 Essen was an inauspicious choice that year. In early January the French, who already controlled much of the Rhineland, marched 100,000 troops into the area, responding to what they saw as the slow payment of war reparations. This initiated a tense strug­gle in the town. At the end of March, French soldiers gunned down thirteen workers who had been protesting the occupation, and the next two years saw both passive and violent re­sis­tance accompanied by harsh reprisals by the French. Though the conflict was local, its economic effects w ­ ere felt across Germany. The occupation helped accelerate postwar inflation, which in the final months of 1923 brought the young German Republic to its knees. Confronted by both this local emergency and the national crisis it helped precipitate, the general secretary of the Association, Franz Xaver Münch, proposed Ulm as an alternative venue: the town was situated about 500 kilo­meters to the south and, thus, far from the French forces. The choice of a new location should not be seen as a retreat from the prob­lems of the era. Münch had helped found the Akademikerverband in the years before the ­Great War to foster a distinctive Catholic identity within the university, 116



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which had traditionally been regarded as hostile to Catholicism. In the postwar crisis, the Association had grown in ambition, and it came to pres­ent a resurgent Catholicism as crucial to national regeneration. For many Catholics, the events following the war, including the French occupation, w ­ ere merely symptoms of a deeper illness, one endemic in liberal modernity. Thus, despite the more peaceful surroundings in Ulm, the sense of national calamity and the need for a confident Catholic response remained a hallmark of the event. As one commentator noted, Ulm was a “business town,” where the Akademikerverband could enter into an “engagement with bourgeois-­capitalist society.” Only thus could it demonstrate its ability to “renew world and society.” The title of Maria Schlüter-­Hermkes’s presentation—­“Catholic Intellectual Work in the Cultural Crisis of Our Times”—is exemplary of the themes and tenor of the meeting.2 The undisputed star attraction was Romano Guardini, a Verona-­born German whose 1918 Spirit of the Liturgy had propelled him to prominence as the leading thinker of the “liturgical movement.” For members of this movement, the liturgy was not supposed to be seen from afar, but experienced. Just as the liturgy had suffused Christian society in the ­Middle Ages, so many thought that it could promote a broad-­based spiritual renewal in the twentieth c­ entury. The liturgical movement could trace its roots to the revival of Gregorian chant in the nineteenth ­century, but it gained official impetus ­u nder the papacy of Pius X, who wanted to encourage lay participation in the Church. By 1923 it had considerable support among German Catholics. In his pre­sen­ta­tion on “liturgical education” at the conference, Guardini bound himself to a movement with even wider appeal: the Catholic youth movement, especially its “Quickborn” form. The interest was mutual. When Siegfried Kracauer, who would ­later make his name as a member of the Frankfurt School, reported on the conference for the Frank­furter Zeitung, he noted the “numerous Quickborners, girls and boys,” who clustered around “their venerated leader Romano Guardini.”3 In fact, for the Akademikerverband, the liturgical movement and the youth movement w ­ ere distinct but interwoven strands of a single enterprise, whose goal was a Catholic re­nais­sance in and of Germany.4 For our purposes, the most revealing talk at the conference was given by the young Jesuit, Erich Przywara. Przywara did not have the same

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draw as Guardini; Kracauer did not even mention him. But Przywara’s pre­sen­ta­tion is significant ­because he posed the conference’s themes in philosophical terms. According to Przywara, three movements in postwar Germany held promise for national renewal. In addition to the youth and liturgical movements, he named phenomenology. Phenomenology might seem an odd addition to the list. First, unlike the other two, phenomenology was a “non-­Catholic” movement. Przywara recognized this, but for him that was its g­ reat attraction: Phenomenology’s return to Catholic truth showed that developments within the confession resonated outside it. That is, the discussion of phenomenology allowed Przywara to claim an epochal authority for his fellow Catholic academics. They ­were responsible not only for the “intellectual currents” of Catholic Germany but for “all of German intellectual life”: “We are standing in the ­middle of the crisis and escape from this crisis depends upon us. On us!”5 Second, while the other two ­were mass movements, engaging thousands of ­people, the Catholic phenomenology I discussed in Chapters 1–3 was a purely academic affair, restricted to a small number of neo-­scholastic thinkers. The First World War, however, dramatically changed its status. The claim that phenomenology was a meeting point between the modern and the medieval came to have a new and far-­reaching po­liti­cal meaning. The phenomenological return to scholastic realism was simply a theoretical analog to a broad Catholic social revival. Understood in this expansive way, phenomenology came to fasten its grip not only on neo-­ scholastics but also on a far broader range of Catholic intellectuals. Husserl fostered the idea that phenomenology had social ramifications. Having lost one son in the war, he had placed his thought in the ser­vice of cultural renewal in a three-­lecture series on Fichte given at Freiburg in 1917.6 That year, Adolf Grimme, a Social Demo­cratic Protestant who had studied with Husserl in Göttingen, published an article in the cultural journal Der Falke with the title “The Good News of Husserl’s Philosophy.”7 Painting a damning picture of prewar intellectual life, he claimed that it was mired in skepticism and relativism.8 But Husserl, he said, was able to cast aside the tendencies of his age by laying new foundations for absolute truth. For this reason, Grimme argued, one day “our grandchildren ­will glorify in one breath two victors of con­temporary German thought on humanity . . . ​: Hindenburg and Husserl.”9 Grimme focused



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on Husserl’s “Gospel.” But for Catholics in the aftermath of the war, the role of phenomenological evangelist had been taken over by one of Husserl’s followers.10 When Catholics identified phenomenology as a key player in national revival, they ­were referring predominantly to the work of Max Scheler.

Max Scheler’s Religious Revival Born in 1874, Scheler was not in any ­simple sense Husserl’s student. By the time he met the older phenomenologist in 1901, Scheler had already completed his doctorate in Munich and his Habilitation in Jena. But like many ­others, he became entranced with the new philosophy. When he returned to Munich as a lecturer in 1907, on Husserl’s recommendation, Scheler became one of the prime movers of the phenomenological circle ­t here.11 He lost his position in 1910 a­ fter his divorce from his first wife earned him accusations of “immorality.” But the misfortune merely cemented his position in the phenomenological movement. He subsequently gave private lessons for about a year in Husserl’s Göttingen, where he befriended Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-­Martius. When Husserl founded the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1913, Scheler was part of the editorial team. In that year, he published the first part of the work that would become the cornerstone of his broader proj­ect to apply phenomenological ideas to ethical questions: Formalism in Ethics. Scheler’s book was directed explic­itly against the Kantians. For Scheler, Kant had provided only an empty and rationalistic formalism, which gave no meaningful motivation for moral action and was powerless in the face of real moral dilemmas. In its place, Scheler proposed a “material” (meaning nonformal) ethics. Just as Husserl thought that we had an intuitive access to essences, Scheler thought that we had access to an axiological realm. “Cognitive” feelings ­were intentionally related to objective values. Playing on the German word for perception, Wahrnehmen, Scheler designated this emotional grasping of values Wert-­nehmen, value-­ception.12 A phenomenological investigation of values showed them to be ordered in a hierarchy moving from the agreeable and useful, through the “vital,”

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to the “spiritual” (geistige) values (the morally right, the true, and the beautiful). The pinnacle of this hierarchy was the holy, and its priority lay in the absolute nature of its object, which was indivisible, per­sis­tent, and completely in­de­pen­dent of ­human ­will. Though this order and the values it comprised ­were in­de­pen­dent of the subject, they did not exist in the sense that objects in the world exist, or in the way “forms” existed in a separate realm for Plato. Rather, the values first had to be “functionalized” in the world—­felt “in” par­t ic­u ­lar objects and ­people. Through such functionalized values we caught glimpses of the value order: in the beautiful object we could feel both that it is preferable to the ugly, and that it is preferable to the simply comfortable.13 ­Because preferences only related to functionalized values, Scheler’s objective and eternal hierarchy did not produce a universal ethics. Good and evil ­were relative, dependent upon the par­t ic­u ­lar values functionalized in par­t ic­u ­lar times and places. We ­were enjoined to undo par­tic­u­lar wrongs, and to strive for par­ tic­u­lar goods, depending on our situation and “basic moral tenor.” That values existed only when “functionalized” also meant that moral improvement could not depend upon abstract rules but relied on concrete examplars: the hero, the genius, and the saint.14 For Husserl, Scheler’s desire to uncover the objective order of values showed that he was “drunk on essences.” In turn, Scheler, like Husserl’s Munich critics, attacked Husserl’s transcendental turn in Ideas.15 In extending Husserl’s Wesensschau to values, Scheler suggested that the experiencing subject must be understood in a correspondingly expansive way: as what he called a “person.” The person was the “concrete and essential unity” of vari­ous intentional acts: thinking, but also feeling and willing.16 This implied that each person is individual, and Husserl had erred in thinking that ­t hese concrete particularities could be abstracted away to arrive at the transcendental subject.17 In addition, ­because persons w ­ ere defined as the unity of their acts, rather than as a substance, they could not be treated like objects: their act-­character was ontologically distinct from the object-­character of nonhuman ­things. ­These arguments had clear social implications. Society needed to be structured in a way that would facilitate the full flowering of the person. ­Because values could be “functionalized”—­realized in the messy real­ity of social life, in multiple ways—­several dif­fer­ent social forms ­were pos­si­ble



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and perhaps equally valid.18 But a set of common guidelines could still be identified. First, Scheler definitively rejected modern bourgeois society, and especially capitalism, which he thought had shut down our access to higher values, and thus led to corruption and de­cadence. Second, the lower values (use and comfort) ­were nonetheless essential, so that society needed to cater for mundane needs (food, comfort, shelter) in order to promote the emergence of higher values: nobility, beauty, and ultimately the religious faith of the “saint.”19 Third, to reflect the objective hierarchy of values, society had to be divided into dif­fer­ent groups, which would “bear” ­t hose values in dif­fer­ent ways.20 In this way the particularity of each person was respected and each played an indispensable role in a nonetheless hierarchical society. Fourth, ­these individual persons would find unity in a higher-­order individuality, or “Gesamtperson”—­a community, state, or Church—­forged through the bonds of love.21 The Gesamtperson allowed the integration of each individual’s goals into a coherent social w ­ hole. It also facilitated the realization of the highest values, which, Scheler insisted, brought us beyond our egotistical selves. Fifth, in the early days of the Weimar Republic, Scheler’s personalism led him to argue for “Christian socialism” and “Christian democracy.” Both prioritized ­human “solidarity” based on love, over capitalistic competition and po­liti­cal domination.22 As this sketch suggests, Scheler’s developing ethical and social theory was infused with religious ideas. He had been born just outside of Munich to a Jewish ­mother and a Protestant ­father, and it seems that the former took the lead in his upbringing.23 Scheler converted to Catholicism in 1899, but his commitment was halfhearted. Only around 1912, ­after his engagement with phenomenology—he referred to his meeting with Husserl as a sort of conversion experience—­did he fully embrace the Catholic faith and did it start to guide his life and work.24 The next few years saw his rise as a Catholic intellectual. In 1919 Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, offered him the chair in sociology at the newly refounded university ­there.25 The combination of religious and social concerns comes to the fore in the book that marks the pinnacle of Scheler’s Catholic period: the 1921 On the Eternal in Man (Vom Ewigen im Menschen). The subtitle of the book, “Religious Renewal,” gives a sense of Scheler’s purpose. It had two

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related meanings: First, it spoke of a revival of religious faith, where religion was the object of renewal; second, it described a hoped-­for revitalization of Germany and Eu­rope on religious lines, and h­ ere religion was the renewing agent. The book begins with an analy­sis of “remorse [Reue],” the deeply felt sense of responsibility for the war. Unlike Nietz­sche, who saw remorse as a vital hatred turned against the self, leading to spiritual deformity, Scheler understood it is as “a type of self-­healing of the soul.”26 ­Because the war had revealed the de­cadence of prewar society—­its nationalism, subjectivism, relativism, and capitalism—it was a spur to self-­ transformation. Remorse had the potential, Scheler argued, to be a “true conversion-­remorse.”27 Moreover, to the extent that remorse was built upon a sense of “common responsibility [Mitverantwortlichkeit],” it could usher in social change.28 For Scheler, remorse was not simply a negative force. It gave us glimpses of an other­wise “invisible order of our soul and its relations to its highest parts and creator,” revealing our place in a “metaphysical-­religious world order.”29 The driving princi­ple of this order was “love,” which would power a “Christian community [Gemeinschaft]” to replace the atomized society (Gesellschaft) of bourgeois modernity.30 In Scheler’s view, as “spiritually finite” persons we are not self-­sufficient and need to live with ­others. Even Robinson Crusoe, Scheler argued, was conscious of his social being, though for him the need for community made itself known through its absence. Further, we are all Robinson Crusoes in the sense that we feel keenly the inadequacy of earthly communities (­family, town, nation, and so on), and the need for a “higher community” with God. Quoting Augustine, Scheler declared, “Inquietum cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te [Our heart is restless, u­ ntil it rests in you].”31 This ascending hierarchy of ever more perfect communities allowed Scheler to dispense quickly with individualism and nationalism, both of which had been cut loose from the religious telos which could give them meaning. 32 The multilayered Christian community respected the individual, the singularity and dignity of each soul before God. But equally it embedded the individual in a range of intermediary organ­izations, a “system of estates [Ständen], and then . . . ​professional-­work communities of all types.” Or­ga­nized this way, work would be governed not by self-­ interest or state power but instead by a sense of duty and ser­vice to the



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broader community. 33 This is what Catholics called a “corporatist” social order, where class conflict was transformed into cooperation, and where each “estate” had its own “dignity [Ehre]” and “conscience [Gewissen].”34 Such intermediary social forms did not stop at the level of the nation, and Scheler i­ magined the possibility of a federal unity of Eu­ ro­pean (and ultimately world) states. 35 Scheler recognized that one ­couldn’t set to one side the specificities of the modern age, but his notion of a corporatist society within a loosely united Christian Eu­rope often led him to turn to the M ­ iddle Ages for inspiration.36 Scheler talked lyrically about the need to open up philosophy to the “­great inheritance of the European-­Christian world of thought,” to move beyond Kant and rediscover the ­Middle Ages, but he did not embrace neo-­ scholasticism.37 Rather, as the second part of the book made clear, Scheler’s religious philosophy drew more on Augustine than Aquinas: We are driven ­toward the divine, Scheler averred, by the “wonderful tension [Spannfeder]” that “lies so deeply in us.”38 The particularity of the religious act, an emotional disclosure focused on the salvation of the soul, sharply distinguished it from metaphysics, which he saw as an intellectual “astonishment” at existence.39 The differences ­were expressed at the level of their intentional object. The religious God grasped in nonrational feeling was the “God of the holy person and the God of the p ­ eople, not the scholarly God of the ‘educated.’ ” He was a “living God” who could love and be angry.40 The God of metaphysics, in contrast, was abstract and austere, an “absolute unchanging Ens.” The former was concerned with the highest good, the latter with the absolutely real (Wirkliches).41 Scheler thus rejected what he saw as Aquinas’s claim that ­there was a “partial identity of essence” between religion and metaphysics, where metaphysics could provide the preambula fidei, a firm basis of theological truths (hence, identity of essence), which would then be supplemented by revelation (hence, partial).42 He thought, nonetheless, that religion and metaphysics ­were dif­fer­ent intentional means of accessing the same real­ity; the “God of religion and the world-­foundation of metaphysics” w ­ ere 43 “­really identical.” The key to this unity was the “unity of the ­human spirit and the necessary absence of contradiction between its positions.”44 In this way, in opposition to the Thomistic partial-­identity system, Scheler proposed his “conformity system”—­metaphysics and religion ­were

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distinct but noncontradictory, two dif­fer­ent ways of looking at the same ­thing, aligned by the unity of the apprehending subject.

Hochland and the Black Nietz­sche Scheler’s articulation of the social and po­liti­cal implications of phenomenology vastly broadened its appeal in the Catholic world. Phenomenology would no longer be the preserve of a few musty neo-­scholastics. His influence, however, was magnified by a transformation in German Catholicism over the same period, which we can track by examining the development of Hochland, a Catholic literary and cultural journal based in Munich that took the lead in the Scheler reception. Hochland had been founded in 1903 by Carl Muth as an attempt to demonstrate and promote the vibrancy of Catholic German culture in the aftermath of the Kulturkampf. The journal wanted to pres­ent a robust image of the Catholic worldview and to overcome the Catholic “inferiority complex.”45 Muth explained the title in the first issue. The journal would be guided by the maxim: Hochland—­land of the high spirit Turned to the highest meaning.

But Muth also participated in a general effort to lead Catholics out of their “ghetto” and make them a force to be reckoned with in German culture and society. He claimed that the idealism embraced by Hochland—­its recognition of higher values and our “ethical-­religious being”—­was sorely needed ­there.46 He thus wanted to be a Catholic who engaged with other Germans, and he promoted Catholic lit­er­a­ture that would gain attention outside of the confines of the Catholic world, while inviting many non-­ Catholics to contribute to his journal. This proj­ect required a renewal of Catholicism. Muth wrote that the journal would gladly welcome the insight and wisdom of the past, but they would develop it “using all means that give us continuing experiences and the knowledge that urges us ever deeper: modern needs and tasks, more developed skills, methods, and techniques. . . . ​In this way, and no other,” he concluded “we are modern.”47 Though Muth did not tie his journal to



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any par­tic­u­lar philosophical school, his approach appealed to progressive neo-­scholastics. Many of the figures we have encountered so far, like August Messer, Heinrich Finke, and Engelbert Krebs, contributed regularly to its pages.48 In 1920 Muth invited Heidegger to submit an article.49 Hochland’s orientation elicited charges of heterodoxy, leading to an extended conflict with the conservative journal Der Gral in the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century. 50 In 1911, during the modernism crisis, Muth’s journal was temporarily placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, though remarkably this was never made public, thanks to the papal nuncio to Munich, Andreas Frühwirth.51 The official reason for the blacklisting was the serialized publication of a novel by Antonio Fogazzaro, who, strongly influenced by Loisy and Tyrrell, had attempted to reconcile Catholic doctrine with Darwinian evolution. But the tensions between the Church hierarchy and Hochland extended beyond the choice of texts. As Muth suggested looking back at this period, his journal represented a “discontent [Unbehagen]” with the Church and religious life, seeking a greater freedom for Catholic thought and a greater role for the laity in Catholic organ­izations.52 The war would help the journal fulfill its goal of internal renewal and extraconfessional outreach. The Kaiser’s appeal to internal unity (the Burgfrieden) gave Catholics an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the German state. When Cardinal Mercier spoke out against German aggression in Belgium, German Catholics reacted with patriotic outrage. Cardinal Erzberger even lobbied the Pope to have the Belgian Primate fired. 53 Their common patriotic fervor brought Muth into contact with Scheler ­after the latter published The Genius of the War and the German War in early 1915.54 Having been dismissed from military ser­vice for health reasons, Scheler presented the book as his contribution to the war effort.55 He argued that the conflict had awakened Eu­rope from its bourgeois slumber and had led it to reconnect with vital, spiritual, and religious values. The war was a necessary and restorative strug­gle against En­glish materialism.56 Scheler’s enthusiasm for the war led many to compare him to Friedrich Nietz­sche. As Steven Aschheim has shown, at that time Nietz­ sche represented the heroic Germanness supposedly reawakened by the war. Consequently, the German authorities distributed 150,000 copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra among the troops.57

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Scheler’s book has played a significant role in cementing Scheler’s reputation in the years ­after 1945 as a German nationalist, even proto-­Nazi, but for Catholics at the time The Genius of War was most exciting for the ways in which it opened a path ­toward national belonging. 58 In a 1915 article, “Merchants and Heroes,” which responded to Werner Sombart’s book of the same name, an anonymous contributor to Hochland drew a common picture of the conflict. The war was a face-­off between liberal-­ capitalistic de­cadence, represented by “­England” (the eponymous “merchants”), and a spiritual revival represented by Germany (the “heroes”). Latching onto Sombart’s and Nietz­sche’s criticism of modern commercial society, a criticism that extended to the prewar German Reich, the writer argued that the conflict had initiated a renewal, where loyalty to Fatherland and p ­ eople had risen over the petty goals of the “naturalistic 59 individual life.” If Sombart and Nietz­sche ­were the prophets of this renewal, Scheler showed that the same spirit could be identified among Catholics. They too wanted to be “done with ­England.” In this way Hochland presented Scheler as a Catholic or “Black” Nietz­sche, someone who had translated Nietz­sche’s criticism of modernity into religious terms: “The experience of the pres­ent World War ­will certainly show again that for the German spirit of heroism t­ here is no stronger support than in Christian truth.”60 In fact, in t­ hese arguments the revitalized Germany was distinguished by its broadly “Catholic” values. Hochland followed Scheler in his rather remarkable analy­sis of the destruction of Reims Cathedral at the beginning of the war: The German forces that fired upon it had a greater affinity with its religious spirit than the rationalist French who sought to defend it. The Germans had merely destroyed a hollowed-­out shell, the cathedral’s soul having perished at the hands of French rationalism long before.61 This reading of Scheler received a fillip on the publication of an extended version of Scheler’s 1912 essay “Ressentiment” in 1915.62 Scheler shared Nietz­sche’s criticism of modern bourgeois “resentment,” but he argued that Nietz­sche had thrown the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting Catholicism at the same time. Following this line, the contributors to Hochland favored Weber’s theory about the origins of capitalism over Sombart’s. They suggested that Protestantism, not Chris­t ian­ity tout



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court, was responsible for the de­cadence of modernity.63 At about the same time, the Catholic phi­los­o­pher Max Ettlinger argued that the En­glish model represented only a watered-­down form of Chris­tian­ity, which had “diluted the meaning of the Christian doctrine of love into s­ imple humanitarianism, a morality of compassion, altruism.” For this reason, the solution to resentment was not the rejection of Chris­tian­ity, as Nietz­sche had thought, but instead its embrace. The war against En­glish commercialism did not only produce “heroes” but also “saints.”64 While in 1915 the comparison between Nietz­sche and Scheler allowed the contributors of Hochland to assert that Catholics and other Germans ­were brothers-­in-­arms in the strug­gle against a soulless economic and social order, ­things began to change when the tide of the war turned against Germany. As the fighting stretched out into a third year, the length and brutality of the conflict all but destroyed the earlier heroic enthusiasm, and it dampened Catholics’ fervor for the German nation. But the “Black Nietz­sche” reading was supple enough to adapt to the new conditions. Scheler was no longer presented as a Catholic counterpart to Nietz­sche, but instead as a Catholic alternative. No longer simply a patriotic German, now Scheler furnished a Catholic remedy to the ills of nationalism. Scheler had become a prophet of love who would salve the wounds inflicted by hatred.65 In a 1917 article on Scheler, Austrian playwright Hermann Bahr criticized the early and Nietz­schean enthusiasm for the war as a paean to power. But it is telling that Bahr could exclude from criticism Scheler’s The Genius of the War, which had informed the more bombastic pronouncements two years earlier.66 For Bahr, “few ­will be able to read their war books again with such easy conscience.” ­Here the differences between Scheler and Nietz­sche, not the similarities, ­were paramount. Unlike other war enthusiasts, who w ­ ere motivated by hate, Scheler was driven by love. Bahr argued that readers had failed to recognize “how sharply [Scheler’s book] contradicted that un-­German Germany, the Germany of the superstitious faith in power, for which what was able to push itself through and assert itself was right.” 67 Scheler’s emphasis on love undermined, rather than giving a Christian foundation for, nationalism—­which was the idolization of an earthly power. The commercialism before the war that had led to the conflict was the result of the nationalization of science and

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philosophy. Redemption required a return to the true sources of cultural production, a revival of “a religious period of culture, oriented to the universal: the ­Middle Ages.”68 Scheler projected a vision of the “German world returned home to dignity, faith, and truth.”69 Only if it pursued this vision could Germany reclaim its leading international role, engaging with Mediterranean culture to produce “a new and greater culture of the German and Roman spirit.”70 Such a criticism of chauvinistic German nationalism was pervasive in the Munich periodical in the final months of World War I.71

Catholics in Weimar Hochland’s increasingly vocal criticism of German militarism positioned it, ­after the defeat, as a leading voice within the Catholic world, one that called for cooperation with the new republican regime. This was not an easy stance for Catholics to take. The “November Revolution” had led to the declaration of the Weimar Republic on November 9, 1918, and the abdication of the Kaiser shortly thereafter. As one of its first acts, the new government, led by the Social Demo­cratic Party (SPD), agreed to an armistice with the Allies; ­later it would sign the Treaty of Versailles. It was an inauspicious start to Germany’s first demo­cratic regime, and helped foster the myth that the socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back.” The terms of the peace, including the massive war reparations, weakened the economic foundations of the new democracy. ­There was a stabilization of the Republic a­ fter 1924, and an increasingly healthy po­liti­cal system, which was only brought down by the global economic crisis ­after 1929, during which Germany’s ­great reliance on U.S. financial support led to a particularly deep and painful Depression. But the early days of the Republic left a strong sense of its illegitimacy, which many Germans felt extended to liberal democracy itself. The situation was particularly fraught for Catholics. Though the Catholic Zentrum (Center Party) was the second largest party in the Reichstag, it counted few demo­crats of conviction. It was a standard Catholic argument that State sovereignty upended the true social and po­ liti­cal order, and few Catholics w ­ ere more than tolerant of republics. The editors of Hochland argued, however, that German Catholics needed to support and participate fully in the new Republic. Such was



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the argument in Carl Muth’s “The New ‘Barbarians’ and Chris­tian­ity,” a programmatic article published in March 1919. Muth followed Leo XIII’s encyclical Immortale Dei from 1885 in declaring that the Catholic Church was indifferent to po­liti­cal form, ­whether monarchy or republic.72 But in the first dramatic months of 1919, when Weimar was besieged from right and left, this old line had a distinctly demo­cratic ring. Muth sternly chided ­those Catholics who harbored hopes that the new regime would be short-­ lived: “The Church is the unrelenting opponent of e­ very counterrevolution, just as it is of e­ very revolution.” It was perhaps the closest to an endorsement of the Weimar Republic that one might hear in a major Catholic periodical.73 Even though Muth wrote favorably about the new regime, he reserved the right to criticize it. In 1923 he argued that Christian involvement was crucial to its success. “Modern state democracy is only a purely rationalistic form of sovereignty, built and reckoning on the state of emergency caused by a fully atomized social body, suited to exploit the p ­ eople by flattering their basest instincts.” To function properly, democracy would have to let go of its liberal presuppositions and embrace a more robust form of community. For this the key and missing ingredient was Chris­ tian­ity, which was “the realization of the spirit of justice, of love for your neighbor, of the willful subsumption into the ser­vice of the ­whole.” “In the ­f uture,” Muth declared, “democracy w ­ ill e­ ither be Christian, or it ­won’t be at all.”74 While Muth’s Christian democracy marked a challenge to the old Prussian-­dominated autocracy from below, it also challenged it from above. The Hochland circle became an early and vigorous supporter of Eu­ro­pean integration. In this, Hochland mirrored broader developments in German Catholicism. In the southern Germany, especially Bavaria, which felt a strong kinship to certain parts of Austria, the old nineteenth-­ century debate between groß-­and klein-­deutsch solutions to the German national question was rekindled by the military defeat, part of an anti-­ Prussian animus on the part of Bavarian (and Austrian) Catholics.75 ­Here the solution to the postwar crisis lay, not in a centralized state, but instead in a looser federation of countries (Länder). Rhinelanders, in contrast, gave considerable currency to the idea of a Eu­ro­pean empire, an “Abendland” where Germans would find “in the Latin Church and the

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Latin language the best complement to our being.”76 For Hochland the two arguments ­were often linked. Otto Gründler, one of Hochland editors, would argue in 1921 that a federal Germany, freed from Prus­sian domination, as part of an Austro-­German “Danube federation” could help clear a path to a federal Eu­rope: a “peaceful alliance of ­peoples.”77 Muth was most radical on the social level. Broadly, Catholics embraced a solidaristic vision of society, moving beyond what they saw as the “abstract individual” of liberalism, and sought to embed men and w ­ omen in a range of social structures—­from the f­ amily, through professional organ­ izations, to the state. A return to “corporatism” had already been central to German Catholic sociology since the mid-­n ineteenth c­ entury when Bishop von Kettler proposed it as a solution to modern social and economic upheaval. This required institutions to mediate between individuals and the state—an organic unity of guilds would replace the conflict of classes. While embracing the po­liti­cal ends of socialists and liberals, including support for ­unionization and limits to the working day, Kettler suggested that ­those ends could be achieved only by Catholic means.78 The social order would reflect the Catholic, particularly Thomist, view of the natu­ral order: a divinely ordained hierarchy, which was accessible to ­human reason. The false and artificial ideals of liberalism consisted in the denial of this order. Muth repackaged and radicalized ­t hese arguments for the postwar world. In par­tic­u­lar, he urged greater unity between the Center Party and the Social Demo­crats, the two largest parties in the Weimar system. The phrase “New ‘Barbarians’ ” in the title of his essay referred to workers’ groups—in his corporatist language, the “fourth estate [vierte Stand]”— who agitated against capitalism. But Muth used quotation marks b­ ecause he urged the Church to stand with t­ hose “barbarians” rather than with the bourgeoisie who had labeled them as such.79 He admitted that the Social Demo­crats had a flawed metaphysics, holding that h­ umans w ­ ere corrupted by society and thus needed only material (not religious) salvation. Their politics w ­ ere premised on an unchristian elevation of state power and rejection of property. But they w ­ ere right, Muth was convinced, in their criticisms of the bourgeois world, and that is why he took up the clarion call of a “Christian socialism.”80 Catholicism was closer to socialism than to capitalism b­ ecause the former was built on the Christian



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princi­ple of solidarity.81 Hochland’s po­liti­cal positioning led it to become a resolute, if necessarily covert, opponent of the Nazis a­ fter 1933.82

The Youth Movement Hochland was not content to be a Catholic think tank. Rather, it promoted a far-­going social transformation. To achieve this, it needed to reach beyond the intellectual elite and engage a broader audience, to appeal to the “average German.” 83 For Hochland the most likely vehicle for such a proj­ect was the Catholic youth movement, which by 1918 had become one of the largest and most dynamic forces within German Catholicism. It continued to grow—by 1933 it encompassed thirty-­three organ­izations, with 1.5 million members.84 Muth described German youth as “the secret of our resurrection and our ­future.”85 Another contributor saw in the movement “a ­great hope for the Fatherland and Church.”86 Catholic organ­izations had become interested in organ­izing young ­people in the early twentieth c­ entury, building on Catholic socie­ties for unmarried men and w ­ omen.87 The movement grew most quickly in the period immediately following the war, appealing to a generation that for the most part had not fought in the army and yet was receptive to the idea that the conflict had delegitimated a liberal and rationalist social order once and for all. Such groups w ­ ere wedded to Tönnies’s conception of Gemeinschaft or community, and romanticized the M ­ iddle Ages and its 88 chivalric ideals. The Catholic youth movement in Germany was multifaceted, but the most vibrant and well regarded of t­hese groups was Quickborn.89 Hermann Hoffmann, one of the movement’s leading figures, described the Quickborners as wanting to f­ ree themselves from the corruptions of “the big city, from the bar, the café, and movie theater.”90 In response Quickborn prescribed a new engagement with nature: they or­ ga­nized long hikes in the mountains, slept in barns, and cooked their own food.91 ­Because urban culture extended to Catholic circles, which thus offered only “the bourgeois corruption of their received faith,” 92 the Catholic press could endorse forms of youthful rebellion: “The fact remains . . . ​t hat precisely this generation, whose ­children brought the youth movement into being, was strongly infected with the worldview of the bourgeoisie. . . . ​Against this rebelled a healthy youthful instinct.”93

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Quickborn resembled other youth movements in early twentieth-­ century Germany, ­whether for men or ­women, proletarian or bourgeois, associated with po­liti­cal parties or resolutely resistant to any outside control.94 For the most part, they could trace their roots to the turn of the twentieth ­century, when in a widespread rejection of Wilhelmine society, “Wandervögel” groups sought their own education through communion with nature. In their opposition to a bourgeois world, t­ hese groups found loose unity in the 1913 “Meissner formula”: “The ­free German youth wants to shape its life by its own determination, out of its own responsibility, and with inner truthfulness.” To this call for autonomy, the youth movement added a commitment to corporeal purity: “All events of the free-­German youth are alcohol and nicotine ­free.”95 Such a stance made most forms of the youth movement unsympathetic ­toward the Weimar Republic from the beginning. L ­ ater the youth movement underwent a militarization and radicalization, and many made the shift to Nazism. “What began in 1910 with frilly shirts [Schillerkragen] and flowers in the hair, by 1930 gave way to uniforms and shoulder straps.”96 Catholic commentators considered the commonalties between Catholics and non-­Catholic movements impor­tant, ­because ­these suggested that Catholicism responded to questions of general concern. But they ­were also keen to mark the differences between the two. 97 The author of a Hochland article from 1921 suggested that the non-­Catholic Wandervögel movement encouraged homo­sexuality and perversion, ­because it raised Eros to the status of a God, and refused to be guided by higher spiritual values.98 In contrast, the Catholic youth movement promoted a healthy and pious existence. Often the argument was presented as that between life (Leben) and spirit (Geist): for the Catholics the chaotic urges of the body unleashed by the other youth movements needed to be tempered by the calming order of the soul.99 This combination of life and spirit was considered most impor­tant for the question of authority. Catholic youth movements had overcome the false “Kantian” autonomy of the Meissner formula to submit themselves freely to the truth of the Catholic Church.100 Waldemar Gurian, who would l­ater make his name as a Catholic po­liti­cal theorist, asserted that while other youth groups w ­ ere “aimed at the de­mo­li­tion of inauthentic ways of life . . . ​the young Catholics instead discover again the forms that



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had lost their deep meaning.” Even if they refused direct adult control, the Catholics did not simply reject their elders, but sought to recuperate the truths of their confession.101 Gurian concluded, “Only through the presence of a true tradition, commensurate with the essence of the real, is the young Catholic generation superior to other groups.”102 A contributor to Hochland argued that “the task of . . . ​a Christian youth movement, which wants to promote a forward development of young ­people, ­will be to pursue the earnest and core idea of the Free-­German revolution, to take it up, and through the internal organic fusion with a purebred and enthusiastic Chris­tian­ity, sublimate and ennoble it.”103 But what ensured this “sublimation”? What brought the Quickborners back to the piety of their ancestral religion, while the Wandervögel followed a downward path to perversion and vice? It was a vexing question. Many ­were worried that the Catholic youth movement would follow the example of their non-­Catholic counter­parts—­that rebellion might trump faith. That is why Catholic commentators ­were reassured by the increasing influence of the liturgical movement in Quickborn.104 As we have seen, Guardini was the towering figure of the liturgical movement, and he considered the Quickborn movement to be his most impor­tant ministry.105 He had attended the first meeting at their new home in the small town of Rothenfels am Rhein, and a­ fter 1924 helped edit one of its journals, Die Schildgenossen.106 Quickborn came to adopt his vision of the Church. According to Guardini’s biographer Hanna-­Barbara Gerl, “What Guardini thought through at his desk, taught from his lectern, and attempted in his pastoral care was put to the test, discussed, sometimes strug­gled through, and (as far as it went) realized in Rothenfels.”107 In Quickborn, alongside hiking and ­music, community masses (Gemeinschaftsmessen) became an impor­tant part of the experience.108 We can see why Guardini’s work appealed to the youth groups. He argued for an “awakening of the Church in the soul” in response to the closed and overly intellectual theology of the neo-­scholastics. Guardini foregrounded the liturgy’s corporeal and emotional ele­ments, including song and chanting.109 Devotional forms, he argued, should “be permeated by warmth of feeling.”110 He also resisted the primacy of the priest and made the communal aspects of the liturgy central, demanding the translation of the liturgy into modern languages.111 The liturgical movement

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was a self-­declared “democ­ratization,” which many critics decried as a “sneaking Protestantization.”112 But we can also understand why Guardini could have been seen as a moderating influence on Quickborn. However much Guardini reasserted the bodily and emotional, he was adamant that Catholics needed to be guided by the intellect and tradition. He wrote in his Spirit of the Liturgy that the “prayers of the liturgy are entirely governed by and interwoven by dogma. . . . ​Prayer is beneficial only when it rests on the bedrock of truth.” For the unity of Catholic truth was able to release the congregation from the “thralldom of individual caprice.”113 The final chapter of his book reaffirms this point: Log­os had primacy over ethos. Participation in the liturgy helped form pious Catholics, embedding them in the Church community. Only in the liturgical contemplation of Catholic truth would Catholics find the intellectual and emotional resources to guide their ethical lives.114 Guardini held views so orthodox that John Paul  II, when listing the greatest theologians of the German Catholic tradition in 1980, could name him alongside Albertus Magnus, Nicholas of Cusa, and Erich Przywara.115 Guardini’s work showed just enough resonance with the youth movement to give it influence t­ here, but it also served as a bastion of Catholic tradition that keep youthful rebellion from degrading into s­ imple anarchy.

Scheler and the Catholic Revival In the early years of the Weimar Republic, Scheler became Hochland’s unofficial ­house phi­los­o­pher: he published many articles in its pages, and Muth’s own essays ­were saturated with Schelerian themes. In 1921 Otto Gründler, Scheler’s protegé, became one of the lead editors.116 Scheler’s prominence in the journal can be attributed to three ­factors, all of which relate to his “Black Nietz­sche” label. First, Scheler was the most prominent proponent of a Catholic anticapitalist social theory that was close to Hochland’s own. Second, he seemed capable of engineering interest in Catholicism outside of the confession. Third, and most importantly, he seemed well positioned, like Guardini, to keep in check the Nietz­ schean impulses of the Catholic youth movement. That is, he furnished intellectual resources for Hochland’s po­liti­cal proj­ect while promising



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the interconfessional outreach and intraconfessional renewal that the proj­ect required. The value of Scheler’s work for Hochland’s po­liti­cal and social aspirations can be seen most clearly in a 1921 article, “The Meaning of Phenomenology for Cultural Life,” written by Gründler. Gründler argued that phenomenology, though hampered by its “tongue-­twisting name,” offered valuable ideas to German society; if made accessible to ordinary Germans, it could be “a power that strengthens and enlivens our entire cultural life.”117 Scheler, Gründler argued, had opposed “the ‘closed’ type of man, the ‘bourgeois,’ the man of the capitalistic age,” to an “ ‘open’ man. The man of the noncapitalist ages: the past and the ­future.”118 In his 1922 book, Ele­ments of a Philosophy of Religion, Gründler linked this social theory explic­itly to Scheler’s philosophy of religion, which, he argued, showed how our religious impulses found their “most concrete expression in the organic arrangement of Christian community into spiritual and worldly estates.”119 This community embedded the individual in a rising ladder of social forms reflecting Scheler’s objective hierarchy of values: “Society” binds h­ umans only with re­spect to their material interests, the “life community” with re­spect to their vital drives, the “nation” with re­spect to their spirituality, their yearning for cultural goods, the religious community, the “Church,” however, with re­ spect to their deepest divine core, their striving for God and personal salvation. And only in this relationship are all men solidary.120

As for Muth, Gründler thought that Scheler’s form of anticapitalist “corporatism” aligned Catholic thought with “Christian socialism,” showing a “far-­reaching correspondence with what social democracy sought ­after and achieved in the revolution.”121 ­These ideas would be realized, however, only if they could appeal to ­those outside the Catholic world. In his articles from the time, both for Hochland and elsewhere, Scheler asserted the value of Catholic thought for German life more generally, and his appeals seem to have been heard.122 Thus, when we hear the familiar claims that phenomenology marked a return of modern thought to Catholic truths, said in reference to Scheler in the first five years ­after the First World War, we should recognize that they had assumed a broader social meaning.123 Scheler’s phenomenology

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had become a sign that Germany might be receptive not only to medieval Catholic philosophy, but also to its social and cultural ideas. As his student Peter Wust remarked in a 1924 essay, Scheler had made “Catholicism acceptable again in German society.”124 Most importantly, Scheler seemed able to discipline and guide the Catholic youth movement. Unlike Guardini, he did not have any official role t­ here, nor did he often speak to youth groups directly. When he did— as, for instance, at their joint congress in January 1922—it seems to have been a disappointment for both sides.125 But many saw him at the time as an impor­tant influence. Waldemar Gurian wrote to Scheler in 1921, “Your ideas find ­great appeal with the supporters of the German youth movement. Even if they ­aren’t in complete agreement with you, they believe they can see in you a man who is more than a teacher, more than a transmitter of knowledge.”126 The phi­los­o­pher Fritz Heinemann would ­later argue that Scheler was the “leader of the young Catholic movement, of ­great propagandistic effect.”127 This judgment comes in part from the place of the young in Scheler’s own writing. While investing ­great significance in the transformative role of youth, Scheler argued that ­simple rebellion against the old ways was insufficient. In a 1923 text dedicated to the youth movement, Scheler was generally positive, seeing in the movement the possibility of turning German society and politics around, but he nonetheless criticized its “overemphasis on ‘life’ and ‘vital’ values over the values of the spirit.”128 That is why, in On the Eternal in Man, he claimed that the anarchic tendencies and “impulse [Drang]” of Eu­ro­pean youth w ­ ere “not more . . . ​ than the raw material for the true master builder of the religious and moral renewal.” The young also required a “new religious and ethical w ­ ill to form,” which would be incited by a “Homo religiosus”—or, in his earlier language, a saint.129 Thus, for many, especially the contributors to Hochland, Scheler addressed their hopes and anx­i­eties about the youth movement in the same way as Guardini: his work both appealed to the rebellious youth and promised to tame it. In 1920 the religion scholar Heinrich Getzeny suggested that what was most significant about Scheler’s philosophy was the way in which it could promote a renewal of the spirit on the basis of vital movements, which for him was the key to any effective change.130 As Bahr had claimed in 1917, while refusing to engage



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in “prophecy,” Scheler’s Formalism “has truly every­thing needed to become a new manual for the new German youth, from whom we await our ­future.” If German youth wanted to reject Nietz­sche’s deadly program, which had led to the war, they would have “no better leader than Scheler.”131

Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg’s Schelerian Order The thinker who best instantiated, both in his personal trajectory and in his ideas, Hochland’s hopes for Scheler was Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg. As many commentators at the time w ­ ere keen to note, Landsberg was not himself a Catholic. Born to a liberal and academic Jewish ­family in Bonn in 1901, Landsberg had been baptized a Protestant as a child. During the war and in the early 1920s, however, Landsberg edged closer to Catholicism, even if he never officially converted.132 Landsberg was a bona fide member of Quickborn, too. As James Chappel has written, Landsberg was one of Gurian’s friends, and they spent time “hiking across the Rhenish countryside in sandals and reading [Carl] Schmitt’s works in the forest.”133 Landsberg had studied ­under Husserl in Freiburg in 1920 and then from 1921 ­under Scheler in Cologne. He leaped to fame at the tender age of twenty, when he published The World of the ­Middle Ages and Us, which he dedicated to Scheler. Landsberg aligned his thought with what he called the “conservative revolution,” urging a rejection of modern liberal society and a return to the estates of the ­Middle Ages. Heard ­today, the term recalls its use by authoritarian nationalist thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, who worked at the same time. It is possibly b­ ecause of ­these resonances that the Benedictine Alois Mager could claim that Landsberg’s book was purely “negative,” and thus contradicted the “positivity” of the Catholic worldview.134 But in 1922 the term “Conservative Revolution” was not yet fixed in its meaning, and in his politics Landsberg comes closer to Muth and Hochland’s Christian socialism and democracy than to Schmitt’s assertion of absolute sovereignty.135 Mager’s criticism of Landsberg is ironic ­because it adopts Landsberg’s own terms of opprobrium. Landsberg categorized spiritual movements according to their negative or positive character, and defined modernity as “heretical” b­ ecause it emerged solely out of the rejection of the medieval

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world.136 The modern world was built on the Protestant Reformation, fueled by “hatred” of Catholicism rather than “love,” which Landsberg, following Scheler, considered the source of any meaningful and “creative [schöpferisch]” movement. The love / hate duality allowed Landsberg to dispense in short order with a range of social and intellectual movements: the Enlightenment embodied hatred of the nobility and clergy; Romanticism embodied hatred of the Enlightenment; socialism embodied anticapitalism; and nationalism emerged out of the rejection of medieval universalism.137 In contrast, Landsberg presented the ­Middle Ages as a positive era. It was structured by the loving recognition of an “ordered w ­ hole” created by a personal God. By presenting this belief in universal order as the central characteristic of the M ­ iddle Ages, Landsberg could then frame modern science, especially that deriving from Galileo and Newton, as a medieval “inheritance.”138 For Landsberg this order expressed itself most promisingly in medieval social and ethical life, which provided a material “ethical law.” Medieval society was comprised of “estates,” or clerical, military, and commercial ­orders—­t he Lehr-­, Wehr-­, and Nährstände (the latter divided into the peasants and bourgeoisie), which corresponded to Scheler’s hierarchy of spiritual-­, vital-­, and use-­values. Only such a social system could ensure the health of society, b­ ecause it endowed each estate with its “dignity,” “duty,” “rights,” and “solidarity,” which, in contrast to the competitive dynamics powering modern society, produced a “social satisfaction” which “we can only longingly divine.”139 As for Scheler, such an order did not subsume the individual. Citing Amer­i­ca, Landsberg claimed that the modern “individual” was “infinitely more uniform and herdlike than the ­people of the ­Middle Ages.” The difference lay in how the ­Middle Ages sheltered and respected “a final sphere of religious interiority.”140 This re­spect for interiority was a result of the recognition of a universal and “eternal” ele­ment in each ­human, which transcended all social and po­liti­cal positions. As Landsberg had argued in the beginning, modernity was marked by the priority it gave to history, and thus the assumption that “we are h­ umans of a par­tic­u­lar time and place, a par­tic­u­lar nation and a par­tic­u­lar profession.” But it forgot “­those depths of ­simple humanity, immersed in an eternal and nonspatial layer of being.”141



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The idea that the M ­ iddle Ages could be best understood as the fullest realization of the “eternal in man” was crucial to Landsberg’s po­l iti­cal proj­ect. He was clear that a “return” to the M ­ iddle Ages was impossible.142 But to understand the prob­lem in historicist terms, using an idea of linear development leading from a now-­foreign past ­toward a radically new f­ uture was to remain beholden to the errors of modernity. Instead Landsberg proposed a circular pattern, where “anarchy” could overcome the “custom [Gewohnheit]” of modernity to open up a path back to “order.” According to this schema, Landsberg had argued at the beginning, the M ­ iddle Ages should “designate less a par­tic­u­lar period of time” than a “­human foundational and essential possibility, that appeared most visibly in a par­tic­ u­lar period . . . ​but is somehow always and never realized.”143 We should look back to the M ­ iddle Ages, not to resurrect a bygone historical age, but in order to discover again an ideal that had never truly gone away. This schema provides the frame for Landsberg’s understanding of the youth movement, which he saw as the most power­ful force contesting the “custom” of modernity. Just as the barbarian hordes had destroyed the corrupt civilization of late antiquity, the youth movement would destroy the moribund forms of modern bourgeois culture.144 The youth movement was thus a negative force, which would lay the ground for the conservative revolution Landsberg was calling for.145 But its anarchy ran the danger of being too negative, of neglecting the true order in its concern to tear down the old. For this reason, the youth movement required the guidance of the liturgical movement and phenomenology. At several points in the book, Landsberg referred positively to Guardini’s proj­ect, his recognition that we needed to withdraw from the “vita activa,” our everyday concerns, and reconnect to God through the liturgy.146 He argued that the “wonderful sounds of the liturgy” reminded man of his “glowing bond to the eternal.” It could reenergize our communion with God, and thus remind us of the ephemerality of our mundane desires and goals: “ ‘as it was in the Beginning, is now and forever s­ hall be, Amen.’ ”147 That is, the liturgical movement was the positive supplement to the negative force of the youth movement, facilitating the move from anarchy to order. The liturgy seems to have had personal importance for Landsberg too. In August  1921 Scheler wrote to Abbot Ildefons, asking him to let Landsberg “penetrate

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deeper into the religious and spiritual, especially the liturgical life of the Maria Laach Monastery.”148 But it was also clear that this order for Landsberg was accessible phenomenologically. When Landsberg picked up Guardini’s “primacy of Log­os over ethos,” he translated it into Schelerian terms: “a primacy of the love-­drenched regard over love-­drenched praxis.” The order Landsberg sought was a “fact of the phenomenology of religion.”149 Scheler’s work secured access to an objective order of values, which would undergird the new social world. “In philosophy one returns to the s­ imple foundational ­orders of being and searches beyond banality and paradox, custom and anarchy in philosophical thought, to discover the vis­i­ble laws of the world in a philosophy of the self-­evident.” By being presented with ­these ideas, “a new youth strides out on a new path from custom through anarchy to order.”150 Landsberg reaffirmed this relationship in a recapitulative ­table at the end of the book. In three columns he listed the ele­ments of custom, anarchy, and order. The youth movement was listed ­under the second, phenomenology ­under the third.151 Landsberg referred to Nietz­sche only briefly in his book. His most extensive discussion comes in his anthropology. He presented two atheistic versions. Epicureans considered ­humans to be no better than animals, seeking only immediate contentment. Stoics, represented in modernity by Nietz­sche, saw h­ umans as Gods, self-­sufficient and masterful.152 But while the stoics sought to raise us above our animal souls, they constantly collapsed into epicureanism: “­Those who separate themselves from grace w ­ ill fall, and ­those who want to become Gods through their own power w ­ ill become animals.”153 Nietz­scheanism failed due to its inability to discern the universal and God-­given order of the world. Like Lucifer, it had tried to take God’s place, to impose its own order rather than be attentive to God’s.154 But if we recognized ourselves as creatures of the ­middle, Landsberg thought, torn between our angelic and bestial selves, a more robust solution could be found. We w ­ ere drawn downward by our animal drives and feelings, but raised upward by the possibility of Grace, a possibility indicated by our suffering.155 We could achieve greater t­ hings, surpass our animal selves, only through faith in God. Landsberg’s discussion of Nietz­sche thus mirrored his discussion of the youth movement. Both needed religious guidance.



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Shortly ­a fter the publication of the book, Landsberg developed the connection between Nietz­sche and the youth movement in an essay written for Hochland. In “Church and Paganism” he argued that the true and most significant ­battle of the moment was not between Chris­tian­ity and a degraded liberalism, which had already shown its inadequacy. Rather, the f­ uture would be deci­ded in the confrontation of Nietz­scheans and Christians, the self-­d ivinized and the ­children of God, “life” versus “spirit.”156 For Landsberg as for Scheler, Nietz­sche had failed to understand Catholicism, ­because its appeal to transcendence did not parasitically drain the “blood of immanence,” rendering the real world valueless. Instead, a personal God through his love bestowed meaning and value on all h­ umans.157 Landsberg did not want to delegitimize paganism. In the article he drew attention to its value and importance. While Chris­tian­ity was right in arguing that “the spirit governs and forms life,” life nevertheless “serves the spirit and gives it fullness.”158 The Nietz­schean valuing of life was thus an antidote to the ills of the contemporaneous world: “Not the excess, but the decay and lack of life, endangers spirit itself ­today.” For Landsberg, Nietz­sche represented a “pious paganism,” in the sense that he valued life over the empty obsession with “­things” that had come to mark liberal modernity.159 Chris­tian­ity had much to learn from Nietz­sche and its paganism, much to learn about the valorization of life. That is why Landsberg could assert that “­here the Church must also be the inheritor of heresy.”160 Landsberg tied this argument directly to the youth movement. It is true that the youth movement ran the risk of “paganism” in its pursuit of the vital values.161 But equally the Church risked losing the support of “the worthy spiritual youth of Eu­rope” if it continued to be hostile to it.162 “The life stream of the youth movement must not be seen too much with mistrust, as if it threatened to destroy the spirit’s governance of life. . . . ​The youth movement produces again first the primary abundance of life . . . ​which spirit needs as well. It is the awakening and the self-­defense of life maltreated by the isolated spirit.”163 The Church should rely on the Christian youth movement to embrace the faith without giving up on life. In this way the Church would resist modern paganism and Nietzsche—­not by direct opposition but by moving

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“through” them. Only thus would “a noble part of the young find its way to Christian truth.”164 For Landsberg, as for the editorial group at Hochland, Scheler was valuable for the way in which he opened up lines of communication to the rebellious Nietz­schean strivings of the youth movement. When they presented him as a Black Nietz­sche, the emphasis was on the noun rather than the adjective—on Scheler’s embrace of the vital ­human values in opposition to the empty and deadly individualism of post-­K antian modernity. Scheler’s Catholicism was significant only on this basis. For from this Nietz­schean starting point, Scheler had come to assert spiritual and religious values that ranked higher than the vital. In ­doing so he had shown how Catholics could recuperate Nietz­sche, while providing the ideas and texts that would secure the allegiance of the youth movement to Catholic princi­ples.

Neo-­Scholastic Doubts The Hochland reading of Scheler as a “Black Nietzsche”—­someone who could transcend (Nietz­schean) vital drives ­toward a (Catholic) spiritual order—­was inhabited by a familiar anxiety. Was it pos­si­ble to convert Nietz­sche to Catholicism, or would that end up simply conceding too much to Nietz­sche’s atheism? That is, was the “Black Nietz­sche” an oxymoron? This question was all the more impor­tant b­ ecause it keyed directly into the complicated and possibly unstable character of the youth movements. While Landsberg and ­others at Hochland saw in Scheler a salutary influence on the youth movement, neo-­scholastics ­were more skeptical. As we have seen, in his On the Eternal in Man Scheler had explic­itly distanced his thought from Thomism and its partial-­identity system. His order of values was in­de­pen­dent of, if congruent with, metaphysics. Throughout his book, Landsberg was also critical of Thomas’s modern interpreters. For all his nostalgia for the ­Middle Ages, he rejected Leo XIII’s proj­ect: he was clear that “no neo-­scholasticism” could help.165 Landsberg criticized, for instance, the Church’s condemnation of modernism, denounced the Jesuits as a purely negative force, and wrote positively about mysticism.166 Most importantly, Landsberg followed Scheler



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in favoring Augustine over Aquinas: epistemological reasons, Landsberg argued, “fully justify Scheler’s return to Augustine.”167 For the notion of order relied on a phenomenological analy­sis of the act of belief, and especially of its degree of activity, which was negatively correlated with the real­ity and in­de­pen­dence of the known object: “This passivity of belief is only the necessary, noetic side of the existential absoluteness of God.”168 The tensions this position caused with the neo-­scholastics led the Hochland editorial team to encourage both Scheler and his followers to engage more closely with Aquinas.169 Many neo-­scholastics agreed with Scheler’s broader religious and social proj­ect, but they worried about its philosophical foundations.170 In par­tic­u­lar, troubled by their own experience with Husserl ten years earlier, neo-­scholastics w ­ ere wary of Scheler’s intuitive method and appeal to an extra-­intellectual emotional intentionality, especially as expressed in his conformity system. They worried that it was not a sufficiently stable foundation for the spiritual order, which, as in Husserl’s work they thought, could degrade into subjectivism. If accessed through our emotions, w ­ eren’t the spiritual and religious values ultimately beholden to the vital forces they ­were supposed to control? A familiar figure provided the most extensive neo-­scholastic response: Joseph Geyser wrote two books on Scheler in 1923 and 1924, positing the priority of the intellect as a correction to Scheler’s emotional intuition.171 Geyser was only one of many. We see a similar reading of Scheler among other neo-­ scholastics in Germany, both progressive Thomists and ­those in the strict Thomist camp.172 Among the neo-­scholastics, the most hospitable response came from Erich Przywara.173 Przywara had been born to a German-­Polish ­family in Silesia in 1889, and dedicated himself to religious study, both in the Netherlands and in Austria.174 ­After his ordination in 1920, Przywara became one of the editors of the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit, a Catholic periodical that was influential ­until the Nazis shut it down in 1941. Such was his prominence that he was involved in much-­publicized debates with Karl Barth in the late 1920s. Barth saw him as the “­giant Goliath incarnate,” the most rigorous representative of Catholic theology, even if he famously discounted Przywara’s analogia entis as “the invention of the anti-­Christ.”175

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Przywara engaged with phenomenology in multiple essays and books over the course of his c­ areer. One of his first extended analyses was the set of lectures mentioned at the start of this chapter, where Przywara integrated his analy­sis of phenomenology into the broader debate over the youth movement.176 In fact, he drew a very familiar portrait. The youth movement tended to prioritize life over form, the individual over community. This accounted for its revolutionary tone, its “strug­gle against the ­family home and school.” Though Przywara saw this strug­gle as necessary, given the fact that parents and teachers had been “infected” by Lutheranism and Kantianism, he worried that it could be taken too far. Such an excess was most clearly vis­i­ble in the non-­Catholic youth movement, which remained at the purely negative stage of Kantian autonomy, the rejection of all authority.177 This is why Przywara argued that the youth movement required its “polar complement in the liturgical movement, that complement that we see already brought to fulfillment in Guardini’s work.”178 The liturgical movement was a “­will to form as opposed to freely growing life; w ­ ill to community as opposed to one-­sided individualism; ­will to a self-­justifying vita contemplativa reposing in God against the instrumentalization of an overreaching vita activa.”179 In this way, it affirmed the priority of God as the “highest ideal and absolute law.”180 How did Przywara judge phenomenology? It too had much to recommend it. He suggested that phenomenology was more than just a philosophical movement. It represented “the way home for non-­Catholic intellectual life to the abandoned Cathedral of the old philosophy.” Referring to Landsberg’s work, Przywara argued that phenomenology was a “movement of liberation” from the post-­K antian philosophical consensus, a “­will to” (and as we s­ hall see, this language is impor­tant) the object, essence, and God, and a strong “yearning” to establish contact with the “non-­self.”181 Though Husserl had taken the path from h­ ere to the transcendental subject, Scheler and ­others sought to break out of the transcendental realm into the real.182 But in Przywara’s view, what­ever value it might have, phenomenology was the “hot” and immoderate yearning of youth.183 In his desperate attempt to break ­free of the limits imposed by Kantian philosophy, Scheler had sought to expand the scope of immediate intuition to a ­whole range of essences, beyond the princi­ples of logic allowed by the scholastics.184



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Most dangerously Scheler had wanted an immediate intuition of God. Scheler was guided ­here, Przywara argued, by a form of adolescent love, an attitude of “can’t-­be-­close-­enough.”185 Such ardor ran considerable risks. In demanding the leap from a fallen world to God, it threatened to make the intuition of the divine a ­human possession, and thus could lead to “radical atheism.” To say that ­humans could immediately grasp the essence of God was tantamount to saying that God was purely h­ uman.186 This was the irony of phenomenology—­its impatient desire to escape from the self and reach a transcendent God led it to collapse back onto itself. Though phenomenology had the right goals, the right “­w ill to,” it lacked the necessary philosophical foundations to secure itself: “knowledge of.” Far from being, as Landsberg had thought, the means by which the youth movement could be guided from anarchy to order, Przywara argued that it suffered from the same flaws. Both needed a more mature guiding hand.187 That is why the appropriate Catholic response to phenomenology was not an enthusiastic embrace but a “word governed by love, a true redeemer’s stance, that does not snuff out the glowing wick or break the twisted pipe.” By holding up the “cool distancing of the scholastic theory of abstraction” to the “hot yearning suddenness of the phenomenological Wesensschau,” phenomenology’s “youthful passion” could be “transformed into level-­headed maturity.”188 In the face of this youthful and headstrong “non-­Catholic” movement, Przywara proposed the firm and calm assertion of Catholic metaphysics, a truth that phenomenology sensed but that, in its ardor and haste, it had come to betray.189 That is why, Przywara wrote in another article from the same time, “scholasticism does not, as Scheler even now thinks (misunderstanding its true doctrine), simply oppose his teachings, [it] represents their true inner maturation.”190 For all his praise of Scheler, Przywara did not endorse the Hochland position. Scheler’s goals ­were laudable, but in sidelining the intellect he lacked the necessary epistemological and metaphysical foundation to secure them. He was not a suitable patron for the youth movement. Guardini better filled that role. As Przywara wrote ­later for a French publication, even though Scheler in his “Catholic springtime” had seemed to promote a religious renewal, his need to reject the old ways won out over his desire for a “return . . . ​to the old Catholicism.”191

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Conclusion Przywara was right. While the young Jesuit was addressing the Akademikerverband about the promise and dangers of phenomenology, Scheler was moving away from the Church. The development seems to have been in part personal—­his marriage to his second wife broke down due to an affair with one of his students, Maria Scheu, and this increased friction with Church authorities—­but it also followed a working-­through of his philosophical anthropology.192 In his ­later work, he rejected the Judeo-­Christian God and developed what he called a “panentheism.”193 In his The H ­ uman Place in the Cosmos, published just weeks before his death in 1928, Scheler elaborated a dualistic metaphysics based upon a princi­ple of mutually irreducible life and spirit. Spirit was in itself powerless, but by inhibiting and deinhibiting life’s “drive impulses,” it could guide that life, using life’s forces to achieve spiritual ends, “sublimating” them.194 The in­effec­tive­ness of spirit on its own, for Scheler, was a power­ful argument against the Judeo-­Christian creator God. Rather than the world having been created by an all-­powerful God, spirit gained its strength over the course of history by co-­opting vital forces. It was thus a “God-­in-­becoming.” To put it differently: a mutual interpenetration of originally impotent spirit and of originally demonic impulsion blind to ideas and values an ideation-­in-­becoming and a spiritualization of impulsion’s sufferings from re­sis­tance [Drangsale] ­behind the images of entities, as well as the simultaneous empowerment or vitalization of spirit; that is the goal and end of finite being and of history. Theism falsely puts the goal at the beginning.195

This ­wasn’t to capitulate to Nietz­sche. Nietz­sche had recognized that the true “creative” force in humanity was life, not spirit. But for Scheler, Nietz­ sche had failed to understand that spirit was also irreducible to life, that it was governed by its own set of laws.196 Scheler’s increasing distance from Catholicism should not lead us to attribute any par­tic­u­lar perspicuity to the neo-­scholastic readings. ­After all, progressive neo-­scholastics had learned to be wary of phenomenology the hard way, through their encounter with Husserl. But while Scheler’s



The Vital Faith of Max Scheler 147

supporters in the Hochland circle, like Heinrich Getzeny and Dietrich von Hildebrand, attributed his break with Catholicism to personal weakness (“the ­whole tragedy of his nature”), ­because Thomists had diagnosed prob­lems with his metaphysics beforehand, they could face Scheler’s conversion with equanimity.197 In 1924 Przywara responded to Scheler’s apostasy by reiterating his criticism of the latter’s value system and its reliance on love, separating value and being.198 He argued that although Scheler came close to Catholicism, his philosophical foundations w ­ ere always anti-­Catholic. It was merely a m ­ atter of time u­ ntil the alliance fell apart. As Przywara described the development in 1928, the religious act always had the Nietzchean character of “rich life” and therefore “the region of empirical ‘life’ breaks in.” For Przywara, Scheler’s development from Formalism in Ethics to The ­Human Place in the Cosmos—­from the objectivity of values to their absolute powerlessness before life—­had always been inevitable.199

II Existential Journeys 1930–1940

5 Christian Existentialism across Eu­rope

Developments in the late 1920s should have put the final nails in the

coffin of Catholic phenomenology. In 1927 the old von Schaezler scholar, Martin Heidegger, had published Being and Time, which was read by many as a landmark of atheist philosophy. In 1928 Max Scheler’s most recent and final work, The Place of Man in the Cosmos, confirmed his 1923 rejection of theism in general and Catholicism in par­tic­u­lar. And in 1929 Edmund Husserl would give his Paris lectures, The Cartesian Meditations, which would do nothing to allay the anx­i­eties arising from his 1913 book, Ideas. From the chastened perspective of a more pessimistic age, the progressive neo-­scholastics’ hopes for phenomenology from before World War I looked completely naive. ­Those hopes had been overblown even in the 1910s. As we have seen, phenomenology entered Catholic networks in large part ­because German neo-­scholastics held chairs within state universities, most notably the centers of phenomenological research in Munich and Freiburg. But outside of Germany, neo-­scholastics ­were sequestered in their own institutes and seminaries. Due to this institutional separation, when Noël, Gemelli, and ­others invoked phenomenology in their overtures to secular phi­ los­o­phers, their entreaties fell on deaf ears. ­A fter being hailed as the 151

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crowning success of progressive neo-­scholasticism, the fate of Catholic phenomenology came to serve as evidence that modern phi­los­o­phers ­were indifferent to their medieval pre­de­ces­sors. And yet the dawn of the 1930s saw a marked resurgence in the Catholic engagement with phenomenology, and over the next de­cade phenomenological ideas not only traveled across Eu­rope but started to make inroads into philosophical establishments in France, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. In its second wind, the stakes of the Catholic reading had changed. Rather than mobilizing phenomenology in their appeal to secular thinkers, neo-­ scholastics drew on it in debates with their non-­Thomist Christian rivals. This might seem the result of diminished ambition, but the shift had two impor­tant consequences: First, it transformed into valuable tools what neo-­scholastics had earlier taken to be phenomenology’s greatest liabilities. The relationship between Husserl’s realism and his idealism, Heidegger’s ontology and his “humanism,” and Scheler’s objective order of values and his agonistic account of the subject came to stand as proxies for the relationship between Thomist and non-­Thomist forms of religious thought. Phenomenology thereby became a privileged battlefield in intra-­ Christian debates. Second, it helped phenomenology make inroads into national academic establishments. Many of the Thomists’ Christian interlocutors occupied positions of importance in state university systems. With a foot in both Catholic and mainstream philosophy, they could act as bridges between the two. To continue our story into the 1930s, then, we need to look beyond the neo-­scholastics, and examine the complex ecosystems of religious thought in Eu­rope in which phenomenological ideas would flourish. As this examination ­will show, t­ hese ecosystems w ­ ere primed for the reception of phenomenology by the migration of another and (in this version at least) in­de­pen­dent set of ideas. First in Paris and ­later elsewhere in Eu­rope, non-­ Thomist thinkers came to articulate their relationship to Catholic orthodoxy by drawing on the work of the German Karl Jaspers and declaring themselves existentialists. As I ­will argue over the next few chapters, the emergence of existential phenomenology outside of Germany was as much a result of the Christian context of the Eu­ro­pean reception as it was a response to Heidegger’s thought.



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Philosophical Soirées chez Marcel We can pinpoint the birth of existentialism as a transnational phenomenon with unusual precision. On April 30, 1932, Gabriel Marcel, the French phi­los­o­pher and playwright, sent out invitations for a new after-­ dinner study group at his home: 21 rue de Tournon in Paris, just north of the Luxembourg Gardens and a short walk from the Sorbonne. The first meeting was set for three weeks l­ater, Saturday, May 21, at 9 p.m., and Marcel chose to devote the session to Karl Jaspers’s recently published Philosophy.1 We are not sure what Marcel said about Jaspers that May eve­ning in Paris, or even w ­ hether the meeting happened at all.2 Perhaps it was canceled at the last minute, or perhaps the conversation continued late into the night and the guests had to leave before it had run out of steam. For what­ ever reason, Marcel proposed another paper on the existentialist for June 18.3 What we do know about the planned event is remarkable enough: it inaugurated one of the most impor­tant, if least studied, institutions of interwar French philosophy.4 That night, Marcel had invited, among o­ thers, Nicolai Berdyaev, René Le Senne, and Jean Wahl, thinkers who differed in their background, religion, philosophy, and politics.5 Despite t­hese divergences, over the next two years they would all emerge as leading French voices of the philosophy of existence.6 Marcel’s eve­ning seminars at the rue de Tournon soon became a fixture of the philosophical scene and a hub for the reception of phenomenology. As Berdyaev ­later recalled, with characteristic exaggeration, Marcel’s home was “without doubt, the only place in France where existential and phenomenological prob­lems ­were discussed. We continually heard the names Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger.”7 In the ­later 1930s Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-­Paul Sartre ­were all added to the list of participants at what by then had become the “soirées du vendredi.” Introducing a generation of thinkers to German ideas, Marcel’s study group was ground zero for the explosion of existentialist ideas onto the French scene.8 To understand Marcel’s enthusiasm for existentialism and his extraordinary influence, we need to examine the party that gathered on that spring night in 1932.9 For the most part, it comprised a motley group of

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Christian phi­los­o­phers who had been meeting in vari­ous locations around the French capital. Many had been regulars at an interconfessional discussion group hosted by Berdyaev at his home in Paris-­Clamart between 1929 and 1932.10 But the core members of the group could trace their intellectual friendship back to a study circle that convened in Meudon, a suburb just to the west of Paris, and that was dedicated to the study of St. Thomas Aquinas.11 The Meudon circle had been meeting since the early 1920s in Jacques Maritain’s home. ­ here w T ­ ere young persons and old persons, male students and female students, and professors—­laymen (in the majority), priests and religious—­professional phi­los­o­phers, doctors, poets, musicians, men engaged in practical life, t­ hose who ­were learned and t­ hose who ­were uneducated—­Catholics (in the majority), but also unbelievers, Jews, Orthodox, Protestants. Some w ­ ere already experts in St. Thomas, ­others ­were serving their apprenticeship with him, ­others knew nothing about him or almost nothing. They w ­ ere all searching.12

Conversations generally began in the early after­noon, fueled by after­ noon tea. Most participants returned home before dinner, although a few remained to eat with the Maritain f­amily.13 Despite the agreeable setting, Maritain’s h­ ouse could be uncomfortable for t­hose who, like Berdyaev and Marcel, differed from their host on philosophical ­matters. According to Maritain, the Meudon circle was like a “chapel,” and the “statutes” give the impression that even though scholarly discussion was encouraged, fundamental disagreement was not allowed: “Heir of the past and trea­surer of the ­future, [Aquinas] alone can teach us to become . . . ​transparent to truth.”14 One of the effects of the shift in location, first to Berdyaev’s and then to Marcel’s home, was that the participants felt more willing to voice criticism of Thomist ideas. At one meeting in Clamart, Marcel refused to defend the Thomist “princi­ple of identity,” which Maritain’s wife, Raïssa, compared to Peter’s disavowal of Christ.15 Berdyaev did not shy away from controversy himself. “Sometimes, I believe, I distressed Maritain, some of my remarks ­were a test for our friendship.”16 By the end of the 1930s



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Marcel had broken with Maritain, in large part due the latter’s criticism of de La Rocque’s Parti Social Français and the Catholic but authoritarian régimes of Schuschnigg and Salazar in Austria and Portugal.17 Nonetheless, Maritain and the Thomism he represented remained an unavoidable, if contested, presence at Marcel’s home.18

Gabriel Marcel’s Existential Ontology Marcel’s strug­gles with Thomism w ­ ere a relatively recent development. In the 1920s, and in part due to an early embrace of Bergson, Marcel had set his sights primarily on French academic idealism.19 In the first volume of his Metaphysical Journal, published in 1927, Marcel had asserted his desire to “render to existence that metaphysical priority which idealism has claimed to deny it.”20 Marcel’s position was laid out most clearly in a 1925 essay that was republished in the Metaphysical Journal as an appendix. ­Here, Marcel distinguished the order of existence from that of objectivity. Existence was not, Marcel argued, a predicate, such that it could be included alongside other characteristics in a rational understanding of an object. Instead, it was simply “given,” without rhyme or reason.21 That is why the idealists, in their quest for intelligibility, had tended to exclude existence from their analy­sis. For Marcel, the unintelligibility of existence did not mean that the real­ity of the outside world was in doubt. It just meant that it was not given as an intellectual or cognitive certainty. We grasped existence in “feeling,” in our bodily participation in real­ity.22 Marcel developed t­ hese themes in the second installment of his philosophical diary, Being and Having (Être et avoir), which was published in 1935 but which collected reflections written between 1928 and 1933.23 Employing what he called a “secondary reflection” (a reflection on the way in which we habitually constitute the objects of knowledge), Marcel reiterated his argument that existence is grasped by incarnated consciousness.24 A ­thing (chose) can be said to exist only if it is “related to my body, as susceptible to be put in contact with it, however indirectly that might be.”25 The body, Marcel thought, was thus a condition for our conventional objective view of the world, ­because it granted us access to existence.

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But it was also a challenge to that view, ­because while the body could be conceived of as a physical object, it also had a privileged connection to subjectivity. In this way, Marcel saw his philosophy as a riposte to Cartesianism, which sought to maintain a sharp subject / object opposition.26 According to Marcel, Descartes’s universal subject, detached from the world it surveyed, was abstracted from and challenged by the incarnated and situated self.27 Marcel’s realist and anti-­Cartesian tendencies brought him close to Thomism, a proximity that became all the more significant a­ fter he converted to Catholicism in March 1929.28 At that time, Marcel read Thomist works, including Reginald Garrigou-­Lagrange’s God, His Existence and Nature and several books by Maritain.29 This was also when Marcel attended the Thomist circle at Meudon most regularly. Marcel wrote in a letter to Maritain dated September 6, 1929, “For me your thought is of central importance; even if I ­can’t agree with you completely on certain points, at least you w ­ ill be ­there to help me orient myself.”30 In part, Marcel’s hesitations concerned the self-­isolating qualities of Thomism. In a review of Maritain’s 1932 book The Degrees of Knowledge, which he wrote for the Revue des Jeunes but which remained unpublished at Maritain’s request, Marcel criticized “a language that is so foreign to modern philosophy.”31 More fundamentally, however, Marcel felt uneasy about the Thomist theory of being. Already in his 1927 Metaphysical Journal, Marcel asserted that he wanted to restore primacy to the “metaphysics of the existential, without engaging at the same time in the ruts of traditional ontology.”32 ­Later he remarked that he had avoided referring to ontology at this time ­because “the word being had an ambiguous and scholastic ring; and ‘scholastic’ for me could only be pejorative.”33 Ironically, Marcel’s criticisms of Thomism mirrored t­ hose he had leveled at idealism: the two opponents w ­ ere united by their hubristic belief in the h­ uman intellect. According to Marcel, b­ ecause the body is impossible to grasp in objective terms, we must dispense with the idea that consciousness is “a luminous circle around which ­there would only be shadows. On the contrary, the shadow is the center.”34 Thomism, insofar as it asserted the intelligibility of being, had failed to take this obscurity into account. Marcel’s criticisms had clear religious implications. By overestimating ­human cognitive powers, Thomists had closed down the



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space for a blind and fragile faith. In the entry for May 10, 1929, Marcel expressed “the ­g reat anguish I feel faced with Thomist claims.”35 He strug­gled in this period to reconcile his affirmation of a realist position with his re­sis­tance to scholastic ontology.36 Initially Marcel hoped to work through ­these differences. In September 1929 he confided to Maritain: “I am aware that t­ here are still re­ sis­tances in me to surmount. But I have ­great faith that they ­will fall.”37 Marcel’s strug­gle with Thomism intensified over the next three years. In the entries for 1932 in Being and Having, the reference to Thomism is ubiquitous and insistent; it is even more so in Marcel’s original diary, before it was edited for publication.38 On May 3—­after he had invited Maritain to the Jaspers discussion but before it had taken place—­Marcel wrote to him to say that he had never “better appreciated the considerable importance of your speculative efforts.” “Sometimes I feel that I am slipping imperceptibly t­ oward you. At other times my impression is the reverse.”39 The latter impression was closer to the mark. Marcel ­later recalled, “I attempted to instruct myself in the doctrine in question, but had to admit relatively quickly that it would remain foreign to me.”40 ­Because of t­ hese reservations, Marcel’s engagement with Thomism from 1929 to 1932 was of crucial importance for his intellectual development and his emergence as the central figure of Christian existentialism in France. Marcel ­later noted that this period brought him to his mature reflections on philosophy, and allowed him to reconcile his playwrighting with his more narrowly philosophical concerns: “I d ­ on’t believe I’m mistaken in saying that in the first months of 1932 I arrived at a full consciousness of my own thought and the path that I was to follow.”41 Most importantly, at this time Marcel overcame his early re­sis­ tance to ontology and reformulated his meditations on existence in ontological terms, challenging Thomism on its own grounds.42 Marcel wanted to show that the investigation of being did not lead to the self-­ confident systems of scholasticism, but could result in the ac­cep­tance of a tenuous but personal connection to God. The centerpiece of Marcel’s new ontological orientation was the “mystery,” which he first sketched in a diary entry from October 1932, referring directly to Maritain, and which he l­ ater elaborated in a pre­sen­ ta­tion to Gaston Berger’s Société d’études philosophiques de Marseille

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the following January.43 Marcel defined the mystery as what resisted the objectifying tendencies of thought. We could never analyze the mystery in a detached and indifferent way, ­because it “is something in which I find myself engaged, of which the essence is, in consequence, never to be entirely before me. It is as if in that zone the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.”44 Marcel’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the mystery as a form of participation marked a dramatic departure from traditional understandings. Quoting the theologian Pierre Jean Jouve in 1933, Marcel argued that “mysteries are not truths that surpass us, but truths that comprehend us.”45 For Marcel, the mystery applied first and foremost to being. The attempt to grasp being objectively, presenting it as something “before me,” is pos­si­ble only if we deny our participation in it—in the first instance, our embodiment. And ­because this participation is irreducible— we cannot deny that we are—­Marcel argued that we had to approach being through non-­objectifying relationships: fidelity, hope, and love, which in turn call for faith, hope, and love in a transcendent God. That is, by challenging the intellectual pretensions of Thomist ontology, Marcel had opened up the possibility for a personal relationship with the divine. Marcel wrote that an ontology oriented in this way “is evidently open in the direction of a revelation, that it nevertheless cannot demand, nor presuppose, nor integrate, nor even (absolutely speaking) understand, but of which it can to some extent prepare the ac­cep­tance.”46 When he first encountered Jaspers’s Philosophy, then, Marcel’s thought was undergoing a transformation.47 Marcel immediately saw the relevance of the German’s ideas for his ongoing engagement with Thomism, and he invited Maritain to both discussions of Jaspers’s work that spring. In encouraging him to attend the second one, he explic­itly drew connections between Jaspers’s and Maritain’s thought.48 But it was clear that Jaspers was on Marcel’s side rather than Maritain’s. In Being and Having, the reader first encounters Jaspers in a 1934 note appended to a diary entry from the spring of 1931. The note suggests the Jaspers had confirmed Marcel in his conviction that “being” (être) is distinct from “having” (avoir), the realm that can be grasped objectively.49 Two aspects of Jaspers’s thought in par­t ic­u ­lar caught Marcel’s eye. First, like Marcel, Jaspers began his reflection with concrete ­human



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subjectivity, what he called “Existenz.” As for Marcel, ­because h­ uman existence was author and condition of the sciences, it could not be their object.50 That is why philosophy had to ­settle for the more modest task of describing it, what Jaspers called an Existenzerhellung (elucidation of existence). Second, Jaspers mobilized this understanding of the subject to challenge rationalist ontologies. ­Because we are concrete and situated subjects, all our attempts to investigate being are indelibly marked by our existential “situation” and thus relative. In consequence, the history of metaphysics resembles a patchwork narrative of disparate ideas. And yet, in what Jaspers called the “limit situation,” such as strug­gle, death, and guilt, we are able to discern a movement of transcendence, which points beyond this fragmentation to a fundamental unity.51 Though Jaspers criticized the way in which religious traditions had substantialized this moment of transcendence in God—he wanted to provide a fully “philosophical” account without reference to theology—he chided secular philosophies for being closed to the “Other.” 52 The attempt to fix transcendence in mundane categories would result in failure, “shipwreck” (Scheitern). Nevertheless, Jaspers argued, we are still able to identify its traces, or “ciphers,” in the world. True metaphysics consisted not in system building, but in the “contemplative immersion into a shifting and polyvalent cipher-­writing,” a hermeneutic task that was never complete.53 Jaspers’s work provided confirmation for Marcel’s argument at exactly the point where the latter diverged from Thomism: how the consideration of concrete subjectivity challenged the proj­ect of elaborating being in conceptual terms, and thus opened up new ways of relating to the transcendent.54 This question framed Marcel’s first extended discussion of Jaspers in an entry from November 1932: Marcel claimed that the conditions for the possibility of metaphysical hopefulness are identical with ­those of despair.55 We feel a “demand” (exigence) for being ­because we participate in it, but this participation is also why all attempts to grasp being objectively ­will fail.56 While the Thomists, Marcel argued, dissimulated this despair, Jaspers fought against such illusions.57 ­These considerations guided Marcel’s analy­sis in his 1933 essay “The Fundamental Situation and Limit Situations in Jaspers” for Les Recherches Philosophiques.58 Recherches Philosophiques did not directly address the neo-­scholastic community. The contributors w ­ ere preoccupied

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instead with the dominant philosophy in French (secular) universities. This is why Marcel’s explicit target in the article was a “rash idealism,” which took our knowledge of the universe and transformed it “into an objective science of being.”59 But as we have seen, this criticism also counted for the Thomists, who w ­ ere more often engaged in Marcel’s diary and in 60 his study group. The terms of this parallel discussion seem to have seeped into the Recherches Philosophiques article. When Marcel claimed that Jaspers had dissociated “radically the notion of being from that of the subsistent,” his argument counted as a challenge to idealism, but his formulation suggests he also had Thomist ontology in mind.61 As in his earlier debates with Maritain, Marcel traced the indeterminacy of being to the ­human condition, which prevents the phi­los­o­pher from taking the stance of an objective spectator: “The act by which I seek being brings with it limitations that exclude the very possibility of that discovery.”62 Marcel summarized, “The theory of existence ­will thus have this paradoxical side, that it ­will tend to clarify the nontransparent and cast light precisely on nontransparency.”63 The individual’s specific limitations w ­ ere described by the “situation,” which was the irreducible singularity of its participation in being, marked by place, time, and intersubjective commitments. Although it is pos­si­ble for me to treat myself as an object, what Jaspers called Dasein, and analyze my situation empirically, such analy­sis could only be accomplished by setting aside “the supremacy of the existentiell”—­the priority of the “ego” (moi) as “pos­si­ble existence.” Recognizing that the situation comprised a f­ ree decision, one realized that it was always “incomplete” and thus that analy­sis could only be provisional. For this reason, as Marcel wrote, “existence is fi­nally a sign, an index . . . ​which carries nothing objectively thinkable or valid, about which nothing can be known or legitimately affirmed about itself or about ­others.” And b­ ecause the meaning of the “question” of being depended on “the person who poses it,” it could not be answered definitively ­either.64 What remained was ontological questioning, which pointed to a transcendence it could not grasp: “quest, interrogation, Frage, Fragwürdigkeit.”65 As Marcel had written at the beginning of the essay, it was only in “failing” in the search for being “that I begin to philosophize.”66 Marcel did not want to follow Jaspers all the way. In the 1933 article, Marcel argued that Jaspers’s thought was marked by an unacknowledged



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dogmatism of the “­here below” (ici bas), the result of an incomplete liberation from the positivist prejudice against the super­natural. This attitude “tends inevitably to make [Jaspers] reject e­ very idea of the canonical and orthodox.” For Marcel, the mystery pointed to God, who was the condition for the fulfillment of fidelity, hope, and love. Pace Jaspers, a purely “philosophical” account of transcendence was insufficient. When Jaspers had secularized religious notions—­for instance turning the notion of sin (Sünde) into guilt (Schuld)—he had broken their “vital drive.”67 As a consequence, Marcel felt inclined to “revise all Jaspers’s position and add to the dimensions of his thought another one, which transforms entirely its aspect.”68 Marcel’s reading of Jaspers in 1933 was Janus-­faced. Explic­itly a confrontation with academic idealism, it emerged out of Marcel’s intense engagement with Thomism over the previous four years. The way it addressed the idealist orthodoxy in French university philosophy was, as we ­shall see, crucial for the development of French existentialism. It would help transmit a seemingly internal debate between Christian phi­los­o­phers to a broader audience. But this should not blind us to the more immediate concerns that led to Marcel’s reading. Marcel turned to Jaspers’s existential philosophy ­because it was useful for formulating his response to Thomist ontology, to show why a consideration of concrete existence undermined any attempt to grasp being in conceptual terms. The stakes of Marcel’s reading w ­ ere not lost on Maritain. For at almost exactly the same time that Marcel refocused his thought on being to open up dialogue with the Thomists, Maritain returned the f­avor and declared that Thomism was an “existential philosophy” too.69

Jacques Maritain’s Existential Thomism Jacques Maritain was a convert. Born into a relatively unreligious f­ amily, he was attracted to socialism at a young age and, in the g­ reat affair of the fin de siècle, declared himself for the Dreyfusards. Nevertheless, in the midst of a spiritual crisis, which came to a head in the first years of the twentieth ­century, Maritain looked for inspiration in Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France. Bergson was merely a stepping stone. In 1906, in part through the ministrations of the novelist Léon Bloy,

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Jacques Maritain and his wife, Raïssa, w ­ ere baptized as Catholics. The conversion brought them into the Church right at the beginning of the modernist crisis, and his reading of Aquinas, alongside the seventeenth-­ century commentator John of Saint Thomas, encouraged Maritain to embrace an antimodernist Catholicism.70 He began teaching at the Institut Catholique just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and came ­under the tutelage of the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-­Lagrange at about the same time. In 1911 he joined the po­liti­cal counterpart to this form of Thomism: the Action Française.71 The Pope’s 1926 condemnation of that group led Maritain to reassess his position, and his politics changed dramatically.72 But philosophically, at least, he remained aligned with the Dominican school of “strict Thomists.” “I am not a neo-­Thomist, all ­things considered I’d rather be a paleo-­Thomist; I am, I hope to be, a Thomist.”73 Nevertheless, Maritain thought that the development of modern philosophy required a reassessment of its relationship to strict Thomism. In his lectures at the Institut Catholique in 1932–1933, ­later collected in his 1934 book Seven Lessons on Being, Maritain affirmed Thomism’s “vitality and its exigencies as a present-­day philosophy.”74 But unlike the progressive neo-­scholastics who hoped to demonstrate this vitality by adapting Thomism to the times, Maritain argued that it need only “realiz[e] itself more perfectly.”75 That is, Maritain argued that a strict Thomist could engage productively with modern thought. In par­tic­u­lar, rejecting “a certain number of vulgar pre­sen­ta­tions of scholasticism,”76 which considered being only from the perspective of essences, Maritain claimed that au­then­tic Thomism was concerned with “existence, esse properly speaking.”77 This is why it could be included u­ nder the rubric “existential philosophy.”78 Maritain highlighted a number of parallels between his version of Thomism and the new philosophy of existence. First, the Thomist metaphysician, like the phi­los­o­pher of existence, was not simply a scholar. He was necessarily “thrown in existence,” reliant on the “experience of suffering and existential conflicts.” Not only did the “act of intelligence reach its end in a judgment affirming or denying existence,” existence was also the starting point of philosophy. Second, this concern with existence showed Thomism to be a practical philosophy. Third, the Thomist did



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not merely seek to know the truth—­t he Thomist also “lives that truth, draws it to his subjectivity and embeds it [l’inviscère] ­there.”79 Most importantly, Maritain argued that the two philosophies converged in their understanding of being as a “mystery.” “The ‘mystery,’ is an ontological plenitude with which the intellect unites itself vitally and into which it inexhaustively plunges.”80 Of course, this mystery might not always be discernible, but it reveals itself in moments of discovery or in a “crisis of knowledge.”81 In t­ hese situations, we experience the unexpected, the “shock of the intellect against the real.”82 To receive the “gift” of being then, we require an “intellectual purification,” setting aside our preconceptions and making ourselves “open, vacant enough to hear what all ­things murmur, and to listen, instead of fabricating responses.”83 ­Because it challenged our conventional and scientific ways of understanding the world, Maritain claimed that his intuition of being was similar to Heidegger’s experience of Angst and Marcel’s analy­sis of moral realities like fidelity.84 But for Maritain, Heidegger’s and Marcel’s versions could only bring one to the threshold of a true intuition of being. They ­were held back by their affective starting points. “The pitfall of all metaphysics that wants to be experiential” is that it remains “enclosed in this or that concrete analog of being, what one choses as the means of access.”85 If one crossed the threshold, Maritain thought, one would see that being was not simply what resisted the intellect, and thus what could only be accessed at the pretheoretical, affective level; it was also open to intellectual understanding. As he argued at the outset, “the notion of an intelligible mystery is not contradictory, it is the most exact way to designate real­ity.” 86 Marcel had deployed the mystery to attack the certainties of Thomist thought. Maritain aimed to show that the edifice of Thomist ontology could withstand the onslaught. The key to this intelligibility and thus to Maritain’s divergence from Marcel was what had caused the dispute at Berdyaev’s home: the princi­ple of identity, “being is being.” This was not a logical princi­ple that reduced all difference and variety. Rather, for Maritain it demonstrated that being is both polyvalent and universal. 87 We apprehend being first as “enveloped, incorporated in the multiplicity of natures or essences”: we encounter a person, a ­table, an idea.88 But ­because “being is being” we are able to reach through this multiplicity to an analogical unity: “being as

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such.” Maritain described this pro­cess as an “abstractive intuition,” an “eidetic or ideative visualization.” The latter term was preferable ­because it emphasized the positive (not subtractive) and intellectual (not affective) aspects of the undertaking.89 Maritain hoped to affirm the won­der of existing real­ity, which had attracted Marcel, without succumbing to what he saw as Marcel’s irrationalism. Being, for Maritain, was a mystery, infinitely rich and ripe with new insights. But it was still open to h­ uman understanding. It was, in a meta­phor that would come to permeate the existentialist community, the intellect’s “food: the other, which it assimilates.”90 The final chapters in the book showed how one could develop a metaphysics on the basis of the princi­ple of identity. Maritain wanted to show how being was “invested with intelligible values,” such as the transcendentals: Being is one, true, and good.91 We could also demonstrate, Maritain argued, that it is governed by the princi­ple of sufficient reason (raison d’être), finality, and (in the case of contingent being) efficient causality.92 Maritain was able to use the language of existence to both associate his work with and distinguish it from other existentialisms. Existential philosophy and Thomism had the same starting point in concrete existence, but the former, ­because it had rejected the princi­ple of identity, had stalled at the affective and psychological level, the level of brute experience, and thus failed to recognize that b­ ehind the variety and apparent contradictions of being lay an intelligible order. Maritain concluded, “If Thomist metaphysics is an existential metaphysics, it is so in being and remaining a metaphysics, a wisdom which proceeds in an intellectual fashion, according to the pure demands of the intellect and its own form of intuitivity.”93 Similar arguments proved useful throughout his work. In 1941 Maritain labeled Aquinas’s philosophy an “existentialism,” and in a 1947 paper at the Roman Acad­emy he declared that it was “the only au­then­tic” one.94 Marcel and Maritain converged on the language of existential ontology ­because it was a shared means of articulating their philosophical differences. It is true that Marcel had addressed the question of existence before, and his discussion in the 1927 Journal Métaphysique has led some scholars to point to that text as the origin of existentialism in France. But his debate with Maritain around 1932 thrust existence and its ontological



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implications onto center stage. In a diary entry from September 29, 1932, Marcel claimed that he was again beginning “to reflect on existence ­after having read Maritain.” 95 And though Marcel would be remembered primarily as an existentialist and Maritain would not, Christian existentialism in France is best understood as the intellectual space that stretched between them: For Maritain new experiences enriched our account of the world, for Marcel they constantly threatened to disrupt it; for Maritain the intellect had priority, for Marcel it had to be supplemented by affective forms of knowing; for Maritain our participation in being as existential subjects meant that a rational metaphysics was pos­si­ble, for Marcel it meant that that proj­ect was doomed to failure.96 At the crux of the debate lay two dif­fer­ent understandings of religious philosophy: Maritain thought that faith had to be built on the secure foundations of objective knowledge; Marcel thought that it could flourish only once h­ uman claims to such knowledge had broken down. The two men met on December 26, 1932, to work out ­these differences, but neither conceded much ground.97 When Marcel came to read Maritain’s Seven Lessons on Being, he was unsparing in his criticism. Writing to Gaston Fessard, he admitted to “a sentiment of ­bitter disappointment . . . ​I w ­ ill never be able to rally to such a philosophy, of which the lack of basic humility, the peremptory and pedantic doctrinalism among ­others is exasperating. I ­don’t have the courage to write to him or to finish this book.”98

The Study Circle and Beyond: Thomists, Anti-­Thomists, Mediators, and Skeptics Understanding Christian existentialism as the means by which non-­ Thomist Catholic phi­los­o­phers sought to thrash out their differences with Thomists helps explain its spread, first to the other members of the Pa­ri­sian study group and then further afield, ultimately beyond France’s borders, transmitted by the networks in which ­t hose members participated. Following Maritain’s example, his friend Étienne Gilson, a historian of medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne and a regular at Berdyaev’s soirées, came to embrace an existential Thomism.99 As we s­ hall see in Chapter 6, at the beginning of the 1930s Gilson argued for a “methodical realism,” requiring us first to recognize the failures of idealism and then

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to choose a realist position. In his writings up u­ ntil 1935 Gilson presented this argument in terms of the “real t­ hing” (chose réelle).100 But he had read Maritain’s Seven Lessons on Being with ­great interest, and returning to the realism question ­later, Gilson rephrased it in terms of “existence.”101 When Gilson came to re-­edit his famous Thomism primer for publication in 1942, the first edition since 1927, he placed the “act of existence” (acte d’exister) at the center of his interpretation.102 A 1944 re-­issue came with minor changes, but in the conclusion Gilson added a discussion of existential philosophy, arguing not only that Thomism was an “existential philosophy” but also (like Maritain) that it was “the only one.”103 While Gilson embraced an existential version of Thomism, o­ thers used existentialism to criticize scholasticism. ­Because their religious affiliations allowed them greater latitude from Maritain in their criticism of Catholic orthodoxy, such hostility was most explic­itly expressed by a pair of Rus­ sian émigrés in Paris, Nicolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The Rus­sian Orthodox Berdyaev, who was the third host of the study circle, had been resistant to scholasticism from the start, an attitude sharpened by personal experience: his wife had converted to Catholicism during the Rus­sian Revolution, and according to Berdyaev had gone through a long period of “fanatical intolerance.”104 The “philosophy of existence” allowed him to pres­ent this criticism in terms more recognizable to his French friends.105 Berdyaev’s most extensive discussion came in his 1936 book Five Meditations on Existence.106 ­There, he opposed two forms of thought: one asserted the primacy of “subjective existence,” the other the primacy of the “objective world”; one took into account the ­will, the other was a pure intellectualism; one subordinated being to freedom, the other did the opposite.107 Berdyaev elected the first option and presented scholasticism as the ultimate example of the second.108 A sign of the de­cadence of scholasticism was Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge.109 Aquinas wanted to harmonize the two in a system, but for Berdyaev this merely resulted in the absorption of the former into the latter: in Thomism, “philosophical knowledge acts as if faith did not exist.”110 Earlier, Berdyaev had made a similar point in a review of Garrigou-­Lagrange’s Providence and Confidence in God: “While reading [this book] I became an atheist—­even a militant one!”111 Maritain was no less frank in his response to Berdyaev. A ­ fter reading Berdyaev’s Spirit



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and Liberty, Maritain declared that he “deplore[d] the metaphysics, which in my opinion is a destruction of metaphysics—­generous and stimulating, like every­thing you write, but in any case a destruction and a ‘catastrophe.’ ”112 Berdyaev’s compatriot, the Jewish phi­los­o­pher Lev Shestov, was equally combative. He had also fled the Rus­sian Revolution to join the growing émigré community in Paris in the early 1920s. Taking up the language of existence in his 1936 book, Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy, Shestov followed Berdyaev in railing against rationalism, but he expanded his critique to condemn all knowledge.113 Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit led to the Fall, and from this Shestov concluded that evil consisted in “knowledge” and “ ‘open eyes.’ ”114 The anti-­scholastic implications of Shestov’s thought ­were presented most forcefully in his Athens and Jerusalem, a book Shestov completed in 1937, a year before his death, and in which he responded to Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Shestov saw in Gilson’s “Christian philosophy” thesis, not the blossoming of Greek philosophy ­under the warm sunlight of revelation, but the boxing up of that revelation in the cold categories of rationalist thought.115 For Shestov, to choose faith over reason was to choose liberation. We w ­ ere constrained in the rational realm, compelled to make one plus two equal three. In the realm of faith, in contrast, we ­were f­ ree.116 While the Rus­sians Berdyaev and Shestov used the philosophy of existence to mark the deep chasm between Thomist and non-­Thomist religious thought, the Frenchmen René Le Senne and Louis Lavelle used it to span the divide. ­These thinkers ­were generally less direct in their reference to Thomism, ­because they w ­ ere engaged in mainstream philosophy in France and thus, like Marcel, preferred to take the dominant idealists as sparring partners. But as Catholics whose work had religious implications, they could not ignore or summarily dismiss Thomism; existentialism was useful for their negotiation with the philosophical orthodoxy of the Church.117 Le Senne first a­ dopted existentialist language in his 1934 book Obstacle and Value.118 ­Little read ­today, the book’s publication was a major event in French philosophy. In a review, Marcel declared Le Senne to be the “most au­then­tic” phi­los­o­pher in France, and suggested that it was a

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scandal that he had not been offered a chair at the Sorbonne.119 Le Senne presented himself as an idealist, and yet by appealing to existence he could extend an olive branch to the Thomists.120 Existence showed up in experience as unintelligible facts (in Le Senne’s terms, “obstacles” or “scandals”), which challenged our habitual sense of cognitive mastery. The shock caused by t­ hese obstacles encouraged us to distinguish a known interior from an unknown exterior, and thus explained the force of realist arguments.121 Though this account brought Le Senne in line with Jaspers on the criticism of objectification, Le Senne argued that it was an error “to seek in the obstacle the pinnacle of immoderate irrationality.”122 For Le Senne thought that we participated in a Value (Valeur), which he identified with God, that transcended obstacles and helped us develop more complete “determinations” of the world.123 Thus, like Maritain, Le Senne presented existence as an inexhaustible richness, which “abounds in ideas and relations, and if it is opposed to them, it is not b­ ecause it denies them, but [instead] b­ ecause it overflows and adds to them without end.”124 The danger with traditional idealism (and implicitly Thomism) was that it tended to retain only “the final term” of this pro­cess, and thus provided a “flattened” understanding of experience.125 Le Senne’s meditations on existence influenced his friend and fellow Lycée professor Louis Lavelle, who a­ dopted a similar language in his 1937 book On the Act.126 As Jean École has argued, the turn to existence allowed Lavelle to understand the relationship between an absolute being and the individual beings that participated in it. Lavelle argued that action was not added to being but constituted it.127 This act, an “act of existence” (acte d’exister),128 was the f­ ree act of consciousness, which for Lavelle, in a stunning prefiguring of Sartre, meant that t­ here was an “inversion of the relations between essence and existence according to ­whether they concern ­things or f­ ree beings.”129 Lavelle and Le Senne played a number of roles in the promotion of existentialist thought in France. Lavelle reviewed books by Scheler, Wahl, Jaspers, Marcel, Le Senne, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard for the Catholic periodical Le Temps, reviews that ­were collected in his 1936 book The Self and Its Fate. The two men also co-­edited a book series, The Philosophy of Spirit, h­ oused at Éditions Aubiers, which became perhaps France’s



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most impor­tant publisher of existentialist thought, and which had grown out of the discussions at Marcel’s home.130 Founded in 1934, its roster came to include Marcel’s Being and Having, Berdyaev’s Five Meditations on Existence, Wahl’s Kierkegaardian Studies, Le Senne’s Obstacle and Value, and Lavelle’s On the Act, as well as translations of Scheler, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. The goals of the series ­were clear in the manifesto published in Les Études Philosophiques, and spoke to the terms of their negotiation with the Thomists: the series would publish work that was oriented ­toward “the double knowledge of the activity of the ­human spirit and of its relation with real­ity.”131 While Berdyaev, Shestov, Le Senne, and Lavelle mobilized existentialism to justify their own religious thought in terms Thomists would understand, another participant at Marcel’s soirée, Jean Wahl, wondered ­whether existentialism need herald a religious philosophy at all. Wahl seems the most unlikely member of the discussion group; his major proj­ect in the 1930s was the secularization of existentialist thought.132 Nevertheless, he was a close friend of Marcel, whom he followed in criticizing philosophical systems, both French university idealism, and (as I w ­ ill discuss at greater length in Chapter 7) Thomism.133 Like Marcel, Wahl’s embrace of realism served to disrupt the hubristic claims of ontology.134 The re­sis­tance to such ontologies undergirded Wahl’s reading of Jaspers in a 1934 article—­“The Prob­lem of Choice, of Existence, and of Transcendence in Jaspers’s Philosophy”—­which followed quickly on the heels of Marcel’s essay and which referred to it directly.135 Wahl argued that Jaspers’s thought was structured by two seemingly opposed claims: that the world is “torn” ­because of our participation in it, so we have no access to the “totality of being”; and that we are called to consider existence by an “unknown transcendence.”136 As Wahl elaborated, the two claims produced an antinomy. The first took relativity as an absolute. Existence, its passing and particularity in the instant—­that is, the “situation”—is eternal.137 The second, however, asserted that ­human existence is “intentionally” related to what was other. In “limit situations” we are placed in contact with what limits and thus transcends us.138 Never the infinite ourselves, we are nonetheless bound to it. The result was, Wahl argued, a sort of “negative ontology.”

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This antinomy laid the ground for Wahl’s criticism. Whereas Marcel argued that Jaspers’s transcendence had been unjustifiably secularized, Wahl identified per­sis­tent and troubling religious traces. He attacked Jaspers for claiming that transcendence necessarily pointed to a beyond.139 When Jaspers had discussed the “unknown transcendence,” Wahl worried that he had simply succumbed to the type of “objectifications” or “fixations” that he had denounced elsewhere. In a l­ater essay, Wahl expressed his concerns in more specific terms. Jaspers had assumed that transcendence reached up beyond the world to the realm of Gods, it was a trans-­a scendance. But Wahl did not see why it might not gesture in the opposite direction, a trans-­descendance, or perhaps point to the ungraspable richness of nature.140 Wahl’s criticism also implicated Marcel. Marcel thought that prayers had to be prayers to God, but for Wahl, “they are appeals thrown at real­ity, and we ­don’t know if that which responds is only their echo.”141 Paul Ricoeur ­later summed up the differences between the two men: “Where Gabriel Marcel wants to be univocal—­ transcendence is God or it means nothing—­Jean Wahl . . . ​tenaciously maintains an equivocacy.”142 The members of Marcel, Berdyaev, and Maritain’s peripatetic study circle ­were major players in French intellectual life. True, of the three hosts, only Maritain held an academic position, teaching at the Institut Catholique. But by the close of World War II, the other members had risen to lofty positions in the academic firmament.143 Wahl had taught at the Sorbonne from 1936, and though he had to flee during the war ­because of his Jewish heritage, he resumed that position ­a fter the liberation of France. In 1941, six years ­a fter Marcel had lamented that his colleague had been passed over, Le Senne was appointed to the Sorbonne too. That year Lavelle was elected to the Collège de France, where he and Gilson occupied the two chairs in philosophy. In 1947 Wahl joined the board, and three years ­later became editor, of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, the most impor­t ant philosophical journal in France. Le Senne’s student Gaston Berger edited the second-­ most impor­tant journal, Études Philosophiques. By the end of World War  II, the thinkers who had gathered in Marcel’s living room that spring eve­n ing in 1932 had become the philosophical establishment in France.



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Existentialisms around Eu­rope Tensions between Thomists and their religious critics ­were not confined to France, and so the way in which existentialist ideas could recast the debate made them attractive across Eu­rope. The international resonances of Maritain and Gilson’s “existential Thomism” are to be expected. As I have argued, neo-­scholasticism must be seen in transnational perspective. It constituted a multinational, multilingual, and yet interconnected community. Maritain’s work was translated widely, with partisans in Germany, Italy, and Poland, while Gilson’s Thomism book was read across Eu­rope and the Amer­i­cas.144 In par­tic­u­lar, the Odzrodzenie (Re­ nais­sance) group in Lublin, Poland, led by Stefan Wyszynski, helped bring Maritain and Gilson’s ideas to Eastern Eu­rope, where a de­cade l­ ater they would be picked up by Karol Wojtyła.145 To explain the proliferation of existential Thomism in this period, however, it is not necessary to appeal to the influence of Gilson and Maritain. Existential philosophy responded to broader trends within neo-­scholasticism, and in the 1930s ­there ­were many articles across Eu­ rope in­de­pen­dently presenting Thomism in this way. In the Netherlands in 1936 the Jesuit Henricus Robbers argued that Thomism was a philosophy “of real­ity, of being. If any vision has the right to the name existential [existentieel], it is the Aristotelian-­Thomistic.”146 For the same reason, the German Redemptorist Theodor Droege felt able to claim in the 1938 edition of Divus Thomas that Aquinas’s Summa theologica was “the best ideal of a Catholic Existenzphilosophie.”147 In Italy, several commentators, including Cornelio Fabro, made a similar argument.148 Michele Fatta wrote in the 1943 edition of Divus Thomas, “Realism is an existential philosophy. . . . ​W hat is the perfection of perfection . . . ​in Thomism? To exist.”149 Often t­ hese Thomists made an argument parallel to Maritain’s: though other forms of existentialism showed promise, they needed to be supplemented by Thomistic metaphysics. The assertion of a commonality between Thomism and existentialism raised the international profile of Marcel and o­ thers in neo-­scholastic circles. In par­tic­u­lar, many progressives saw Christian existentialism as a new iteration of their updated Thomism, marrying traditional metaphysics and the modern concern for the subject. In a set of lectures at the

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Louvain Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in 1934, Aimé Forest argued that the tradition of French idealism leading up to Le Senne was complementary with Thomism, especially insofar as the former sought to found, rather than negate, “concrete existence.”150 Similarly, in a 1938 article for the Revue Thomiste, Jeanne Delhomme argued that by emphasizing existence, Marcel had found a way to lead post-­Cartesian philosophy, which had been trapped in idealism, back to traditional realism.151 ­Later, Alphonse de Waelhens, in his 1942 book on Heidegger, which was published by the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain, identified Marcel and Le Senne as “proponents of existential philosophy” as opposed to the debased “existentiell philosophy.” His distinction between “existential” and “existentiell” spoke to the ways in which their work opened up the possibility of a metaphysics and thus of a rapprochement with the Thomists.152 By the early 1940s, similar arguments began to appear in Italy. In a 1941 article for the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, Luigi Pelloux emphasized the connections between the “philosophie de l’esprit” (of Lavelle, Le Senne, Marcel, Berdyaev, and Forest) and traditional metaphysics. “The true ‘philosophie de l’esprit’ . . . ​agrees with scholastic philosophy, valorizing the perennial reasons of truth, while integrating them with what is true and vital in con­temporary philosophy.”153 Marcel’s more robust break with idealism attracted the most enthusiastic attention.154 In the 1943 volume Existentialism edited by Pelloux, Carlo Giacon worked out the relationships between Thomism and the new movement. Though existentialists had emerged out of other philosophical traditions, Marcel’s work showed that “they can nevertheless be seen in a favorable light by  scholastic phi­los­o­phers.”155 In his book Introduction to Existentialism, published the same year, Cornelio Fabro praised certain forms of existentialism for turning attention to being in a way that aligned with Thomistic realism.156 He denied that Marcel’s existentialism was an “absolute irrationalism.” It merely recognized t­hose ­things that ­resisted philosophical systems and objective thought.157 The existentialists ­were right to contest the absolute rights of rationality, even if they went too far in denying that it could play a role in clarifying the prob­lem and opening up the ontological realm.158



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The non-­Thomists did not have the benefit of the type of preestablished and institutionalized networks that their orthodox counter­parts enjoyed, and so their reception tended to be more haphazard and fragmentary. For instance, t­here was l­ittle appetite for their work (and for existentialism more generally) in Poland, where, as we have seen, Thomists enjoyed a more direct connection with mainstream thought. Marcel and o­ thers found like-­minded thinkers abroad mostly through contingent personal relationships, such as ­those with the Christian existentialists Peter Wust and Käte Nadler in Germany.159 Nadler did the most to introduce the work of Marcel, Le Senne, and Lavelle on the other bank of the Rhine. She wrote, “Whoever in Germany ­today wants to discuss seriously the prob­lem of ontology and Existenzphilosophie w ­ ill need to acquaint themselves with the basic princi­ples of ­these French works.”160 Nevertheless, the Christian existentialists w ­ ere able to make use of neo-­scholastic networks at one degree removed. For ­t hose who sought to engage with Thomists in one Eu­ro­pean country ­were often drawn to t­ hose trying to do the same in another, which is why in the late 1930s and early 1940s ­there was a spike in interest in existentialism among the Christian spiritualists in Italy.

Christian Spiritualism in Italy between Giovanni Gentile and the Scholastics Outside of Germany and France, Italy had the largest and most vibrant Christian existentialist community. In national terms—­t he terms according to which most histories have been written—­Italian existentialism was a critical reaction to the dominant force in academic philosophy on the peninsula: Gentilian idealism.161 The argument is accurate as far as it goes, but it tends to miss t­ hose aspects of Italian existentialism that tied it into the Europe-­wide movement. For, as in France, the way Christian thinkers in Italy reacted against the dominant idealism thrust them into a confrontation with neo-­scholasticism, and this encouraged them to look abroad for inspiration, to read Jaspers and Heidegger, but also Marcel and Le Senne, and to declare themselves “existentialists.” A determinative moment in Giovanni Gentile’s philosophical development was his early engagement with Marx. He saw materialism as

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limited by its static conception of ­matter, which had bogged down even Marx’s dialectics.162 To avoid such immobilism, Gentile argued that we should transpose praxis onto the ideal realm. This meant studying “concrete” thought in action (the pensiero pensante) rather than the “abstract” thoughts produced by it (the pensiero pensato). Understanding the “act of thinking as pure act” (hence “actualism”) helped us comprehend the essential unity of spirit and nature, and the priority of the former, as the “Absolute” or “transcendental” (though not empirical) subject, over the latter. The I ­doesn’t think an external object, but itself. In this schema, all supposed transcendences—­truth, God, nature, logic, and so on—­were merely products of the primordial creative power of spirit, which was their source but which also could negate them dialectically, a pro­cess Gentile called “autoctisi.” ­Because Gentile identified history as the handi­work of this creative spirit, his radical idealism led him to a radical form of historicism. Following Giordano Bruno, Gentile argued that truth is the ­daughter of time: “veritas filia temporis.” The real and thought w ­ ere bound up in the dynamism of history, b­ ecause any stable object, such as truth, that was supposed to transcend history should be seen as an abstraction from it, an abstraction that masked ­human autonomy. The main shortcoming of scholasticism for Gentile was its fealty to such abstractions, and the main merit of the Re­nais­sance was that it had shaken off the “deadly concerns” of the medieval world.163 Gentile’s conviction that philosophy must be concrete and historical motivated his po­liti­cal adventures. Especially as Minister of Public Instruction from 1922–1924 and then president of the Fascist Institute of Culture, Gentile had by 1930 achieved a dominant position in Italian philosophy and culture. For Gentile, Fascism promised to overcome the excessive individualism that he identified as the core weakness of modern society, so he placed his work in the ser­vice of Mussolini’s “religion of the Fatherland.”164 As Rocco Rubini has recently argued, Gentile was “arguably, the closest approximation in history to the ideal of a ‘phi­ los­o­pher king.’  ”165 ­Because Gentile’s philosophy seemed to legitimate a secularized religion, a number of Christian thinkers in the 1920s, like Luigi Stefanini, Augusto Guzzo, Armando Carlini, and Enrico Castelli, challenged his



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immanentism.166 Guzzo, who taught at the University of Turin, in 1928 published a book titled Judgment and Action, which attempted to find a way out of Gentile’s idealist philosophy into the Christian tradition. The key lay in Gentile’s understanding of the transcendental subject—­which, Guzzo argued, required the transcendent. The acting subject could attain objectivity only if it was released from its finitude through the intercession of a personal God.167 ­Human subjects ­were “infused” by the divine, they heard God’s voice, and this rescued h­ uman knowledge from ­simple relativism. Guzzo argued ­later, citing Augustine, that God was the “Truth that teaches us from the intimacy of our spirit.”168 In this way, Guzzo inverted Gentile’s understanding of the relationship between truth and history: this time truth is the ­mother of time, “veritas mater temporis.”169 An appeal to the transcendent was particularly impor­tant for understanding values and moral responsibility, which Guzzo thought ­were not compatible with a fully immanentist position. Only thus could absolute idealism be rescued from the “charge of immoralism.”170 Armando Carlini, rector of the University of Pisa and himself a fervent supporter of Mussolini’s Fascists, made a similar argument.171 In his 1931 book Orientations of Con­temporary Philosophy, he argued that the history of philosophy could be understood in three stages: the ancient period, oriented by the prob­lem of the world; the medieval period, oriented by the prob­lem of God; and the modern period, focused on man.172 But while the modern re­orientation marked an impor­tant development, and produced a flowering of art and science unseen since classical times, it had also led to the rejection of spiritual values, an assertion of immanence, and ultimately skepticism.173 Carlini argued that even the ­great proponents of Italian idealism, Gentile and Croce, had been trapped by the immanentism of modern thought, attributing a mundane character to “the most frankly religious intuitions.”174 Nevertheless, Carlini was certain that one could work through modernity and affirm religious transcendence from within the acts of h­ uman self-­consciousness, to find again “the reason of that more profound and originary real­ity, that alone gives value to the world of men, and is therefore transcendent while being immanent [immanendo] in the h­ uman.”175 Like Guzzo, Carlini claimed that it was pos­si­ble to overcome absolute idealism from within and lead it to the affirmation of God—to move, as he put it ­later, from the “transcendental”

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to “the Transcendent,” though this needed to be supported by an act of faith.176 In attempting to find an opening in idealism for God, ­these Christian thinkers collided with neo-­scholasticism, which a­ fter the Lateran Accords of 1929 was one of the few institutionally power­f ul rivals to actualism in Italy.177 Scholasticism already played a role in their arguments. In his book Carlini had explic­itly rejected the neo-­scholastics.178 As he saw it, their prob­lem was a surfeit of Aristotelian metaphysics, which in the medieval period had planted the seeds of the Re­nais­sance and Reformation, secularizing and depersonalizing the divine.179 ­Later he identified his adhesion to Catholicism but distance from official Catholic philosophy as crucial to his intellectual development.180 Guzzo also rejected what he saw as the naive realism and intellectualism of medieval thought.181 In 1928 Carlo Mazzantini, a Turinese phi­los­o­pher who contributed regularly to the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, reviewed Guzzo’s book.182 He criticized Guzzo for taking (transcendental) subjectivity as his starting point. This, Mazzantini thought, made it impossible to distinguish the object for us and the object in itself—­for example, the “Caesar” as he was considered by historians and “Caesar himself.”183 Moreover, Mazzantini claimed that his appeal to a universal subject made Guzzo insensitive to particularity.184 To achieve objectivity and rationality, one instead had to begin from being as accessed through the senses and the intellect.185 Guzzo responded to the review in the Rivista the following year. In asserting the in­de­pen­dence of being from h­ uman subjects, Guzzo argued, Mazzantini presupposed the f­ree w ­ ill of God to create that being. God was the “subject of action, which posits the object.” In God thinking, willing, and being ­were one.186 But if God w ­ ere the ultimate foundation of being and was utterly ­free, then essences could not, as Mazzantini wanted, be static, and so phi­los­o­phers w ­ ere unable to lay out a definitive ontology. As Guzzo posed the prob­lem, it was impossible to root “hellenically” eternal essences in the “living Christian God.”187 Carlini was attacked by Francesco Olgiati, who taught metaphysics at the Sacred Heart University in Milan.188 Olgiati strongly contested Carlini’s Augustinian route to God. His alleged “immanent transcendence” was r­ eally just the “perennial insatisfaction” with the mundane and could not make good on its promise to break through to the divine: “The drive



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[sforzo], the tendency to transcend ourselves is not yet the affirmation of the Transcendent.”189 To make his argument, Olgiati challenged Carlini’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the history of philosophy. Philosophy did not pass through three stages, but instead two. For all their differences, both Greek and medieval thought w ­ ere based on the “conception of real­ity as being.”190 In contrast, modern philosophies began with thought. For Carlini’s moving focus of philosophy, Olgiati substituted the idealism / realism opposition.191 Read in this way, Carlini could not overcome modern philosophy by revealing its internal drive t­ oward the divine. ­Either self-­consciousness had absolute priority (idealist immanentism) or it did not (theological realism). Instead of trying to find a way out of idealism, Olgiati claimed that we should simply reject it and return to the premodern metaphysics of being. It was clear that while refusing to give ground, neither Guzzo nor Carlini wanted to burn bridges with the neo-­scholastics, with whom they seem to have had relatively warm personal relationships.192 Guzzo argued that he was trying to show that it was pos­si­ble to produce “a non-­ objectivistic philosophy from the very princi­ples of orthodoxy.”193 Carlini defended his own line of thinking as a necessary response to the modern man, who “shuddered or smiled indulgently” on hearing the words “Transcendent, Dogma, Catholicism.”194 Though he praised the Thomist metaphysics “against which on other occasions I have broken my brave lances,” philosophy was meant to convince; and it was impossible to convince, Carlini suggested, if you did not assume your interlocutor’s starting point.195 Carlini thus presented his differences with the neo-­scholastics primarily as one of approach. They addressed dif­fer­ent audiences. The conciliatory stance was not merely a ­matter of politeness or pandering. Over the course of the two debates Carlini and Guzzo had worked to narrow the gap between their thought and scholasticism, and the key to this rapprochement turned out to be existence. In the preface to his 1936 volume The Myth of Realism, which included the Orientations text and his own contributions to the Olgiati debate, Carlini declared that “the debate . . . ​forced me to take a more serious look at the metaphysical question, which in Orientations I had too easily dispatched as a ‘myth’ (the myth of naturalism).” Maintaining his re­sis­tance to the idea of a

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subject-­independent real­ity, Carlini opened up the possibility of a new metaphysics based upon the spirit. Most importantly, Carlini enlarged his understanding of this spirit in order to make up for an earlier neglect of “embodiment” (corporeità).196 As he wrote in Pelloux’s 1943 volume on existentialism, such embodiment bound our “existence” as “interiority and spirituality” to “existence” as “mere exteriority.”197 In sparring with Mazzantini, Guzzo also moved closer to his Thomist critic. The debate was collected in Guzzo’s 1935 book Idealism and Chris­ tian­ity, and ­here he argued that, by starting with experience, one is compelled to affirm the world as “absolutely real” (realissimo). Further, Guzzo emphasized the importance of individuality understood as “existence.” He argued that the universal was not for him the abstract as opposed to the empirical. Instead it appeared necessarily as an individual. Similarly, Guzzo argued that ­human subjectivity involved both finite consciousness and consciousness of the universal, an “ought-­ to-be” (dover essere) over and against our finite existence.198

From Germany via France: Existentialism Comes to Italy Given the ways in which the Italians reframed their thinking in terms of existence during their debate with the neo-­scholastics, we can understand why they might have turned to French Christian existentialism. The Italian spiritualists ­were familiar with their French counter­parts through a common reference to Maurice Blondel, whose 1893 book Action provided an attractive model for the type of Christian actualism to which Carlini, Guzzo, and ­others aspired.199 Stefanini had launched his ­career with a book on Blondel, Carlini referred positively if not uncritically to him, and Enrico Castelli considered the older man a mentor.200 By the late 1930s, Castelli and Guzzo ­were both members of the Société d’études philosophiques in Marseilles, of which Blondel was the honorary president. On the French side, both Le Senne and Lavelle considered the phi­los­op ­ her from Aix-­en-­Provence a mentor.201 It is prob­ably through such networks that Guzzo first came to know his “amicissimo” (­great friend) Le Senne.202 Le Senne had sent Guzzo a copy of Obstacle and Value, a book that Guzzo would translate in the



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1950s; and through Le Senne, Guzzo built up contacts among the “philosophy of spirit” group in France, both in Paris and, with Le Senne’s student Gaston Berger, in Marseilles. Twenty-­five years ­later he wrote, “Le Senne’s friends became my friends, my friends became his: further, my students found their Pa­ri­sian patron in that scholar who was a sage.”203 Through this connection, Le Senne was offered the opportunity to publish in Italy.204 When in 1946 the Italian Christian spiritualists founded their own journal, the Giornale di metafisica, they invited Le Senne and Lavelle to take part.205 So too for Marcel. As Andrea Serra has shown, spiritualists led the way in his reception in Italy, organ­izing the earliest translations of his work, b­ ecause of the way in which Marcel promoted their rapprochement with the neo-­scholastics.206 Stefanini ­later had contact with Le Senne and Lavelle and was personally close to the latter.207 This community of institutionally established Christian phi­los­o­phers reaching from Paris via Provence to Turin and Pisa was crucial to the Italian reception of German existentialism. Italian spiritualists engaged with existentialism ­because of its importance in French debates. As Guzzo wrote l­ater, the work of Marcel and Wahl “led many in Italy to become interested in Jaspers, in existentialism in general, and also in Heidegger.”208 It was on this basis that Guzzo first started to give lectures on existentialism the spring of 1938, paying attention to both its French and German versions.209 He leaned ­toward the former, which better matched the traditions and religious concerns of Italian thought. As he wrote in 1940, “just as in France [the philosophy of existence] has reawakened the typically French tradition of the g­ reat moralists of the seventeenth c­ entury, so too in Italy it finds correspondence in ethical-­religious demands, that idealism too had proposed to interpret, but which it succeeded, at least in its most renowned and pervasive forms, in distorting rather than satisfying.” Rather than be “shipwrecked,” as Jaspers had argued, the Italians followed the French in thinking that ­human existence could find safe harbor (approdo) in the eternal.210 Over the next five years, distaste for the “pessimistic” German brand of existentialism, often in ­favor of the “optimistic” French, became a leitmotif in the Italian discussion. We can see it in such figures like Enzo Paci and the Re­nais­sance historian Eugenio Garin.211 Most influentially, however, this preference structured the early work of Luigi Pareyson.

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In the late 1930s, when he was barely more than a teenager, Pareyson studied u­ nder Guzzo in Turin. Guzzo encouraged Pareyson to travel in the summer breaks to Germany and France, where he met Jaspers and Heidegger, as well as Berger and Le Senne.212 Through his readings and personal contacts, Pareyson emerged as one of the leading experts in Italy on existentialism, and his essays on the movement, starting in 1938 and culminating in his 1943 book, Studies on Existentialism, made the young man a highly influential voice.213 In Pareyson’s comprehensive overview, we can identify the same themes and questions that had raised existentialism’s profile in France. First, like the French, Pareyson was concerned more with Jaspers than with Heidegger. In his first book, The Philosophy of Existence of Karl Jaspers from 1940, Pareyson presented Jaspers as an introduction to existentialism as a w ­ hole.214 Most importantly, Jaspers’s work highlighted what Pareyson identified as the two major characteristics of existentialism: “the accentuation of the personalistic demand and the revival of religious interest.”215 Second, Pareyson took Jaspers to task for betraying both. Though Jaspers had foregrounded the “situation” into which we are “thrown,” he had overemphasized its closure. For Jaspers, we “choose” our situation, but this choice was not properly ­free. It was a form of Nietz­sche’s amor fati, or as Pareyson ­later noted, Protestant predestination: the giving of ourselves over to predetermined fate. Moreover, insofar as Jaspers discussed transcendence, it was of the sort that demanded the sacrifice of existence in the “shipwreck.”216 Third, and given this reading of German existentialism, Pareyson showed a clear preference for the more “optimistic” version found in France.217 In his 1940 article “Genesis and Significance of Existentialism,” he argued that, unlike the Germans, the French existentialists preserved the person by rendering our “choice” of situation a true one (we could accept it or strug­gle to overcome it), and by posing transcendence as God, which did not dissolve but constituted the ­human person.218 Properly attentive to the demands of an axiology, Pareyson argued, the existentialists should “remember that in the individual, limitation is not finitude [ finitezza] but definition, insufficiency is not negativity but exigency, determination is not an already deci­ded and destined resolution, but decision and call.”219 For this reason, emphasizing the connections between the French and the



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Italians, Pareyson could argue that the “true master of true existentialism is without doubt Augustine.”220 Thomism was only a bit player in Pareyson’s work. He cited the Thomist lit­er­a­ture on existentialism, and he referred on several occasions to Heidegger’s relationship to “traditional metaphysics,” though ­these arguments rarely came u­ nder serious scrutiny. But his reading nonetheless bears the traces of Guzzo’s and Carlini’s earlier engagement with Mazzantini and Olgiati: Pareyson foregrounded the way the analy­sis of existence helped us understand our particularity in the concrete and embodied person, and how it opened up metaphysical questions. Thus, in addition to Augustinian interiority (our relationship to ourselves in the situation), Pareyson drew attention to the way in which existentialism thematized our “ontologicity”—­that is, our “very close relations to being,” a “metaphysical participation.”221 In fact the two ­were intimately related: as Pareyson argued, echoing Le Senne and Lavelle, existence was the “punctual convergence of the interiority of the singular and of the relation with being.”222 Most importantly, as he elaborated in his 1950 book Existence and Person, this relationship meant that we, as h­ uman persons, are our relationship to being, which was still not relative (was irrelativo) to us. For this reason, “the inability to objectivize being not only does not obstruct the ontologicity of man, it coincides with it.”223 In highlighting this aspect of existentialism, Pareyson was not merely harking back to the ideas that had arisen in the clash between Thomists and Christian spiritualists in Italy more than ten years earlier—­our metaphysical participation in being, and yet the impossibility of a definitive ontology. It was the same argument that, in the midst of his debate with Maritain, had led Marcel to Jaspers.224

Conclusion By 1943, the year Sartre published Being and Nothingness, existentialism had already emerged as a significant philosophical school in countries across Eu­rope. The development cannot simply be understood as the diffusion of German ideas. Rather, existentialism gained traction in large part ­because of the ways in which it appealed to religious thinkers, an appeal that was first heard in France but that was quickly picked up

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elsewhere. ­Here the diffusion relied parasitically on neo-­scholastic networks: the reasons existentialism appealed to heterodox Christian thinkers in the intimate setting of the rue de Tournon also made it attractive in academic centers across the continent where Thomism was an equally unavoidable presence. This critical engagement with Thomism helps us understand the diversity of the existentialist movement. A common interlocutor brought together realists like Marcel with spiritualists like Le Senne and Guzzo, phi­los­o­phers like Carlini and Pareyson invested in at least a form of rationality with irrationalists like Shestov, Catholics with Protestants, Rus­sian Orthodox, and Jews. To which final list one could also add atheists. For already in the late 1930s, commentators had begun to oppose the “right” Christian to the “left” secular version of existentialism, among whose ranks they named Heidegger in Germany, Nicola Abbagnano in Italy, and the contributors to Recherches Philosophiques in France.225 In the period a­ fter World War II ­t hese thinkers would come to dominate our understanding of existentialism, sidelining the predominantly Christian thinkers I have discussed h­ ere. But the two stories cannot be neatly separated, in large part ­because the dialogue between neo-­scholastics and their Christian existentialist critics was a critical context for the initial reception of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler. As we s­ hall see in Chapters 6–8, the phenomenological conversions that vexed neo-­scholastics made phenomenology attractive to their Christian existentialist critics, while providing opportunities for secular thinkers to challenge the latter’s thought. Circling in ever widening gyres, phenomenology transformed from a means for articulating religious difference into a justification for atheism.

6 The Cartesian Thomist

Writing in the relative obscurity of the Louvain Jesuit College, Joseph

Maréchal spent the early 1920s working on his magnum opus, The Starting Point of Metaphysics (1922–1926). Over five volumes, he meticulously reconstructed the history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Enlightenment to support the claim that Aquinas’s metaphysics was compatible with post-­K antian thought. He acknowledged the concern that if one accepted the starting point of modern philosophy, one would “confine knowledge in a circle of subjective modifications.” But for Maréchal, the rejection of modern thought could only lead to the “ivory tower of a narrow dogmatism,” leaving Catholic philosophy isolated and defensive.1 Moreover, he argued, if one confronted Kant directly, it was pos­si­ble to demonstrate not only that the critical prob­lem with which he began could be solved by Thomist-­Aristotelian metaphysics, but also that Thomism was the only solution. ­After World War  II, Maréchal’s work became one of the most impor­tant influences on “transcendental Thomism,” a vigorous and dynamic strand of Catholic thought with distinguished proponents like the German Karl Rahner and the Canadian Bernard Lonergan. Before 1945, however, Maréchal’s reputation was overshadowed by that of another set of Catholic phi­los­o­phers working in his hometown, who posed the same question: Could one attain the 183

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truths of Thomist metaphysics if one began one’s reflection at the starting point of modern thought, the subject? Léon Noël and o­ thers at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie w ­ ere more prominent than their colleague at the Jesuit College, but in the interwar period they ­were fighting to stay relevant. At that time progressive neo-­scholasticism was besieged by strict Thomist critics, who sought to prove that its marriage of old and new had failed. This debate would thrust phenomenology, a­ fter a near twenty-­year absence, back onto the center stage of international neo-­scholasticism and thus spur on its reception around Eu­rope. For in making the argument that progressives had succumbed to the idealism they purported to fight, the strict Thomists returned with increasing insistence to Husserl’s transcendental turn. How better to warn Catholics about the dangers of the modern starting point than by recounting the cautionary tale of phenomenology?

The Critical Realism Debate As we have seen, one of the most impor­tant results of the rise of existentialism in Eu­rope was that it shifted the decisive intersection between modern philosophy and scholasticism from the progressive branch to the strict Thomists, by undercutting the strategies employed by the former to update Aquinas’s thought. If the theoretical subject had been displaced from its dominant position in modern philosophy, perhaps it was no longer necessary to start with the prob­lem of knowledge, with all the risks that entailed. Thomists could engage with the existentialists on their home ground. The changing philosophical climate thus tended to sideline the progressive Thomists, and has led to their almost total effacement in our understanding of neo-­scholasticism. The names Maritain and Gilson are far more recognizable to modern scholars than ­t hose of their Louvain counter­parts. The most impor­tant confrontation between what became the new existential Thomism and the Louvain school was a debate between Étienne Gilson and Léon Noël. Gilson had laid down the gauntlet in his paper “Methodical Realism” for the 1930 collection Philosophia Perennis. The paper was the last in a section titled “Epistemological Prob­lems,” and it immediately followed a paper, titled “On the Notion of Epistemological



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Realism,” by Noël’s student René Kremer. The two papers reproduced the central division within neo-­scholasticism in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury. Kremer reiterated the Louvain school’s line, closely following Noël’s theory of “immediate realism.” He rejected the idea that “what we know directly is only a copy, a subjective trace of the object. For St. Thomas . . . ​it is indubitable that we know, not the repre­sen­ta­tions of ­things, but the ­things themselves.”2 Nevertheless, for Kremer scholasticism needed “a sincere epistemology,” the key to which was “intentionality.”3 Even though the real ­thing was given directly in knowledge, we still grasped it in a par­tic­u­lar way. In this sense, and in this sense only, ­t here was a “subjective intermediary that allowed us to know ­t hings.” 4 The criticism of this “subjective intermediary” (in practical terms, the examination of the words with which we formulate ideas and judgments) was necessary in order to found knowledge securely. Such criticism, Kremer claimed, would engender an appreciation of the ways we grasp being, so that the idealist notion of consciousness as efficient cause could be converted into the scholastic notion of consciousness as final cause: “Being is made to be known . . . ​Verum et ens convertuntur.” 5 Kremer hoped to show that from the critical starting point one could make one’s way to scholastic realism. Gilson’s paper was a forceful rejection of Kremer’s proj­ect. For Gilson, the idealist assumption that philosophical reflection “must necessarily go from thought to ­things” was a “Copernican Revolution” of the old medieval tradition, which had “thought from the point of view of the object.”6 The clear opposition between idealist and realist routes made a conciliatory position simply contradictory. Notwithstanding the importance of the Cartesian cogito for other realms of philosophy, Gilson was adamant that, for proving the existence of the real world, it was a bust.7 Gilson was explicit about the target of his criticism. Gilson noted that some scholastics had wanted to show that “thought is not enclosed on itself, but attains or even entails the object.” 8 For Gilson, however, this approach was deeply flawed; from idealism only idealism could emerge. Singling out Noël’s “immediate realism,” he suggested that it marked the most sophisticated attempt to combine scholasticism and idealist philosophy. Noël had put aside the assumption that one could “bridge” mind and real­ity and instead claimed “to seize the object without having to go

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through any intermediary.”9 While Gilson conceded that this was a bona fide Thomist argument, he was less certain that it was a realism. Noël had posited a point where thought and being came together, but according to Gilson “this point, if it exists, is still and first of all part of thought.”10 Gilson took it as axiomatic that “in departing from a percipi, one ­will never reach another esse except that of the percipi.” Gilson bluntly concluded, “A critical realism is self-­contradictory like the notion of a square circle.”11 Gilson’s intervention is in large part a reiteration of the classic strict Thomist argument against the progressives: to adapt to modern philosophy is to capitulate to it. As he stated in his 1939 book Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, both “Cartesian Thomism” and “Kantian Thomism” ­were unnatural hybrids.12 Instead of starting with the prob­lem posed by idealism—­a prob­lem, Gilson claimed, that already imported with it idealism as a solution—­scholasticism should adopt a “methodical realism.” Such an approach would begin by demonstrating the contradictions of idealist philosophy, discrediting the claim that was in solidarity with it: that the criticism of knowledge was a necessary first stage for all philosophical undertakings. Neo-­scholastics could then backtrack to the point in history where philosophy had taken the wrong turn, embracing once again a “precritical realism.”13 Metaphysics would regain its title as first philosophy. Gilson’s article—­Bernard Roland-­Gosselin, professor at the Institut Catholique, described it as a “manifesto”14 —­elicited a flood of responses from prominent Thomists.15 For Noël it instigated a decade-­long proj­ect of rebuttal. Throughout the 1930s he returned insistently to the question of a “methodical realism” in his courses and publications.16 Noël’s first attempt, “The Method of Realism,” appeared in the 1931 volume of the Revue Néo-­Scolastique.17 Noël argued that a critical approach to realism was necessary for Thomists, ­because they had to “satisfy the demand which has been made by modern thought since Descartes”: to build philosophy on the incontestable foundation of the cogito.18 As he remarked in a letter to Maritain from 1932, his argument was directed “ad hominem Cartesium.”19 Thomists could convince Cartesians, Noël thought, by showing that the cogito was “open,” a possibility that Gilson had shut down only by “wordplay.”20 For though we could never “think a non-­ thought real­ity” (a contradiction in terms), Gilson was wrong to assume



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that a thought real­ity was “only thought.” To make this argument, Noël distinguished between the act and the object of thought.21 Epistemology involved reflection on the acts of thought, which demonstrated how we grasped the mind-­independent real.22 Pitting the possibility of engaging with modern philosophy against the purity of Thomistic realism, the debate threatened to tear the neo-­ scholastic world apart, and a number of figures tried to mediate between the two sides. As Maritain noted in a letter to Noël from 1932, he wanted to “maintain the u­ nion between Thomists on the essential points.”23 Maritain’s contribution to the debate came in his wide-­ranging and complex 1932 book The Degrees of Knowledge. The book was Maritain’s attempt to construct a multilayered system of knowledge (he preferred the term “spiritual organism”), a coherent Thomistic approach to all subjects from science to theology, while recognizing what made them dif­fer­ent, hence the subtitle: “Distinguish to Unite.”24 He structured it by an ascending motion: moving from experimental science, through metaphysics, it culminated in the knowledge of the super-­rational world.25 This multilayered approach was designed at least in part to span the divide between the Thomists and Christian spiritualists, which I discussed in Chapter 5. Maritain wanted to show how a “ ‘philosophy of being’ is at the same time, and par excellence, a ‘philosophy of the spirit.’ ”26 In the third chapter Maritain homed in on the Gilson / Noël debate, conceding points to both men. The chapter title, “Critical Realism,” was a nod to Noël. Maritain thought that it was pos­si­ble to pose the critical prob­lem in a way that did not lead directly to idealism.27 The prob­lem with idealism was not an excess of criticism. The phi­los­o­pher needed to judge the value of the percipere as it appeared to us, to describe and analyze it, which was a “purely reflective task.”28 Rather, Maritain thought, “one must reproach idealist criticism above all for not being sufficiently critical.”29 Picking up on Noël’s terms, Maritain argued that Descartes had assumed a “closed cogito.”30 In contrast, Thomism started with the “open cogito.” Moreover, the relationship of “the known t­ hing to the soul that knows” was a “relationship of reason, which does not affect or modify in any way the known ­thing.”31 Rather than having to refound the actually existing “­thing” on the basis of the “object” given to consciousness, or to give up any hope of ­doing so, one was impelled “to affirm that the ­thing

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is given with the object and by it, and that it is absurd to want to separate them.”32 At the same time, Maritain leaned ­toward Gilson. He opened the chapter with a reference to Gilson’s 1930 article and asserted the dangers of engaging with idealism.33 The central prob­lem of post-­Cartesian philosophy, for Maritain, was its “philosophical radicalism”: it doubted every­thing.34 In contrast, Thomists did not question “the irrecusable evidence of the princi­ple of identity,” “the general veracity of our powers of knowing” and “the notion of truth.”35 That is, the openness of the Thomist cogito was not discovered by critical analy­sis, as Noël had thought, but preceded it. The “first movement of the mind” was direct knowledge of real­ity.36 If our knowledge of being came first, then post-­Cartesian thought erred in confusing the “starting point” of criticism with that of philosophy tout court. Criticism was both subsequent and subordinate to the initial givenness of the real; epistemology was both subsequent and subordinate to metaphysics. And ­because the critical moment was temporally and logically second, philosophy could never begin with a “moment of real universal doubt.” To do so would be to undermine philosophy’s foundations.37 “Realism is lived by the intellect before being recognized by it.”38 This formulation of the prob­lem transformed the task of critical thought. Critical thought produced scientific knowledge out of the raw material of spontaneous certainties; it was not suited to the metaphysical task of proving the existence of the world. While making space for criticism within Thomism, Maritain ended by reaffirming Gilson’s position. Both thinkers placed metaphysics first, with epistemology as a secondary and dependent science.39 In language that resembled Gilson’s, Maritain said that the starting point of philosophy was a choice, and that it was only ­after having made that choice that one would realize that only the realist had chosen “wisely.”40 Though the main contributors to the critical realism debate came from the French-­speaking world, from the beginning the debate was keyed into the transnational networks of Catholic philosophy. Gilson had been encouraged to write his opening salvo by the Canadian Gérald Phélan.41 His essay had been published in the Philosophia Perennis volumes that celebrated the German Joseph Geyser’s sixtieth birthday. Geyser’s Festschrift was itself an international publication: it brought together sixty-­eight scholars from sixteen nations, and the essays w ­ ere written in En­glish,



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French, German, Italian, and Spanish.42 Consequently, the Gilson / Noël controversy was followed with ­great interest around Eu­rope: The “dispute between the realists” was reported in a 1931 article for the daily L’Avvenire d’Italia, and the November 1936 International Thomist Congress in Rome gave it pride of place, with papers by Noël and Olgiati.43 Channeling Gilson, Olgiati declared that epistemology was always “founded upon a metaphysics . . . ​the concept of real­ity is the dominant feature of any system.”44 Olgiati’s assertion of the priority of metaphysics over epistemology was the culmination of a long shift in Milanese neo-­scholasticism, which we can track by following the fate of Giuseppe Zamboni. A ­ fter Canella’s fall, Zamboni was the most committed Mercerian at the Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica. This reputation was confirmed when the University of the Sacred Heart in Milan opened its doors in 1921. Gemelli offered Zamboni the chair in Criteriology, and in his courses Zamboni drew heavi­ly on the Belgian cardinal’s work.45 According to Zamboni, we are able to grasp only the “phenomenal being” of external objects. What he called their “ontological being” had to be affirmed through a pro­cess of inference from the ontological being of the subject.46 Such an argument, Zamboni thought, showed a way to reconcile Kantianism and Thomism. They ­weren’t opposed, but worked at dif­fer­ent levels: Kant was concerned with “phenomenal being,” Thomas was concerned with “ontological being.” Zamboni’s philosophy led him into a similar impasse to Mercier.47 His apparent “illationism” (the argument that we know external being only by inference from intermediary phenomena) already made him suspect. But his fate was sealed when the Milanese came to agree with the strict Thomists that ­there was no pos­si­ble reconciliation between modern critical philosophy and medieval metaphysics.48 By 1930 Gemelli felt compelled to take action, asking Zamboni to restrict himself to the teaching of canonical philosophical texts. In 1931 he removed Zamboni’s courses from the cata­log of Catholic University, and in 1932 he intervened to remove his right to teach, his nihil obstat.49 In justifying t­hese mea­sures, Gemelli claimed that “Zamboni’s doctrine has placed noxious and dangerous doubts in the minds of our youth.”50 ­After Zamboni had been fired from his chair at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, it was open season on his ideas. Olgiati took the lead,

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attacking Zamboni’s “phenomenalism and subjectivism.”51 Zamboni had tried to negotiate with modern thinkers, but he had ended up accepting their metaphysics. An adherence to medieval realism had to come first. As an institutional expression of this position, Olgiati, as professor of metaphysics, took over Zamboni’s courses at the university.52 Given the outcome of the debate, it is not surprising that Gemelli felt compelled to address the charge that the Milan school had become “archeoscolastici.”53 The Zamboni affair helped exacerbate the split between Louvain and Milan. In a number of articles in the Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie from 1935 and 1936, the Belgian neo-­scholastic Charles Ranwez attempted to adopt a neutral position, but nonetheless faulted Gemelli and Olgiati for what he saw as their fruitless polemic and willful blindness to what was valuable in Zamboni’s work. He also suggested that Olgiati had criticized Zamboni for showing insufficient re­spect to ecclesiastical authority.54 Olgiati was personally incensed and wrote a long letter to Noël reaffirming his position, and criticizing Ranwez for g­ oing too far in his attack.55 The language of the note suggested to Noël that Olgiati was invoking a l­egal right to respond, and Noël replied with thinly veiled disappointment, lamenting the “imperious tone” of several recent communications from Milan, and complaining, “For a long time, the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica has pretended to have nothing to do with the Louvain school.”56 Angry at Noël’s rebuke, Olgiati withdrew his note from publication, asserting that he w ­ asn’t intending ­legal action but rather had written in the spirit of fraternity and in the “interest of truth,” adding caustically, “I thought t­ hese reasons carried weight with the editors of the Revue Néo-­Scolastique.” While claiming ­great re­spect for Louvain, Olgiati asserted Milan’s in­de­pen­dence: “Certainly we cannot accept (and I think that you recognize this too), Louvain treating the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart like a suckling baby; Italy is not South Amer­i­ca, thank heaven.”57

The Phenomenological Battleground ­ here ­were many indications that Husserl’s phenomenology would be a T privileged battleground in the critical realism debate. The first volley had been fired in a volume celebrating Joseph Geyser, and Léon Noël was one



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of the major participants. ­Because Noël and Geyser, like other progressives, had fêted phenomenology around 1910 as evidence that their renewal of Thomism was a success, the furor surrounding Husserl’s “conversion” to transcendental idealism in his 1913 book Ideas threatened them with guilt by association. Husserl’s trajectory, its direction and logic, spoke directly to the issues at the heart of the debate: the value and dangers of engaging with modern thought, and the relationship between idealism and realism. Was Husserl’s phenomenology proof that modern idealist philosophy could be converted to the truths of medieval scholasticism? Or was it instead evidence that to engage with idealism was already to surrender to it, to risk losing one’s soul? As we saw, debates within the Catholic community had encouraged neo-­scholastics to misread Husserl’s transcendental idealism as a denial of the existing world in ­favor of the immanence of consciousness. This reading seemed to gain support with the 1931 publication of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which derived from a set of lectures he had given in Paris two years earlier and was his first major work to appear in French. In that work, Husserl presented himself as a “neo-­Cartesian.” Not only was he firmly ensconced on the wrong side of the modern / ​medieval divide—he was “oriented t­ oward the subject” and not t­ oward the object— he had also radicalized the Cartesian break by rejecting t­ hose ele­ments of Descartes’s theory that Husserl, following Koyré and Gilson, argued ­were indebted to scholasticism.58 Husserl concluded his lectures with a quote from Augustine: “Noli foras ire, in te redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas—­Do not go outside, return into yourself; truth resides in the inner man.” The impression that Husserl had turned decisively against Thomism would be reinforced in 1933 when Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink, published his influential essay “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy in Con­temporary Criticism,” an essay that Husserl endorsed.59 ­Here Fink responded to criticisms from neo-­K antians by declaring that Husserl had gone beyond their “world-­immanent” questions to ask ­after the very origin of the world, which, Fink contended, could be found in the transcendental sphere. Husserl was not a scholastic, but rather one who had “radicalized” the Kantian revolution through the phenomenological reduction.60 It is true that Fink emphasizes the ontological aspects

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of the phenomenology, showing how the reduction allows us to integrate belief in the world into the transcendental sphere. As Ronald Bruzina has noted, Fink thereby “de-­Cartesianizes” Husserl’s work.61 But as in the reception of Ideas, the historico-­philosophical placing of Husserl’s thought mattered more than the details of his argument. Fink’s essay, which became a mainstay of the Husserl reception around Eu­rope, added weight to the argument that Husserl had never been a neo-­scholastic ally. The prob­lems posed by Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations led Jacques Maritain to discuss phenomenology in his The Degrees of Knowledge, presented as a “digression” from his contribution to the critical realism debate.62 Husserl’s pertinence was clear from the beginning of Maritain’s account. Maritain described phenomenology as “an activation of post-­ Kantian philosophy through contact with Aristotelian and scholastic seeds,” relating Husserl to the “Kantian Thomism” Gilson condemned.63 But ­because in this debate Maritain was concerned in part to defend Noël from Gilson’s criticisms, his analy­sis of Husserl emphasized the differences between phenomenology and Thomist critical realism—­Husserl’s cogito was closed, Noël’s was open—­even if the former served as a reminder that the latter was sailing rather close to the wind.64 Maritain identified the scholastic seeds in phenomenology as intentionality and the Wesensschau (intuition of essences), which Husserl had inherited from Brentano. Both could show how the subject grasped extra-­ mental being directly in thought (ego cogito ens), not simply the phenomenological object or pos­si­ble being.65 But, Maritain asserted, in phenomenology both ­were distorted by a Kantian inheritance, as represented by the epoché. He read the epoché as the exclusion of all “extra-­mental existence” from thought. That is why he could claim that Husserl had set himself the contradictory task of “thinking being while refusing to think it as being.”66 With re­spect to the Wesensschau, Maritain criticized Husserl for being beholden to “the phenomenalist notion of a pure object,” where the object was fully detached from the existing ­thing (chose) it represented.67 Similarly, in Husserl’s “neo-­Cartesian” hands, intentionality had lost “its efficacy and value.”68 While Husserl had defined intentionality as the way consciousness “aimed at objects,” Maritain argued that a more robust version could explain how being, which was



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outside of consciousness, “becomes existent within it.”69 Again, in pairing a Thomist concept with the epoché, which bracketed existence, Husserl had denatured it. Transcendence could not be rediscovered within the sphere of immanent experience. Insofar as Husserl’s analyses rang true, Maritain argued, it was ­because he relied surreptitiously on realist assumptions. His supposed constitution of the world was in real­ity a “reconstitution,” and thus presupposed “an original.” In this way, phenomenological idealism was a “parasite,” hostile to the real world on which it nonetheless fed.70 Such an argument allowed Maritain to separate the transcendental aspects of phenomenology, which he wanted to reject, from its critical aspect, the slow and patient description of the cogitata.71 With only a “­mental shift” it was pos­si­ble to “think such a renewed transcendental idealism in realist terms.”72 Phenomenology, that is, could be converted back to Catholic thought, but only by dispensing with t­hose ele­ments of Husserl’s philosophy that he had inherited from post-­K antian thought.73 ­After Maritain, reference to Husserl became a leitmotif in the critical realism debate for Régis Jolivet in France and Michele Losacco in Italy, among ­others.74 Thanks to phenomenology’s prominence in perhaps the most impor­ tant debate within neo-­scholasticism, the Société Thomiste chose it as the topic for a conference held in Juvisy just outside of Paris in September 1932. It was the first conference outside of Germany dedicated to phenomenology.75 Such conferences ­were a new undertaking for the society. They had been proposed in 1929 as opportunities to treat “­either the general prob­lems of Thomist history, philosophy or theology, or more precise or more currently discussed questions.”76 When the time came to choose the topic for the inaugural conference in early 1932, the critical realism debate was well ­under way, and Maritain, who was vice-­president of the society, had recently published his essay on Husserl. Phenomenology fit the bill.77 Between the decision and the conference in September, the pace and intensity of the critical realism debate increased: Gilson published an extended intervention in May; Rolland-­Gosselin and Garrigou-­ Lagrange published their contributions; and four days before the conference Noël received the proofs for Maritain’s The Degrees of Knowledge.78 Moreover, the main participants of that debate w ­ ere pres­ent in Juvisy:

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Maritain introduced the discussion, Noël presided over the after­noon panel, and Gilson was in the audience.79 The question of critical realism was never far from the minds of t­ hose pres­ent. In his opening remarks, Maritain explained the choice of phenomenology, “one of the most impor­tant movements of con­temporary thought.” First, “the points of contact between Thomism and phenomenology are frequent, something from scholasticism having entered through Brentano, although in a dif­fer­ent spirit”; but second, the criticisms that Thomist phi­ los­o­phers might address to phenomenology “have a certain relationship with the criticisms they have addressed to certain members of the ancient scholastic ­family.” This was an explicit reference to Duns Scotus, but the audience could well have ­imagined a more proximate target, especially given that Maritain identified Gilson as a source of the attack.80 We can understand Maritain’s reluctance to name the critical realism debate directly. The very aspects that made Husserl a good proxy for an analy­sis, and perhaps criticism, of progressive neo-­scholasticism also meant that the Thomists who ­were most knowledgeable about phenomenology came from that side of the movement. Both of the main presenters ­were invested in the progressive stance: René Kremer, as we have seen, was Noël’s student from Louvain, and Daniel Feuling from Salzburg was a friend and collaborator of both Erich Przywara and Dietrich von Hildebrand.81 Kremer and Feuling had very dif­fer­ent attitudes to phenomenology than the Thomists we have discussed so far: both w ­ ere far more optimistic about its contributions to scholastic thought. As we saw in Chapter 2, in the text of Ideas Husserl was ambiguous about the status of transcendental subjectivity: Was it a region of being, such that the epoché excluded a discussion of transcendent real­ity? Or was the epoché merely a change in attitude, which allowed us to rediscover the transcendent within the reduced sphere? Maritain a­ dopted the former reading, positing an irreconcilable opposition between Husserl’s intentionality, which opened the subject up to the transcendent, and the epoché, which enclosed it in immanent experience. Feuling and Kremer took the latter. For both of them, Thomists could deploy Husserl’s epoché in a modern reaffirmation of medieval realism. Feuling took a similar approach to Geyser. He conceded that Husserl’s work was “idealistic.” Nonetheless he insisted that phenomenology was



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above all a methodology without metaphysical implications. The epoché served Husserl’s broader goal of establishing philosophy as a science by setting aside all presuppositions: absolute Voraussetzungslosigkeit. Husserl was skeptical of naive assertions about existence, but, Feuling argued, “he ­doesn’t deny existence; he ­doesn’t even doubt it; in this he differs from Descartes.” Feuling then recounted how Husserl radicalized the epoché in the “transcendental reduction” to get to the “field of pure transcendental consciousness.”82 Though Feuling agreed that the reduction took us to the constituting subject, he argued that, at the most fundamental level, that subject had to be identified with God, as the ultimate source of the constituted world: God “lives his life constituting, in and through transcendental consciousness, the transcendental egos of a second order with their noeses and noemata, and through them, the earthly egos and the objective world.” In this way, while phenomenology did lead to “transcendental idealism,” that idealism was very dif­fer­ent from “psychological idealism, according to which the psychological ego, the ego of our natu­ral attitude, produces and constitutes the phenomenal world of our natu­ral experiences.” And ­because the divine transcendental subject constituted entities in their physical and material as well as their psychological real­ity, Husserl’s transcendental idealism resulted in “a very pronounced realism.”83 Kremer sought to reach the same conclusion, but by another route. Of all the major participants, Kremer had the closest connection to the Louvain school, and this made his intervention fraught with difficulty. He treated the “similarities” between Thomism and phenomenology directly, referring to the long history of interactions, starting with Noël’s 1910 article.84 Above all, Kremer wanted to defend Husserl’s early work, which had first attracted Noël’s eye. He denied that Husserl’s Wesensschau was significantly dif­fer­ent from Aquinas’s knowledge of essences. The fact that the latter required abstraction as a preliminary step and the former did not was not a decisive objection, b­ ecause Aquinas thought that once that abstraction had been completed, the intellect “finds itself in the immediate presence of a quiddity, an essence.” On this basis, Kremer claimed that the criticisms of psychologism and relativism in the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations ­were “entirely usable by Thomism.”85 Kremer was able to make his argument by exploiting the narrow space Husserl had left between the epoché and the transcendental reduction.

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This allowed Kremer to prise Husserl’s method (the presuppositionless analy­sis of the given) apart from his idealism. According to Kremer, the methodological application of the epoché coincided with Thomism, which asserted a real distinction between essence and existence, allowing the two to be treated separately: “­Isn’t that the long-­k nown condition of all serious philosophical research?” Phenomenology could be appropriated for a realist philosophy.86 Husserl’s idealism, as expressed by the transcendental reduction, had other ­causes. Following a line of argument that can trace its roots back to Stein’s 1929 article, Kremer claimed that, in contrast to Thomism, which recognized the limitations of our ­human cognitive faculties, Husserl had placed excessive faith in reason. He believed he could produce a “purely logical study of knowledge.” 87 To achieve this end, Husserl radicalized the epoché from a provisional method into “the final stage of the spirit,” excluding rather than simply bracketing existence.88 But for Kremer, this was a fool’s errand. The world exceeded the limits of our logic. Leibniz’s mathesis universalis (universal science) was simply a dream.89 Far from being in­de­pen­dent of existence, logic needed to be placed in contact with “concrete real­ity,” which the mind could subsequently justify and criticize.90 Kremer’s argument was clearly driven by a desire to defend the progressive neo-­scholastics and Noël in par­tic­u­lar. He wanted to show that they could not be implicated by Husserl’s heretical idealism, and that it was pos­si­ble to take the modern starting point (as represented by the epoché) and affirm the mind-­independent real. In this way, the arguments at the Société Thomiste conference ­were structured by a debate that had more to do with internal neo-­scholastic politics than with a disinterested appraisal of phenomenology. Writing to his friend Hedwig Conrad-­ Martius, Alexandre Koyré inquired ­whether “the Master” (Husserl) had liked the proceedings. He ­didn’t wait for an answer: “Very ­little, so I have heard.”91

Husserl around Eu­rope Like the critical realism debate into which they ­were folded, the Thomist readings of Husserl had continental reach. At Juvisy the Dominicans had welcomed scholars from France, Belgium, the Channel Islands, Austria,



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Germany, and Italy, and the conference would be reviewed in Catholic periodicals across Eu­rope.92 During a toast made at the lunch, Maritain made reference to the international nature of the proceedings: “At a time where particularist passions are excited to a supreme degree in the temporal realm, the obligation to maintain and develop international intellectual collaboration imposes itself more than ever on ­those who care for the common good of the spirit.”93 The issues discussed at the conference resonated among neo-­scholastics in many dif­fer­ent countries, and Husserl was invoked regularly in debates over the relationship between modern and medieval metaphysics all around Eu­rope and beyond over the course of the next de­cade. M. Flory wrote an article on Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations for the 1934 volume of the Spanish journal Estudios eclesiásticos, weighing the differences between scholasticism and phenomenology.94 In the Netherlands, J. Wolters published an essay in 1940 on “The Universal in the Philosophia Perennis and in Husserl.”95 Erich Przywara was perhaps the most sanguine about the connection. Immediately ­after the Juvisy conference, the editor of The New Schoolman in the United States reached out to him to commission an article, suggesting that Przywara write on Husserl. In the piece, which appeared in 1934, Przywara argued that Husserl’s work was governed by both scholastic and Cartesian ele­ments. But unlike Maritain, who saw the latter as a corrupting influence, Przywara argued that Husserl’s Cartesianism showed that his study of objective being did not mark a ­simple return to the ­Middle Ages. Instead, “It is from the innermost soul of the modern era that this light is breaking forth new, triumphantly new.”96 Some followed the strict Thomist line. In his 1940 book The Intentionality of Knowledge in Husserl, the Dutchman Herman Boelaars argued that the development of Husserl’s idealism was already contained in nuce in the Logical Investigations.97 Even in Louvain some students ­were inclined in this direction. As Alphonse de Waelhens wrote in 1936, when he was still a doctoral student at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, though Husserl had initially tried to construct a realism based on Brentano’s intentionality, he adhered to the idealist prejudice of the primacy of rational Sosein (essence) over irrational Dasein (existence).98 This decision condemned phenomenology, as early as the Logical Investigations, to idealism: “A philosophy that succeeds or thinks it has succeeded in

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posing itself without reference to an existing being,” de Waelhens argued, ­w ill “be tempted to cast off this superfluous existence. . . . ​Initial neutrality w ­ ill not fail to become pure and ­simple negation.”99 ­Others, however, argued that one could rescue Husserl’s phenomenology from his idealism. Writing in Flemish in 1941, J. Nota remarked both on the initial parallels between Husserl and the scholastics, and then, ­under the influence of Descartes, the increasing gulf between the two.100 As for Kremer, this history allowed Nota to separate Husserl’s “method” from his idealistic conclusions. Marcel de Corte was also convinced that Husserl’s metaphysics did not follow necessarily from his phenomenological starting point, and that it had “hardened” the other­wise “fluid and supple instrument of the epoché.”101 Józef Roskwitalski in Poland agreed: “When we speak of the phenomenological method, we are not thinking of the phenomenological reduction.” ­Because the former, unlike the latter, was metaphysically neutral, Roskwitalski claimed that one could opt for a realist reading.102 A similar line was taken in the journal The New Scholasticism in 1937. Kurt Reinhardt, a student of Husserl and in the 1920s a convert to Catholicism, presented the epoché as a methodological device and claimed that the phenomenological Wesensschau corresponded well with Thomist thought. Like Kremer, Reinhardt argued that the differences between Husserl and Aquinas could be traced to the former’s excessive faith in reason, his search for an “unshakable epistemological foundation.” Reinhardt, however, took this argument in a dif­fer­ent direction. For him it demonstrated the danger of taking epistemology as a prima philosophia. “For Thomas Aquinas transcendental criticism in . . . ​ Husserl’s sense would have carried l­ittle meaning.” Ultimately Thomism was “God-­centered” and thus started with metaphysics, whereas phenomenology was “ego-­centered” and for this reason could not “break radically through the sphere of immanence.”103 The idea that Husserl’s idealism resulted from his overestimation of ­human reason became a leitmotif in the reception. According to this argument, it had led him to confine himself in the immanence of pure consciousness, and to believe that he could construct a rigorous science ­there. But for neo-­scholastics, beyond a limited number of princi­ples, apodictic certainty was the preserve of divine consciousness. ­Humans had to



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generate knowledge in confrontation with the real. As Carlo Mazzantini suggested in 1931, the central prob­lem with Husserl’s work was “its failure to recognize ‘existentiality’ as the supreme condition and presupposition of any ‘possibility.’ ”104 Having secured our grasp of existing real­ity through the epoché, neo-­scholastics prescribed its slow and careful analy­sis. Mazzantini’s work on Husserl stands at the beginning of a productive period of engagement in Italian neo-­scholastic circles. It is significant that Maritain’s treatment of Husserl had first appeared in the Italian journal Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica in January 1932 as a stand-­alone article: “Notes on Knowledge.”105 Published at the peak of the Zamboni affair, it clearly spoke to Milanese questions, and although Maritain attempted to spare Noël from the brunt of his criticism, he might well have considered Zamboni, who was l­ ater dubbed the “Italian Husserl,” a more deserving target.106 During the 1920s and early 1930s the Milanese neo-­scholastics had continued to refer to Husserl as an example of the modern turn to “objectivity,” even as doubts arose about his ability to construct a robust realism.107 In the wake of the Zamboni affair, however, interest grew, not least with the newly unemployed Zamboni, who set off to Germany in the summer of 1933 to “familiarize [him]self with Husserl’s thought.”108 The person who would do most to promote Husserl among neo-­ scholastics and ­others in Italy was Sofia Vanni Rovighi, a young phi­los­ o­pher at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, and a student of Armato Masnovo, who had praised Husserl back in 1911. She l­ ater recalled that she had begun her reading of Husserl with the Logical Investigations, and that she had seen the German as a realist who could be used to oppose Italian idealism.109 Much of her l­ ater work on Husserl stemmed from an attempt to reconcile this first reading with Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Vanni Rovighi had first expressed interest in Husserl when she was only twenty-­two, in a 1930 article discussing Husserl’s 1929 Festschrift. She focused her attention on Edith Stein’s comparison between Husserl and Aquinas.110 Vanni Rovighi criticized Stein, however, for placing too much emphasis on faith. Aquinas had wanted to prove all the praeambula fidei using ­human reason. Arguing that Stein had ignored the distinction between logical and ontological truth, Vanni Rovighi suggested that h­ uman philosophical research began with the former, based as it was on the “givens of experience.” Moreover, she asserted, “starting

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from the consciousness of the subject does not at all imply that I pose the ‘ego’ as the center of real­ity.” It was pos­si­ble to move from consciousness to a realist philosophy. According to Vanni Rovighi, the cause of Husserl’s egocentrism, which Stein had diagnosed, had to be sought elsewhere.111 Vanni Rovighi developed her discussion in a 1937 article on the cogito in Husserl and Descartes. Vanni Rovighi started by noting the “profound evolution” that took Husserl from the Logical Investigations to the Cartesian Meditations.112 Husserl’s first concern was to make philosophy into a rigorous science, and he formulated the epoché to put aside all that was dubitable.113 Vanni Rovighi, like Kremer, did not find much to criticize ­here. She argued that Husserl’s epoché had nothing to do with “naturalistic subjectivism or skepticism, with the affirmation of the objects as they are known in common experience, as subjective ­etc.”114 Further, just as doubt brought Descartes to his cogito, Husserl’s epoché brought Husserl to his. “The cogito is the apodictic evidence they sought a­ fter, it is the indubitable truth capable of sustaining the edifice of philosophy as rigorous science.”115 Nonetheless, Husserl and Descartes differed in their approach to this source of apodictic evidence: “Husserl is preoccupied with remaining inside the cogito, of never falling back into the naturalistic affirmation of the existence of the world, while Descartes is preoccupied with leaving the cogito, of finding other realities beyond that of the thinking subject.”116 The difference, and ­here Vanni Rovighi referred to Fink, could be traced to the transcendental reduction, which made the appearance of the world into a creative act of the transcendental subject.117 For Vanni Rovighi this was Husserl’s wrong turn. T ­ here was no reason to move from the true claim that the given was necessarily given as the cogito’s object to the false one that it was also “created by the cogito.” Knowing was not a “creation” but a “revelation . . . ​disclosing what has already been created.” That is, Husserl erred in shifting from a methodological and provisional “bracketing” to a metaphysics, which “resulted in transcendental solipsism.”118 Vanni Rovighi repeated this argument in her book La Filosofia di Edmund Husserl (1938), the first monograph on Husserl in Italian. A slow accounting of Husserl’s development from his early work with Brentano to his Crisis lectures, the book ended with a chapter on “idealism.” ­Here



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again the comparison with Descartes took center stage. Why was it that Descartes could avoid idealism and Husserl could not? According to Vanni Rovighi, Husserl gave two arguments for his stance. First, he asserted that “all that is given is always given to a thought,” and that therefore to think of a world without a consciousness was contradictory.119 Husserl concluded from this that consciousness was necessary, and the world was dependent upon, even produced by it. Second, and ­here Vanni Rovighi referred to Fink, Husserl had argued that consciousness and being did not occupy the same plane of real­ity. Consciousness was necessary and absolute, existing being was contingent and relative, and thus the latter had to be dependent on the former.120 For Vanni Rovighi, the first argument was by no means definitive: “That it is not pos­si­ble to escape from thought is a truth no realist contests.” The question was instead ­whether ­human thought was a “revelation of being,” or ­whether being was “posited” by consciousness. For Vanni Rovighi, Husserl’s idealist argument confused the two possibilities. In addition, if the subject ­were the source of real­ity, the constitution of alter egos would become a serious prob­lem: How could we understand the constitution of what was constitutive?121 The second argument, Vanni Rovighi noted, was more in­ter­est­ing ­because it resembled traditional (read Thomist) metaphysics, where the contingency of the world pointed to an absolutely necessary creator. It diverged from Thomism, however, ­because of the reduction, which bracketed the outside world. As Vanni Rovighi glossed this decision, Husserl “preferred the Augustinian itinerary to that of Aristotle-­Thomas.”122 For Vanni Rovighi the path inward, insofar as it radicalized the epoché, went wrong: “Husserl does not seem to have seen clearly that knowing through universalizing does not mean that we can know the specific essence of the ­thing directly.” For “the concepts that we form immediately through a ­simple universalizing abstraction, or if you prefer eidetic intuition, are extremely raw and indeterminate.” To move from ­these rough ideas to scientific concepts “requires long elaborations, and when one treats the entities of physical nature, one can only obtain less imprecise concepts through scientific induction.”123 According to Vanni Rovighi, such induction was foreclosed by Husserl’s choice of Augustinian interiority and rejection of the epistemic value of existence. Only the Thomists, by

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locating the true constituting subject in God, could explain how our striving ­toward knowledge is pos­si­ble. With God as the true “origin of the world,” the epoché would no longer lead us to transcendental subjectivity. Instead it simply affirmed the “shadowy character of the world in which we live.”124 The epoché should then encourage us to study this world, using scientific methods, embarking on the long and arduous climb t­ oward truth.125 Vanni Rovighi followed the general progressive line in thinking that a presuppositionless examination of intuitive givenness would demonstrate our intentional connection to existence, but the way she explained this connection is representative of an impor­tant line of argument in the Thomist reception. In the article on the cogito, Vanni Rovighi interrogated Husserl’s and Descartes’s dif­fer­ent understandings of the ego. Most importantly, the Cartesian cogito implied an “empirical ego,” which gave Descartes a toehold in existence, from which he had been able to reconquer the world. In contrast, Husserl’s cogito implied a “transcendental” ego, which suggested that “being is constituted by the act of consciousness that discloses it.”126 The point was that by taking a transcendental rather than a concrete subject, Husserl had denied himself the possibility of developing a realist philosophy. The neo-­scholastic debate over Husserl provided a schema for his reception outside of Germany in the 1930s. While strict Thomists tended to elide the differences between the epoché and the transcendental reduction—­both led to a denial of the real—­progressives sought to tease the two apart, arguing that, as the methodological bracketing of all presuppositions, the epoché did not lead to the reduction of extra-­mental real­ity, but instead, along the lines of Noël’s immediate realism, could demonstrate our intentional relationship to existence. That is, by distinguishing the epoché from the transcendental reduction, and adhering only to the former, progressives hoped to demonstrate how one could construct a realism that was in tune with modern philosophy. In the 1930s, they thus came to promote their own form of existential Thomism, but one where existence was affirmed from a modern, subjective starting point, often explic­itly presented as concrete. Their debate with the strict Thomists had led them to a position not too distant from that of the Christian existentialists.



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Husserl beyond the Thomists: The Case of Gaston Berger The way neo-­scholastics press-­ganged phenomenology into the critical realism debate provided an opening for their non-­Thomist peers, the spiritualists and idealists who ­were at the center of the new Europe-­wide movement of Christian existentialism: the noetic-­noematic correlation demonstrated the irreducible place of the subject in any account of being. Many progressives seemed to have taken note of this opening. Already in 1930 Joseph Maréchal had used Husserl to argue for the value of Blondelian insights to scholasticism.127 For Maréchal, Blondel’s emphasis on “the total activity of man,” in par­tic­u­lar a range of pragmatic and affective acts, provided means for countering Husserl’s idealism.128 Whereas Husserl’s Wesensschau only gave access to pos­si­ble forms, Blondel had shown how an emphasis on the concrete subject and its action “always contains a demand for ‘objective existence.’ ”129 In this way Blondel’s work provided Husserl with the resources “for the critical justification of the metaphysical affirmation.”130 Gaston Fessard made a similar argument in an extended essay for the Recherches de Science Religieuse, this time pairing Husserl with Le Senne.131 Fessard was more critical, arguing that ­because Le Senne started with idealism, he treated only a watered-­down form of existence (only existence as it is “for us”), and thus needed to be supplemented by a more robust philosophy and theology.132 The general argumentative thrust was, however, the same: the shortcomings of phenomenology highlighted how Christian existentialism could contribute to Thomistic thought. The Christian existentialists I introduced in Chapter 5 did not let the opportunity pass. Phenomenology would make regular appearances at Marcel’s soirées, where it would be introduced to a generation of French thinkers.133 For Marcel, Husserl provided a modern language for thinking about realism that also brought him in line with the Thomists. In Being and Having, Marcel was explicit: on the question of realism, he wrote, “my personal positions . . . ​would coincide almost completely with Monsieur Jacques Maritain’s, and rejoin on the other hand the German theorists of intentionality—­that is, the present-­day phenomenologists.”134 We see a similar argument made by the phi­los­o­pher Paolo Filiasi Carcano in

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Naples.135 Filiasi Carcano had argued that Descartes’s methodical doubt had “castrated” the old scholastic metaphysics, and led to the idealism of Kant and Gentile.136 But Husserlian phenomenology and French Christian spiritualism (along with, he noted, progressive neo-­scholasticism) had forged a dif­fer­ent path for modern philosophy, by taking the Cartesian cogito as a concrete subject and thereby rediscovering “the universality and unity that are proper to metaphysics.” They had all shown how one could return to scholastic realism without ignoring the subject.137 For o­ thers, the progressive correction to phenomenology proved most useful. For instance, in his article “Husserl and Cartesianism,” published in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana in 1939, Arturo Massolo suggested that by expanding Husserl’s notion of intentionality beyond the purely intellectual and representative, we could leave ­behind Husserl’s radicalization of Descartes in the transcendental reduction and find a way back to the world, life, and metaphysics.138 It was a line that was promoted by René Le Senne in the second edition of his Introduction to Philosophy. Husserl’s idealism was of a piece with his assertion that philosophy is a rigorous science, which led him to ignore the empirical ego. Redirecting attention to the concrete subject would transform Husserlian transcendental idealism into existentialism.139 In 1946 Armando Carlini criticized Husserl for misreading Descartes to affirm philosophy as a mathesis universalis conceived in a manner following Kant: the “constitution of a system of logico-­metaphysical essences, in which science would have to find their apodictic truth.” This split between essence and existence was a result of Husserl’s decision to consider only the theoretical subject. He thus “muffles and annuls in its ‘ego’ that feeling of interiority, which it initially appeared to promise, and which is also an au­then­tic aspect of Cartesian thought.”140 The person who did most to leverage the Thomist debate over Husserl to make space for non-­Thomist Christian thought was the Franco-­ Senegalese phi­los­o­pher Gaston Berger, who was a key link in the chain of Christian spiritualists leading from Paris to northern Italy. Berger differed from his Christian existentialist peers, however, in one crucial re­ spect. Whereas they had rejected the transcendental reduction, arguing that it obscured the embodied and concrete subject, which ensured our



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access to existence, Berger embraced it to demonstrate the priority of his own idealism over Thomism. Berger came to academia late in life. In the 1920s and 1930s he made his fortune as an industrialist, rising to the position of managing director of a fertilizer manufacturer. But he still made time for philosophical studies, working with both Blondel and Le Senne. In 1926 he founded the Société d’études philosophiques du Sud-­Est, whose journal, Études Philosophiques, would soon become one of the most impor­tant philosophical journals in France.141 His orga­nizational success prefigured a glittering administrative c­ areer. A ­ fter the war he became secretary general of the Fulbright Commission and from 1953 u­ ntil his death in a car accident in 1960 was Director-­General of Higher Education in the French Ministry of Education. As the second monograph on Husserl’s thought in French (­after Levinas’s 1930 The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology), Berger’s 1941 book, The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy, has attracted the most attention from scholars. But treating this book on its own obscures the stakes of Berger’s intervention. At the time French phi­los­o­phers w ­ ere required to write two texts for their doctorate, and the Cogito book was Berger’s “complementary thesis.” His main thesis, which set the terms for the Husserl study, was entitled Investigations on the Conditions of Knowledge, and it responded to many of the debates and philosophical fault lines I have been outlining. In his opening chapter, Berger posed the central question of the critical realism debate: What is “the starting point of philosophy”? He formulated the prob­lem thus: “Our assertions about being ­will only be as good as our knowledge, but reciprocally, all criticism of knowledge supposes a certain number of implicit assumptions.” Metaphysics and epistemology each seemed to presuppose the other.142 In confronting this dilemma, Berger chose the progressive neo-­ scholastic route. His work was a “théoretique” starting with knowledge, and it would be “pure research,” excluding all metaphysical presuppositions.143 At this point Berger explic­itly rejected the strict Thomists’ “ontological realism,” citing, among ­others, Maritain’s Husserl essay, Garrigou-­ Lagrange, and Aquinas, while drawing on Maréchal’s work to suggest why naive realism necessarily failed.144 Berger equally rejected metaphysical

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idealism. “One d ­ oesn’t escape ontology by performing a Copernican revolution, placing t­ hings in thought rather than thought in nature.”145 For the idealist the world was a dream, for the realist the self was a t­ hing. What they had in common was that they both asserted, if only “secretly,” an identity between subject and object. The differences ­were “less theoretical than practical,” and depended upon ­whether priority was given to the “ego or to God, to the individual or the spirit, to existence or value.”146 Berger also sided with the progressives in declaring that a close investigation of knowledge would lead to the affirmation of being.147 Quoting Maritain’s The Degrees of Knowledge, which, as we have seen, was allied with Noël on this point, Berger claimed that “the cogitatum of the first cogito is not the cogitatum, but ens.”148 Moreover, he agreed with the Thomists about the existence of the outside world. The prob­lem, he argued, “has properly no sense and nonspecialists are rightfully scandalized when one asks them this question.”149 ­Later Berger claimed that his interpretation of experience was close to that “given by ‘immediate realism.’ ”150 What is crucial to understand about Berger’s argument, however, is that his affirmation of being and existence from within experience, which aligned him with the progressive neo-­scholastics, was simply a first stage.151 Berger argued that we never encounter brute existence. It is always embedded in an “order” of meanings (significations): we encounter a person or an animal, grasp an idea, or find something beautiful.152 An analy­sis of ­these ­orders brought Berger to the “ego” (Je), which was, he argued, “the most profound condition of any meaning.”153 Berger claimed that the realm of meaning is not a region of real­ity but vice versa. Differences in experience between the real, the ­imagined, the hoped for, and so on are differences in the meaning of the given. Even “universal existence” or being, the raw material of signification, has a meaning, and as such implies a subject: “As much as thought is concerned with being, one must say with equal force that being is what offers itself to the transcendental ego.”154 ­Because the transcendental ego is the necessary correlate of being, it could not be part of being itself, and for that reason the ego must be distinct from the empirical subject, even if the former is necessarily “incarnated” in the latter.155 Thus, although Berger started like Maritain from the “spontaneous affirmation of being, naively found and loyally accepted,” he aimed



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to “elevate us to transcendental idealism, which is for us the only idealism that is absolute.”156 Berger dedicated his Husserl book to this shift. He set himself the task of carving a path from the natu­ral attitude (and, in his view, Thomism) to Husserl’s cogito, which could then serve as a “starting point” for philosophical reflection.157 Husserl had shown that we grasp being in a variety of ways, corresponding to dif­fer­ent forms of intentionality. At the most basic level, intentionality confirmed Thomist realism: psychological intentionality aimed at ­things, whose meaning implied that they ­were in­ de­pen­dent of the empirical subject. Thus, “realism is right to affirm the transcendence of real ­things with re­spect to consciousness, ­because it also places itself in the natu­ral attitude which opposes the soul to the body and to other bodies.”158 To justify this first level of intentionality, however, one needed to accede to a higher plane where intentionality is transcendental and constitutive, and in this Berger took his lead from Fink’s 1933 essay, to which he referred continually throughout the book: the transcendental ego is truly the “origin of the world.”159 Through the transcendental reduction, which follows on from and completed the epoché, we move from taking the world as world, to taking the world as a cogitatum, and thus discover the transcendental ego.160 The transcendental reduction is in this way a “conversion,” which allows us to move beyond the realism of the natu­ral attitude.161 Having identified the transcendental ego, Berger showed how it constituted what the reduction had reduced; it showed what “existence” and “being” meant.162 And b­ ecause the ego was not mundane, and thus could not be determined by any exterior forces, this constitution must be “creative.”163 Berger’s analy­sis of Husserl in his complementary thesis helped him justify the multilayered approach to knowledge he had elaborated in Conditions of Knowledge. Thomism was given its due, but only by embedding it in transcendental philosophy. Berger summed up his argument thusly: “Far from narrowing our perspective, we on the contrary enlarge it by passing from a philosophy of being to a transcendental phenomenology. . . . ​if transcendental philosophy exceeds ontology, it is not to destroy it; it is to found it.”164 In the conclusion, Berger related his analyses to the historical comparison that had obsessed so many neo-­scholastics: Husserl’s relationship

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to Descartes. First, Berger argued that Husserl’s proximity to Descartes did not entail the repudiation of realism. Husserl followed Descartes in the epoché, which was the putting aside of all presuppositions. But whereas Descartes had been led to a “universal negation,” Husserl “limited himself to a s­ imple ‘suspension’ of judgment.” The world was placed “between brackets,” without being denied or destroyed.165 Though the “phenomenon” in phenomenology might suggest a distance from the real, in fact “phenomenology, like traditional metaphysics, is constantly preoccupied with the nostalgia for being. . . . ​Originary consciousness, thanks to its intentional nature, offers us access to absolutely true being.”166 If in his approach to being and ontology, Husserl seemed to avoid the excesses of Descartes’s theory, from another point of view he was more radical. Descartes was caught up in the prob­lem of understanding the relationship between subject and object, two distinct regions of the world. But in performing the transcendental reduction, Husserl had discovered an ego that was “outside the world.”167 Indeed, the radical transcendence of Husserl’s ego and its openness to being ­were closely related. The “crucial prob­lem of idealism”—­k nowing how to reach the object from within consciousness—­arose only if we took the ego to be a mundane object, with limits that needed to be breached. For phenomenology, in contrast, “one is never ‘enclosed’ in consciousness, cut off from a mysterious transcendence, ­because it is proper to consciousness to be directed t­ oward something ­else.”168 In articulating his argument in this way, Berger came close to René Le Senne, to whom the main doctoral thesis was dedicated. Like Le Senne’s “determinations,” Berger’s “­orders of signification,” which structured our experience of being, ­were necessarily partial and subject to change: “What my experience furnishes is a plurality of points of view according to which I might position myself to develop my meaning intentions.”169 ­T hese ­orders are relative, ­because the transcendental ego, though distinct from the world, is necessarily situated; we grasp being generally through our body, in a par­tic­u­lar place and time.170 Yet open to “Value,” which, like Le Senne, Berger identified with God, we could recognize our situation as contingent, and through “courageous action,” prise ourselves away from any single perspective.171 For Berger, knowledge required



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“detachment” from the world, moving away from the par­tic­u­lar perspectives of the concrete self guided by the ideal of a transcendent and absolute truth.172 This meant that the transcendental reduction was always a work in pro­gress, moving ever closer to absolute and divine knowledge, which nonetheless always lay out of reach. Berger concluded, “For knowledge to have a meaning, it is necessary that I should come to offer the indefinite development of my singular adventures to God himself.”173 This Le Sennian argument seems to have motivated Berger’s only serious criticism of Husserl. Berger questioned Husserl’s claim to be ­doing rigorous science: “We ­don’t do science at all. We never attain knowledge; we only tend ­toward it.”174 In his t­ heses, Berger outlined a multilayered philosophical system that reconciled Thomism with its Christian spiritualist rivals. Both, if understood at their appropriate level, w ­ ere correct. Phenomenology was valuable b­ ecause it could explain the relationship between the two. Husserl was, as the progressive neo-­scholastics had hoped, a Cartesian Thomist, building a bridge between modern and medieval thought through the noetic-­noematic correlation. But Berger’s Husserl and the progressives’ Husserl bridged the two in importantly dif­fer­ent ways. For Berger, Husserl did not break out of modern philosophy and find his way back to scholastic truth. Rather, by embracing the phenomenological reduction, which even the progressives had sought to put to one side, he showed how Thomist realism required as its justification the ac­cep­tance of transcendental philosophy. According to Berger, Husserl had engineered a philosophical conversion, but unfortunately for the progressives, it led in the wrong direction.175

Conclusion In the 1930s Husserl’s thought was at the center of a b­ attle engulfing the neo-­scholastic world. His work was taken as a decisive test case in the debate over the proper approach to modern philosophy, pitting progressives against their strict Thomist rivals. The progressives fought a valiant rearguard action seeking to detach phenomenology from the idealism of its most famous proponent and show that their proj­ect was not implicated in Husserl’s apparent conversion. They achieved this ­either by rejecting

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the transcendental reduction, through a replacement of the transcendental subject with a concrete embodied one, or by identifying the constituting ego as God, who created the world to which He gave ­human minds access. Through t­ hese efforts, Husserl gained a singularly prominent, if ambivalent, reputation in the neo-­scholastic community. By the end of the 1930s his phenomenology was passionately discussed and contested in seminaries and Catholic universities around Eu­rope. Husserl’s transcendental idealism was clearly an embarrassment to the progressives who had once identified him as an ally. But the troublesome aspects propelled Husserl’s work out of neo-­scholastic circles and into mainstream philosophy. For the way in which progressives sought to marry modern subjectivism with medieval realism in their reading of Husserl’s work encouraged many Christian existentialists to appeal to him when figuring their own relationship to the dominant philosophy of the Church. Some, like Berger, went further, realizing the fears of strict Thomists by deploying Husserl’s phenomenology to argue for the priority of their own idealism. In this debate, however, Husserl was soon eclipsed by his student Martin Heidegger. Christian existentialists used Heidegger’s Being and Time to argue for the irreducibility of the h­ uman subject in the elaboration of a realist ontology. But in binding themselves to a man who was widely taken to be an atheist, Christian existentialists opened themselves up to greater dangers. Husserl proved a menace to neo-­scholasticism. Heidegger threatened religious thought in general.

7 The Secular Kierkegaard

On a brisk Saturday eve­ning in December  1937, the members of the

Société Française de Philosophie gathered to discuss a new paper by Jean Wahl. Some of the most impor­tant phi­los­o­phers in Paris ­were pres­ent, including numerous French and émigré existentialists: Gabriel Marcel, Nicolai Berdyaev, Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg, and Siegfried Marck, who has as good a claim as any to have named the movement.1 Word of the meeting also reached t­ hose who could not make it that day, and letters contributing to the discussion ­were received from, among ­others, Levinas, Lavelle, Heidegger, and Jaspers.2 Wahl’s “famous communication,” as Levinas would l­ater dub it, is a unique moment in twentieth-­century intellectual history, where many of the key proponents of existentialism in dif­fer­ent lands engaged in direct debate for the first and only time.3 Wahl saw his proj­ect as a form of conversion: the secularization of existentialism. But in the paper he presented that night, “Subjectivity and Transcendence,” he drew attention to the difficulties such a proj­ect confronted. Wahl asked ­whether it was pos­si­ble to produce a “philosophy of existence” without the “nostalgia and echo of the religious.”4 He presented two alternatives: Existential philosophy would remain bound to its religious antecedents, and so the secularization would be incomplete; or if it managed to expunge all religious traces, it would be excessively abstract, 211

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becoming simply a “general theory of existence, from which all particularity, all historicity, all existence would be expelled.”5 Wahl’s paper is short and the argument cryptic, but if we roam over his writings we can begin to recognize the extent of his prob­lem. As his other essays show, Wahl thought that “abstraction” was also marked by religious ideas, such that the means by which we could escape one understanding of the theological almost inevitably sent us into the arms of another. Wahl had long recognized that existentialism was confessionally complex. In his article “Kierkegaard and Heidegger,” published in 1932 in Recherches Philosophiques, he had argued that Heidegger’s thought was the “effort to bring together both of the most profound tendencies of con­ temporary thought: existential subjectivism, realist objectivism.”6 With regard to the idea of truth, Heidegger started above all from a “reflection on ancient philosophy and on scholastic theories,” to which he added “a meditation related to that of Kierkegaard, born perhaps like Kierkegaard’s from Christ’s words: ‘I am the truth.’ ”7 Wahl’s article focused mostly on the prob­lem of theological (read Kierkegaardian and Protestant) residues in Heidegger’s thought, which he thought could be reduced by raising existential thought to an abstract level. The religious markings of existentialism could be neutralized by developing a general theory of existence. In a footnote, however, Wahl worried that this development could be taken too far. In this pro­cess of “abstraction,” Heidegger risked error when he shifted from discussing our “relation to the world” to discussing our “relation to being”: realism to ontology. According to Wahl, this error arose when Heidegger translated existential experience “into scholastic language.” 8 The dangers presented by a scholastic ontology are also noted in Wahl’s early article “­Toward the Concrete.” ­T here he promoted a form of realism opposed to French university idealism, but he was also careful to distinguish it from a scholastic version. 9 Like Le Senne’s, Wahl’s was the realism of “shocks,” which denied “the intelligibility of being,” and not a scholastic realism, which presented being as readily digestible.10 For Wahl, then, the proj­ect of erasing the traces of Protestantism to arrive at a “general theory of existence” moved in the direction of Catholic philosophy. Conversely, Protestant ideas w ­ ere useful in resisting Catholic ontology. In “­Toward the Concrete,” Wahl claimed that the



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“no” of a “negative theology, or rather of negative ontology,” was necessary to limit the assimilating tendencies of philosophy, and he argued that he had been put on the path ­toward this “no” not by phi­los­o­phers but by theologians, including Karl Barth.11 Moreover, Wahl worried that only a divine transcendence was able to disrupt such assimilating tendencies.12 Thus, although Wahl admitted that Heidegger’s version of transcendence eschewed all reference to God, he thought that it retained the echo of Kierkegaard’s divine, an echo perceptible in the unspoken ethical coloring of Heidegger’s “thrownness,” which bore the traces of an “accursed finitude” ( finitude maudite), and the implicit (if denied) priority of authenticity over inauthenticity.13 Wahl’s prob­lem thus comes to light. He found religion difficult to escape, b­ ecause existentialism was interwoven with several confessional strands, and in seeking to remove one, the existentialist inevitably became entangled in another. Wahl posed the prob­lem in systematic terms, but his argument rehearses a longer history. The curious intertwining of Protestant and Catholic readings of existentialism follows from the trajectory of Heidegger’s thought and its first reception in Germany and beyond. As we saw in Chapter 3, Heidegger reformulated Husserl’s noetic-­noematic correlation to address the question of existing being. Coupled with Heidegger’s personal and intellectual biography, this argument encouraged commentators to figure his thought as a “Protestant” analy­sis of Dasein in the ser­vice of a “Catholic” ontology. In this way, it provided resources for two diametrically opposed, if symmetrical, accounts of Heidegger’s atheism: Thomists explained it by the restrictions placed upon Heidegger’s ontology by his (Protestant) prioritization of h­ uman subjectivity; Protestant theologians understood it through his attempt to ground the analy­sis of ­human finitude in an ontology, which arose from an excessive and Catholic faith in our rational capacities.14 Depending on one’s point of view, the conversion to Protestantism or Catholicism could also appear as a conversion to atheism, and vice versa. L ­ ater a very similar set of prob­lems would animate debates over Heidegger between neo-­scholastics and Christian existentialists.15 When Wahl outlined the difficulties of secularizing existentialism, he codified an interconfessional debate over Heidegger’s phenomenology that had been raging for almost a de­cade.

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Heidegger and the Dialectical Theologians The religious debates over Heidegger’s thought must be understood in the context of the German “Kierkegaard Re­nais­sance.”16 When Heidegger began referring to Kierkegaard in the early 1920s, he placed himself in the com­pany of a number of other German thinkers at the time: Theodor Haecker, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Karl Jaspers. The most influential voice in the Kierkegaard re­nais­sance was Karl Barth, especially in the second revised edition of his book The Epistle to the Romans from 1922. Barth placed the relationship between individual ­human existence and an utterly transcendent God at the center of his analyses: God was the “totally Other” (der ganz Andere). This understanding of the ­human / divine opposition fueled Barth’s criticism of Schleiermacher and liberal Protestant theology, which had been dominant before World War I. Schleiermacher and his followers had built theology on humanity’s intuitive sense of the divine, a strategy that for Barth threatened to denature God by failing to recognize how he exceeded ­human grasp. In asserting the “infinite qualitative difference” between man and God, Kierkegaard offered a power­ful corrective to the Schleiermachian position. In certain limit cases, we confront, fearful and trembling, our contradictions, the limits of our reason compounded by our sinfulness. In what Barth called the “risky venture” (Wagnis), we could put aside ­human attempts to grasp the divine and simply hear God’s word, a paradoxical revelation that found its vehicle in the Theologian-­Preacher. Rudolf Bultmann, who had been Heidegger’s colleague and friend at Marburg, brought Barth’s ideas into conversation with Being and Time.17 Bultmann agreed with Barth on most points of theology, but he worried that Barth had relied on an insufficiently developed anthropology in his appeal to the Wagnis. Heidegger’s philosophy, Bultmann thought, was equipped to solve this prob­lem, ­because it could show that the Wagnis is a concrete possibility of ­human existence.18 In his analyses, Bultmann drew on Heidegger’s categories of the ontic (or existentiell) and ontological (existential), which divided the factual analy­sis of entities from an understanding of their being—­such as the description of a par­tic­u­lar chair versus the understanding of what a chair is.19 In Bultmann’s view, Protestant theology, ­whether Barth’s or Kierkegaard’s, was an ontic science



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founded upon “a concrete and contingent proclamation, which is addressed to a concrete Dasein.”20 In contrast, Heidegger’s philosophy provided a “formal-­ontological” analy­sis. It was concerned with existentiality, what existence is, not with concrete existing beings. For instance, Heidegger had uncovered the ontological concept of guilt (Schuldbegriff), of which the Christian concept of “sin” was a par­tic­u­lar ontic determination.21 By showing that theology and ontology operated at dif­fer­ent levels, Bultmann thought he could deal with Heidegger’s atheism. Heidegger’s ontology was a-­theistic, in the sense that it did not affirm the existence of God. But it was not anti-­theistic, ­because the distinction between faith and nonbelief made sense only at the ontic level. Bultmann concluded that Heidegger’s ontology was neutral with re­spect to religious questions.22 Although it seemed to reconcile atheistic philosophy with theology, Bultmann’s pre­sen­ta­tion of Heidegger was unfortunate, ­because it focused the discussion on the theological value of ontology, a question on which prominent dialectical theologians had already taken a stance. In a 1929 article for the dialectical theologians’ journal Zwischen den Zeiten, Heinrich Barth, Karl’s ­brother, had attacked Heidegger’s philosophy on precisely this point. Though it was representative of a return to the concrete h­ uman subject, and thus brought “deeply rooted existential thoughts” to the attention of academic philosophy (and ­here Barth referred to Heidegger’s Kierkegaardian inheritance), its value, Barth argued, was severely compromised by Heidegger’s ontology.23 For Barth the prob­lem with ontology, and by extension Bultmann’s appropriation of Heidegger, was that it implied that faith is rooted in the natu­ral capabilities of the ­human self.24 Though Bultmann resisted this conclusion, he had seemed to give the game away in a 1928 article where he declared that God’s revelation uncovered possibilities that man “always had.”25 That is, an ontology of the believing self threatened to humanize religion, and thus subordinate theology to philosophy. As the Protestant theologian Gerhardt Kuhlmann put it, ontological philosophy thought it could solve the “question of the absolute meaning of humanity . . . ​without the help of the revelation offered by theology.”26 Conversely, if revelation was r­ eally a radical irruption into the world, as the dialectical theologians had argued, the “state of anguish” it provoked could not possibly have an “ontological definition.”27 Barth was categorical in his

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refusal: “As ontology this philosophy is not . . . ​equipped to see the true prob­lem of ‘Dasein’ in its existentiell movement.”28 Of course, simply showing that Heidegger’s ontology was inhospitable to theological claims was not sufficient reason to reject it. Perhaps Heidegger had simply demonstrated that the dialectical theologians ­were incoherent. To ­counter this, they sought a philosophical argument against Heidegger’s ontology. Their inspiration came from an unexpected source: a set of articles published by Karl Löwith in 1930, which had the explicit goal of showing that Heidegger’s philosophy and Protestant thought ­were closely related.29 Protestantism, Löwith argued, was “skeptical in princi­ple . . . ​a bout any empiricism and empirical expression of faith.” ­Because it accorded no credence to outward signs of holiness, Protestant theology could embrace “Feuerbach and Nietz­sche’s anthropological criticism of Chris­tian­ity.”30 Löwith presented Barth’s challenge to Schleiermacher as part of this inheritance. Barth followed Feuerbach in attacking a theology made in man’s image, even if Barth wanted thereby to save the divine from anthropological debasement. Löwith wrote, “Feuerbach’s philosophical-­anthropological reversal of theological statements” was “a useful stake in the flesh of theology, useful for the purification of theology from any anthropological intermixing, support or even foundation.”31 ­Because dialectical theology had come so close to Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, according to Löwith, it was only one step away from atheism. 32 Conversely, Heidegger’s atheism could be explained by his Protestant heritage. It lay “on this side . . . ​not beyond belief and the Christian tradition.”33 Heidegger’s philosophy was compatible with Protestant theology ­because it exploited a worldliness that was at work in the latter.34 While the specifics of Löwith’s argument implicated Protestantism in its own secularization, the way he criticized Heidegger’s ontology opened it up to appropriation by the dialectical theologians. The centerpiece of Löwith’s criticism was the claim that, ­because Heidegger’s ontology was informed by theology, it could not be neutral as Bultmann had wanted.35 Ontological analy­sis was, and h­ ere Löwith quoted Heidegger, “ultimately existentiell, i.e., ontically rooted,” which meant that it was always guided by an ontic “ideal of existence” (Existenzideal).36 Löwith concentrated on Heidegger’s concept of Existenz, which, he said, followed Kierkegaard’s,



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simply shifting it from the ontic to the ontological register: “The Christian consciousness of sin underlies factically even ‘existentially’ understood guilt.”37 Ignoring Löwith’s explanation of Heidegger’s atheism through reference to its Protestant inheritance, dialectical theologians could still use Löwith’s claims about the ontic contamination of ontology to undermine Heidegger’s authority. We can see this refiguring of Löwith’s argument in a 1933 article written by Heinrich Barth. It was unjust, Barth argued, for Heidegger to throw around the charge that other philosophies ­were “worldviews,” b­ ecause the “scientificity” of his own ontology was in doubt.38 Ontological philosophy was guided by the prejudice that humanity could make itself the “master of the world . . . ​capable of an all-­encompassing world-­and life-­ knowledge.”39 Emil Brunner, one of the founding editors of Zwischen den Zeiten, expressed the same skepticism. Referring to Löwith, Brunner argued that Heidegger’s philosophy was contaminated by his personal atheism, which left no room for the paradox at the heart of dialectical theology.40 Heidegger had tried “to make humanity understandable without reference to God.” If he was right, then t­ here could be no theologia naturalis but only an anthropologia naturalis, which could not be aligned with true Chris­tian­ity.41 For the dialectical theologians, a clear sign that Heidegger’s ontology was not neutral was his understanding of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit). Löwith had already proposed this argument in his early articles, and it became a theme for many ­others.42 In Being and Time Heidegger had declared that authenticity had no ontological priority over inauthenticity. It was simply an “existentiell modification of the ‘one.” 43 Nonetheless, many thought that his discussion was normatively tinged, especially given the close relationship Heidegger constructed between authenticity and ontology: Dasein could grasp the meaning of its being only when it authentically confronted its own finitude. In 1930 Heinrich Barth argued that Heidegger’s “authenticity” was incompatible with the crisis and fallenness attested to by the dialectical theologians. It demanded a self-­transparency that was not pos­si­ble, given ­human limitations. Moreover, it relied upon a set of norms that Heidegger had smuggled into his philosophy. The Nietz­schean imperative “Become what you are!,” which underpinned Dasein’s grasp of its

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being, could not be derived from it, and this undermined ontology’s claim to neutrality.44 In their criticism of Heidegger’s “authenticity” and its related “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit), many Protestant theologians sought to reassert, against Heidegger, the importance of the “non-­self”—of God, but also of other ­humans. That is, they sought to radicalize the intersubjective aspects of Heidegger’s analytic to challenge his ontology. Kuhlmann, for instance, preferred a “critical philosophy” to Heidegger’s ontology ­because the former allowed more room for the prob­lem of the “other” (Andere), priming it for theological appropriation.45 So too Karl Heim argued in 1930 that Heidegger’s ontology could be made compatible with religion by working through Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein.46 Levinas would ­later make a similar set of arguments in his discussion of the “Other.”47 Not only did the dialectical theologians seek to undermine the claim that Heidegger’s ontology was neutral, they also sought to identify the source of its bias. In criticizing Heidegger’s ontology, Brunner referred to what he saw as the two tributaries of Heidegger’s thought—­scholasticism and Kierkegaard—­and trained his criticism on the former: Not Heidegger’s dependence on Kierkegaard—­why would we trou­ble ourselves with that!—­but the following: That something pres­ents itself as philosophy, which when its legitimacy is examined, would only have the right as theology, b­ ecause it is a thought that only has meaning in relation to the thought of God and revelation.48

­ ere Brunner criticized both scholasticism and Heidegger’s work for H overstepping the bound­aries of philosophy and trespassing on theological realms, linking the profane aspects of Heidegger’s thought to a residual Catholicism.49 If Heidegger’s philosophy was a crypto-­t heology, then it could not claim priority over ­those forms of thought that ­were animated by dif­fer­ent religious traditions. Such an argument legitimated the dialectical theologians’ own attempt to build philosophy on revelation. B ­ ecause both a ­humble submission to God’s word and a vaunted faith in reason derived from supra-­philosophical commitments, the former was just as legitimate



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as the latter.50 In essence, the dialectical theologians opposed a Catholic natu­ral theology that pretended to be entirely dependent on natu­ral reason, to their own natu­ral theology that recognized the limits of philosophy and required revelation. The choice was not between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, but between two dif­fer­ent religious positions.51 Brunner concluded his article by saying that dialectical theologians should be suspicious of Heidegger’s thought, not simply ­because it is atheistic, but instead “­because it is secretly theological.”52

Heidegger and the Neo-­Scholastics As the debate raged over the value of Heidegger’s thought for dialectical theology, a similar and strangely parallel discussion developed among the neo-­scholastics.53 As early as 1928 Erich Przywara had made the case that Heidegger’s worthy return to being and ontology had been undermined by his fixation on the h­ uman subject.54 This judgment echoed throughout the Catholic world. Take, for instance, Alfred Delp’s contribution to the 1933 volume Advances in Metaphysics, which he ­later expanded into his book Tragic Existence (1935). 55 Delp praised Heidegger for grounding “epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical statements” in being. He also saw reason to celebrate Heidegger’s concept of existence (Existenzbegriff ). Both brought the German thinker in line with the scholastics.56 But like Przywara, Delp suggested that t­ hese similarities hid a fundamental division: Heidegger chose to construct a purely immanent philosophy; Aquinas was attentive to the transcendent. In par­t ic­u ­lar, Delp attacked Heidegger for focusing on the being of finite man. Such a consideration was one-­sided b­ ecause it failed to account for the ways in which a consideration of ontology led us to infinite being or God: “[Heidegger’s] principal standpoint of finitude closes him off from the doctrine of the analogy, act-­potentiality speculation, humanity’s final apprehension of its directedness ­toward the infinite, fi­nally the multiplicity of questions, which flow from Dasein’s knowledge of the infinite.”57 As Delp put it ­later, citing Przywara, Heidegger’s metaphysics was unjustifiably restricted to the “ontology of ­human consciousness.”58 This argument allowed Delp to position Heidegger in relation to Catholic metaphysics. “One could oppose e­ very final statement about being

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in this philosophy with a line from the old philosophy or even a line from theology, and to formulate ­t hese lines one would only have to change the sign of this philosophy’s statements.”59 Delp’s variations on Przywara’s argument became common currency in Catholic journals. They ­were picked up in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s 1939 essay “Heidegger’s Philosophy from the Standpoint of Catholicism” in Stimmen der Zeit. ­Here the prob­lem was not that Heidegger had emphasized our finitude (Catholics of course recognized ­human limitations too) but rather that, by cutting our finitude off from any sense of the transcendent, he had “absolutized” it.60 Like the dialectical theologians, the Catholics embedded their reading of Heidegger within a broader confessional conflict. Whereas the dialectical theologians criticized Heidegger for his Catholic desire to philosophize about God and consequent failure to recognize the radical irruption of revelation, the neo-­scholastics tied Heidegger’s atheism to a Protestant desire to make God completely other. We can see this move in Przywara’s 1929 book, Kierkegaard’s Secret, which was structured by the Protestant / Catholic distinction.61 According to Przywara, Protestantism had emerged as a salutary “corrective” to Catholicism, protesting the worldly abuses of the late medieval Church. But, he suggested, Luther and other reformers w ­ ere not satisfied with this role and had established Protestantism as an in­de­pen­dent confession. Detached from the Catholicism it sought to reform, Protestantism radicalized, refusing to recognize Christ’s mystical body on this earth and his anointed representatives in the Church. “The original Lutheranism is the heightening of God’s omnipotence [Allwirksamkeit] to exclusive power [Alleinwirksamkeit].” Taken to its logical conclusion, this led to an unlivable split between man and God: ­under Barth and his followers, God became “unconditioned, strictly transcendent majesty,” opposed to a fallen and abject man. It was a theory built on sharp distinctions between faith and reason, grace and nature, and creator and creature.62 Przywara recognized the same oscillation between pious asceticism and worldliness in Kierkegaard’s work, which allowed for two apparently opposed readings, one associated with Barth and the other with Heidegger. According to Barth’s “religious” reading, Kierkegaard’s religious moods—­melancholia and love—­described the pious person confronted



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with the unconditional.63 According to Heidegger’s “psychoanalytic” reading, they ­were merely the expression of psychic forces. Heidegger had bent all the “paths pointing beyond (to God) back into the immanent.” 64 Between Heidegger and Barth emerged the “extreme either-or between earth and heaven.”65 But, Przywara suggested, ­because Barth’s and Heidegger’s readings responded to the central ambivalence of Kierkegaard’s, and indeed all Protestant, thought, the superficial differences hid a deeper unity. Barth’s reading depended upon the contrast with an absolutely immanent philosophy, for it was only on that basis that he could pres­ent such a sharp distinction between the ­human and the divine, and thus justify his radical rejection of the mundane. The Catholic theologian Karl Wittkemper argued in 1938 that what united Barth and Heidegger was the absolute “nothingness [Nichtigkeit] of humanity,” even if they arrived at this point from theocentric and anthropocentric positions, respectively.66 Not only was Heidegger’s atheistic reading essentially parallel to the Protestant one, the former could be seen as a product of the latter. For by banishing the divine to a beyond, Barth had rendered it dispensable. As Przywara argued, Luther’s effort to tease apart God and world had produced “the most refined form of worldliness and paganism.”67 The twin readings of Heidegger by neo-­scholastics and dialectical theologians show a fascinating symmetry.68 Both groups provided very similar interpretations of Heidegger’s philosophy: it was an ontological analy­sis of ­human existence. But they differed in their explanation of Heidegger’s atheistic “conversion.” The dialectical theologians blamed it on Heidegger’s ontology. ­Because they dramatized the absolute dependence of man on a divine other, the ontic aspects of Heidegger’s thought (his analy­sis of ­human existence) seemed promising. This promise was belied, however, by Heidegger’s ontological claims, which underestimated the radical alterity of God and revelation. The dialectical theologians presented Heidegger’s atheism as a legacy of his early work on the scholastics, who thought that natu­ral reason could lead us to God. The Thomists presented the inverse diagnosis. ­Here Heidegger’s ontological proj­ect represented a hopeful turn in modern philosophy.69 Ontology was a meditation on God’s creation, one that should lead philosophy, along the lines of the cosmological proof, to a belief in the creator. Instead Heidegger shut

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his ontology off from the divine, by concentrating on the fallen ­human subject. In line with Protestant theology, Heidegger had placed God beyond h­ uman reach. Both groups agreed then that Heidegger’s thought was atheistic, but their explanations of his conversion w ­ ere mirror images of each other.

Being around Eu­rope ­ ecause in t­ hese debates Heidegger was presented as a liminal figure, B straddling the border between Catholicism and Protestantism, his thought attracted the interest of thinkers from across Eu­rope and from a range of dif­fer­ent confessional backgrounds. Drawing on the transnational connections of the Catholic Church, the neo-­scholastic reading emerged in vari­ous forms all over the world. Delp’s work was translated and diffused faster than Heidegger’s. It was reviewed extensively around Eu­rope, it was translated in 1935 for the French Archives de Philosophie, and Delp reiterated his argument for the American journal The Modern Schoolman in 1936. In 1942 his work appeared in Japa­nese.70 The Thomist reading also offered opportunities abroad for t­ hose phenomenologists in Germany who had similar concerns. In her 1933 article for the French journal Recherches Philosophiques, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius brought out the connections, asserting that with Heidegger “we find ourselves . . . ​very close to Aristotelian-­Thomist ontology.”71 The editor of the journal, Alexandre Koyré, marveled at how she had “redisover[ed] the deepest metaphysical-­ontological intuitions of scholasticism” and yet defined substance in phenomenological terms. When the translation, undertaken by Henry Corbin, proved to be a prob­lem, Koyré remarked that it might have been easier to render it in Latin. Nevertheless, Koyré seems to have been uncomfortable with Conrad-­Martius’s arguments. He suggested that by reinserting Heidegger’s ideas into a theistic framework she had deprived them of their originality and importance: “­Isn’t the ­whole force of Heidegger’s thought that it is an atheism, despite the stale theology of which t­ here is too much in Being and Time?”72 The neo-­scholastic argument also found local proponents. We see it in a 1936 article for the Dutch Studia Catholica, where Henricus Geurtsen discussed how Heidegger seemed to “study being like the ancient and



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scholastic ontology” and related Heidegger’s position to Aquinas’s in De Veritate.73 Geurtsen argued that Heidegger went wrong in sidelining ­human intelligence, which for Aquinas moved inductively through abstraction to the truth. We could overcome h­ uman cognitive limitations through our “analogical” relationship to God.74 Denying this, Heidegger confined his ontology to the finite.75 A similar argument guided Wagner de Reyna’s account in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology (1939), one of the first books dedicated to Heidegger’s thought in Spanish. Heidegger had brought ontology back to the attention of modern phi­los­o­phers. His question of being, de Reyna asserted, was a return to the “spontaneous question of medieval man.”76 But b­ ecause Heidegger “absurdly” put the subject before the object, he was unable to fulfill the potential of his proj­ect.77 The theological implications of Heidegger’s ontology motivated the first article on Heidegger in Polish, from 1954, which lagged ­behind the reception elsewhere b­ ecause the rationalist focus of mainstream Polish philosophy gave existentialism (though not, for po­liti­cal reasons, personalism) less traction ­there. Drawing on Heidegger’s ­later work, including the Letter on Humanism (1947), the neo-­scholastic Franciszek Sawicki argued that Heidegger’s meditations on nothingness, while initially “one-­ sided,” had begun to make him more open to a “positive transcendence.” This development confirmed “that not only the perfection but also the imperfection of the universe points to God as the final reason for all being. ­W hether thought ascends to the light or probes the dark depths of every­ thing and nothingness, it always ultimately meets with God.”78 In Italy neo-­scholastics had been interested in Heidegger as early as the 1932 Société Thomiste meeting on phenomenology, which Sofia Vanni Rovighi had reviewed for the Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica.79 Vanni Rovighi would write a short introductory book on Heidegger in 1945.80 Carlo Mazzantini, who had challenged Guzzo from a neo-­scholastic perspective at the end of the 1920s, wrote one of the most extensive early treatments of Heidegger in Italy, which the historian Roberto Tommasi has called the “first serious approach”:81 a set of three articles published in 1935 for the Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica.82 The opening article was a balanced and relatively full account of Heidegger’s thought. Mazzantini emphasized Heidegger’s realism, which compared favorably to Husserl’s

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“idealism.” According to Heidegger, the phenomenon was “being, insofar as it is manifest, reveals itself.” In addition, Heidegger’s emphasis on the “existent” was a considerable improvement on his teacher.83 Mazzantini argued in the second article, however, that Heidegger’s realism ultimately collapsed ­because it privileged a “conscious entity (Dasein).”84 The worldly t­ hings that Heidegger described through Dasein ­were merely “ontically” in­de­pen­dent of ­human thought, and Mazzantini criticized Heidegger for thinking that “ontological truth” stemmed from the “­human intellect.” Heidegger’s ontology was excessively anthropocentric.85 The result was a polar tension between Heidegger’s Kantianism and his realism: “On the one hand, man . . . ​[gives] to ­things the ontological truth that is their own real­ity . . . ​but on the other hand t­ hings appear to man as they are in themselves.” Scholastics escaped this contradiction ­because for them the source of ontological truth was God. H ­ umans could access this truth through a pro­cess of abstraction, which was necessarily partial, and thus required a supplementary “reasoning” to arrive at what lay beyond ­human intuition.86 For Mazzantini, through this discursive and demonstrative (not intuitive) pro­cess, h­ umans could come to know the immaterial: the universal, necessary, and eternal.87 The “finitude and contingence of the world implies the reference to God.”88 Similarly our “being-­toward-­death” did not suggest that Dasein was “closed in its inexorable (unerbittlich) structure, and ontologically temporal . . . ​it opens instead onto the horizon of immortal life.”89 In our confrontation with both ­human mortality and ­human ignorance, we ­were impelled to move beyond them. Hence, while for Heidegger transcendence was “intramundane”—­ “man’s transcending (as a conscious entity) ­toward the ­things of the world”—­for neo-­scholastics it reached through the world to the divine. In place of Heidegger’s finitude, Mazzantini reaffirmed the cosmological argument. That Heidegger did not take this type of transcendence into account, what­ever his claims about the neutrality of this thought with re­ spect to the prob­lem of God, “ineluctably closes and bars the path that leads to the otherworldly Infinite.”90 Mazzantini did not connect this argument directly to Protestantism, but ­others did. In 1943 Carlo Giacon spoke for many when he argued that although Heidegger was “initially



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Catholic,” he had corrupted his thought through a Protestant understanding of original sin.91 The text with the greatest impact beyond neo-­scholastic circles was Alphonse de Waelhens’s 1942 Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy. Drawing on scholarship in six languages, it was the first book-­length work in French on Heidegger’s thought. ­Because it was clearly written and for the most part reliable, the “de Waelhens” became for a long time (in lieu of a complete French translation of Being and Time) a key point of access to Heidegger’s work for French students, including Sartre.92 De Waelhens had begun the book during his doctoral work at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain, publishing a number of articles treating Heidegger and existentialism in the Revue Néo-­Scolastique. The manuscript, however, was lost in the May 1940 German offensive, when troops bombarded Louvain and damaged the library for the second time in thirty years, destroying about one million books. The published version of his book was thus the result of furious rewriting in the early years of the war, and de Waelhens defended it in July 1942 to win the title Maître agrégé à l’École Saint-­Thomas.93 His central thesis was that although Heidegger had wanted to provide a general ontology, his emphasis on Dasein had led to the failure of that proj­ect, or as de Waelhens reformulated this familiar argument, the “ontic” nature of Heidegger’s analyses had stymied his “ontological” goals.94 In the first few pages of Being and Time, de Waelhens noted, Heidegger “marks his intention to take up again ab ovo the study of the most classical prob­lems of traditional metaphysics; ­there is no question of the upheavals that the very word existentialism tends to evoke ­today.”95 Thus, although de Waelhens was careful to note Heidegger’s criticism of scholasticism, he argued that Heidegger’s thought had the same objectives. In par­t ic­u ­lar, he remarked on the analogies between Heidegger’s understanding of judgment and the scholastic version: Scholastic doctrine distinguishes epistemological truth and ontological truth. From the epistemological point of view, it professes an immediate realism, affirmed by faith in reasoning that is very dif­fer­ent from Heidegger’s, although quite similar in its doctrinal content.

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The two diverged most dramatically on the ontological level. For the scholastics, “if man knows the true, it is ­because ­every entity has an ontological truth,” a truth furnished by divine intelligence. For Heidegger, in contrast, man’s discovery of truth was “absolutely first. Man does not find a truth already contained in t­hings. His discovery is creative and constitutive of the true.”96 This led to the central failing of Heidegger’s philosophy, ­because, though he had intended a metaphysics of being in general, when “the affirmation of being in general is identical with the unfolding of the being of man. . . . ​T he analy­sis of h­ uman existence is no longer simply the preparation, but the very content of metaphysics.” Consequently, Heidegger’s metaphysics was a metaphysics of finitude, and thus, in de Waelhens’s estimation, not a metaphysics at all.97 De Waelhens also distrusted Heidegger’s distinction between ontology and ontic science. He drew attention to a number of passages where Heidegger apparently had not observed the distinction himself, and, as Löwith had done, implied that Heidegger’s existential analytic was guided by a “conception of existence” that undermined its claims to neutrality. 98 According to de Waelhens, Heidegger drew that conception of existence directly from Kierkegaard. 99 Whereas Heidegger’s supporters, like Bultmann, hoped to make Heideggerian guilt (Schuld) in­de­pen­dent of Kierkegaardian sin (Sünde), de Waelhens saw them as intimately connected.100 The conclusion to be drawn from this was not that Heidegger was surreptitiously religious, but instead that Kierkegaard was, at heart, secular. B ­ ecause Kierkegaard’s choice for God was based, not on any experience, but instead on “an effort that emerges from the void [vide], a tension that nourishes itself only from itself, without any other issue than the proclamation of itself as tension,” it was ultimately just “a façade destined to mask the absolute and insurmountable solitude of subjectivity.”101 Heidegger tore this façade down: “One c­ an’t even say . . . ​that Heidegger has secularized Kierkegaard. He was content to understand Kierkegaard as, no doubt, he must be understood.”102 The implications of de Waelhens’s reading remained in the subtext: If Heidegger had wanted to be a metaphysician and had failed, a religiously oriented philosophy guided by a dif­fer­ent “conception of existence” might be more successful. We felt “impotent” and “servile” ­because of our connection to the mundane, but, de Waelhens thought, it was pos­si­ble to



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overcome this slavery. The true lesson from existential absurdity was that “contingency is that which is never, and can at no price be, accepted by man. Finitude is unbearable.” The only way to resist such contingency was to appeal to an “Other” that reached beyond the limits of existentialism.103 As in the progressive reading of Husserl, de Waelhens’s argument brought him close to the Christian existentialists Le Senne and Marcel, whose work he praised throughout the book.104 Writing to the latter in 1942, de Waelhens asserted that it was through Marcel that he had “discovered existentialism, and . . . ​found the means to orient myself within it; my criticism of Heidegger is, I think, directly in line with your thought.”105

Beyond Being The dialectical theologians’ argument was at once less mobile and more influential. They did not have the transnational reach of the neo-­ scholastics, and thus far fewer scholars picked up their interpretation abroad. Regin Prenter’s 1933 “Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy and Theology” in the Danish Teologisk Tidsskrift, and a 1935 article by Paul Tillich for the American Journal of Religion are rare exceptions.106 Dialectical theology had the greatest direct influence on ­later readings of Heidegger through the work of Henry Corbin, who first translated Heidegger into French. Corbin had been brought up as a Catholic and completed his Licence de Philosophie in 1925, ­under Étienne Gilson, with a thesis on Latin Avicennism in the M ­ iddle Ages.107 In his ­later work he argued that Avicenna’s neo-­Platonism had been overcome by the deadening Aristotelianism of Averroës.108 Preferring the former to the latter, Corbin turned his attention to Avicenna’s understanding of Islam, especially Sufism, and studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.109 At the same time, in part thanks to Jean Baruzi, Corbin developed a strong interest in what he saw as a parallel tradition in Protestantism, and read, among o­ thers, Karl Barth, whom he translated into French.110 We can understand how Heidegger fit into this development by reading Corbin’s 1934 article, “Dialectical Theology and History.” Corbin presented the scholastic view of history as an “untenable synthesis” between “Greek naturalist” and “Judeo-­Christian or biblical anthropology.” In line with the former, scholastics had fixed the essence of man, and this

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led to the “abandon of the real ­future in ­favor of the past.”111 In contrast, the dialectical theologians prioritized the ­f uture, a f­ uture that could not be bound by any historical schema, thanks to the irruption in history of the divine Other, a “word” (Parole) from “beyond existence.”112 According to Corbin, Heidegger provided a philosophical basis for the dialectical theologians’ version of historicity. As he put it in a 1937 paper, the goal of Heidegger’s work was to “reveal the being of Dasein, the subjectivity of the subject, as a reality-­that-­transcends.”113 Corbin recognized that this transcendence did not necessarily have theological implications. The openness to the ­future that Heidegger described was not the openness to God and God’s word. “The ‘futurum resurrectionis [­future of the resurrection]’ that determines Christian existence is not a pos­si­ble discovery of ‘formal’ ontology.”114 Yet Corbin followed Bultmann, whom he cited throughout the text, in thinking that in its openness to the ­f uture, Heidegger’s ontology demonstrated the “possibility” of revelation, the embrace or rejection of which “qualifies existence ontically.”115 This Bultmannian proj­ect helps us understand Corbin’s early translations of Heidegger, most famously the essay collection published in 1938 as What Is Metaphysics?, which eventually sold almost 13,000 copies.116 Corbin’s se­lection of texts reflected his interests. First, Corbin privileged the sections on being-­toward-­death and historicity from Being and Time. Second, he included the two essays, “What Is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground,” which brought attention to the role of transcendence in Heidegger’s thought. That is, Corbin foregrounded the ele­ments that a few years earlier he had declared ripe for theological appropriation. Corbin’s translation has often been criticized as one of the major influences on the “humanist misreading” of Heidegger in France.117 As the preceding analy­sis should make clear, this was not his intention. In his introduction to the translated sections from Being and Time, Corbin was adamant that Heidegger’s “title does not announce ‘The being of man and time’ but ‘being (tout court) and time,’ ” and elsewhere he emphasized the “transcendental” aspects of Heidegger’s existential analytic as the condition for the possibility of ontology. This was why, Corbin declared, Heidegger’s proj­ect was in no way “anthropological.”118 Nonetheless, Corbin’s concern to co-­opt Heidegger for a broader religious proj­ect, focused on the paradoxical relationship between God and humanity, meant that he was



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interested first and foremost in the being of Dasein—­a term he (in)famously translated as “réalité-­humaine”—­a nd transcendence.119 While emphasizing the ontic / ontological distinction, Corbin discussed the ontological aspects of Heidegger’s thought in the same way as Bultmann: to clarify the distinction between theology and philosophy, which was a precondition for their mutual “resonance.”120 Though a few figures like Corbin picked up the dialectical theologians’ reading of Heidegger outside of Germany, that reading was most influential when refracted through German Existenzphilosophie, which had the effect of splitting it from its explic­itly theological and Protestant context, and thus rendering it more acceptable to non-­Thomist Catholics. To understand the shift from dialectical theology to Existenzphilosophie, take the book in which, according to its author at least, the latter term was first coined: Fritz Heinemann’s New Paths of Philosophy (1929).121 Heinemann also presented Heidegger’s work as a secularization of Kierkegaard’s “Christian existence,” ­because the question was no longer “How can man be Christian?” but instead “How can man be man again?” For Heinemann, in Heidegger’s work “the Pauline-­K ierkegaardian suffering, sinful, guilty, ­human . . . ​becomes a historical being embedded in time and not separable from it.”122 In aligning himself with Heidegger, Heinemann rejected the dogmatic aspects of dialectical theology. Heinemann wanted to understand man “from himself” (aus sich selbst), not “from God.”123 For this reason, he had no truck with the dialectical theologians’ appeal to Revelation. His Existenzphilosophie was still religious in the sense that it made manifest our openness to, or more precisely “resonance” with, the divine.124 But he rejected the determined religious content normally attributed to this openness, which is why Heinemann could pres­ent his argument as a form of de-­Christianization.125 Nonetheless, Heinemann shared the dialectical theologians’ hostility to scholastic ontology. He identified Heidegger’s scholastic heritage in the concepts that he had borrowed via Husserl and Brentano, most importantly intentionality. Whereas neo-­scholastics had emphasized the noematic over the noetic aspects of intentionality, and indeed had criticized Husserl and ­others for ­doing the reverse, Heinemann took the opposed track, criticizing Husserl for ­those moments when he forgot that the

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intentional act is rooted in the h­ uman subject.126 For Heinemann, Brentano’s fundamental achievement was to identify the “new fundamental layer [Fundamentalschicht] as man,” and for this reason one would misunderstand him completely “if one saw in him a relapse into scholastic-­ Aristotelian ontology and was satisfied with the cheap antithesis: ­here Kant, h­ ere Aristotle.”127 In direct contrast to the neo-­scholastics, when Heinemann declared Heidegger to be an “ontologist of ­human existence” (Ontologe der Existenz), he meant it as a compliment.128 Though Jaspers plays only a bit part in Heinemann’s book, by the early 1930s he had risen to become the leading figure of Existenzphilosophie. As we have seen, Jaspers also opened up the possibility for a religious reading of transcendence, while rejecting the dialectical theologians’ attempt to tie it to a par­tic­u­lar revelation or religious tradition. Jaspers also resisted the scholastics’ ontology.129 This set the frame for the Existenzphilosophie reading of Heidegger. Take the popularizing lecture by the Protestant theologian Johannes Pfeiffer in 1933. Pfeiffer explic­itly sidelined the ontological aspects of Heidegger’s thought in order to integrate it into the argument.130 In addition, Pfeiffer used Jaspers’s thought to infuse Heidegger’s philosophy with theological significance. “Heidegger’s philosophizing knows only two dimensions of being: present-­to-­hand worldly being [das vorhandene Weltsein] and existing Dasein.” Jaspers broached a third dimension, analyzing “the references that in the limit situation point over into a third, ‘totally other,’ ‘otherworldly’ dimension.” Jaspers thus opened up philosophy to the divine, a “transcendent being-­in-­itself,” that was only hinted at by Heidegger. Read through Jaspers, Heidegger’s “realism of ­human existence” could become a “religious realism.”131 Non-­T homist Christian phi­los­o­phers around Eu­rope tended to privilege this interpretation of Heidegger. Most read Heidegger alongside Jaspers, and often favored the latter.132 Berdyaev, for instance, was attracted to Heidegger, not as a phi­los­o­pher of being but as an interpreter of Dasein who emphasized its temporality, its “care” and “fear,” and for this reason Berdyaev felt closer to Jaspers.133 In Italy, Luigi Stefanini argued that Heidegger had much to learn from Jaspers, who “recognizes the need to draw out from Dasein’s contingent conditions a universally valid reason . . . ​to understand it in the light of the absolute.”134



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We can see why the association of Jaspers and Heidegger would have been so attractive. First, Catholics ­were resistant to the more clearly Protestant ele­ments of Heidegger’s thought. While setting aside the claim that German existentialism was “a pure and ­simple secularization of Protestant theology,” Pareyson argued that it was incontrovertible that it “refers to decidedly reformist themes.”135 Heidegger’s and Barth’s w ­ ere parallel proj­ects, centered on the absolute fallenness of Dasein.136 Stefanini made a similar argument in his 1942 book Heidegger’s Existentialism, the first monograph on Heidegger in Italian. For Stefanini, Heidegger’s Angst was “the echo of that painful invocation, which fallen humanity, irreparably vitiated by original sin, addresses through Luther to an inexorable predestination, which no ­human resource can appease or vary.”137 Jaspers was a considerable improvement. Though he was by birth at least a Protestant, Catholics appreciated the distance he had put between himself and the doctrinal content of theology. And yet, second, the Jaspers connection allowed Christian existentialists to foreground Heidegger’s discussion of the h­ uman individual over and against “scholastic” ontology. In his column on Heidegger in the Catholic Le Temps from 1932, Lavelle agreed with the neo-­scholastics that Heidegger had reduced the question of being to the being of the individual. But in contrast to them, Lavelle saw Heidegger’s emphasis on ­human subjectivity as the most valuable part of his work: “All the classical concepts of philosophy lose with him their anonymity.” “This philosophy of being is thus at the same time a philosophy of subjectivity; it raises subjectivity to the Absolute.”138 Stefanini too, at key moments in his account, used Heidegger in a broader criticism of neo-­scholasticism. Stefanini recognized that Heidegger was concerned with being in general and not simply the being of Dasein, which raised the hope of “a return to traditional ontology.”139 But in this proj­ect Heidegger had been right to grant the initiative to “spirit” rather than “nature.”140 Given their emphasis on the self, the Christian existentialists ­were not willing to adopt the neo-­scholastics’ proposed corrective to Heidegger’s thought: that his ontology needed to be released from the constraints of its h­ uman starting point. Instead they doubled down on his subjective analy­sis, arguing that if it w ­ ere carried through to its ultimate end, it would confirm our personal spiritual connection to God. Pareyson argued that

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in “reflecting on the origin of self-­identity” we discover “the profound connection that exists between the relations between man and God and the assumption of the situation . . . ​existence must seek itself in the intimacy of the singular, at that point where its relationship to itself coincides with its relationship to God.”141 The way Heidegger allowed Christian existentialists to assert our ­human bond with God did not mean that his contribution to debates about ontology was unimportant for them. Heidegger’s ontology proved a useful resource in their ongoing strug­gle with neo-­scholasticism, showing how the correlation between the self and being demonstrated why Thomism required Christian existentialist correction. This was the crucial context for the first translation of Heidegger into Italian, by Armando Carlini. Guzzo ­later recalled that Carlini had followed Heidegger with “insistent attention” from the early 1930s.142 Carlini had encountered Heidegger at the Davos dispute in 1929, and read the essay “What Is Metaphysics?” shortly afterward.143 Carlini l­ater wrote that the essay fascinated him b­ ecause it showed that “­doing metaphysics means discussing a prob­lem that involves the being and existence of the one who poses that prob­lem.”144 It was precisely the claim he had defended against Olgiati. Carlini’s translation appears in his 1936 book The Myth of Realism, sandwiched between a new edition of his Orientations, which had incited the debate with Olgiati, and Carlini’s contributions to that debate.145 In the debate, Carlini had begun to emphasize the corporeality and concreteness of the subject in order to forge a bond between interior and exterior existence and thus open a productive engagement with Thomism. This question framed his pre­sen­ta­tion of Heidegger’s essay. According to Carlini, Heidegger “takes up the scholastic prob­lem of being.” But, he insisted, “­here being is, first of all, the being of that entity in which essence coincides with existence, the act of self-­consciousness, that positing itself is alone able to give a beginning, and thus meaning and value, to a world of real­ity.”146 Carlini was, of course, aware of Heidegger’s atheism. Referring to his distinction between the worldly “transcendental” and the divine “transcendent,” Carlini claimed that Heidegger had resisted the internal forces in the first that necessitated the latter. Heidegger focused single-­mindedly on the mundane.147 This reading might seem close to Mazzantini’s from



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the previous year, but it differed in a crucial re­spect. Whereas Mazzantini had urged a move from finitude to the infinity of God through an ontological study of the exterior world, Carlini sought a path through the ­human self. According to Carlini, Mazzantini’s solution would necessarily fail. Heidegger’s notion of personality lacked an “inner life,” and thus “the sense of the divine,” ­because he had made “spiritual interiority” a purely contingent aspect of Dasein.148 In so ­doing, Heidegger had followed the lead of “traditional metaphysics,” which equally effaced the ­human person.149 That is why Thomism could not rescue Heidegger from his atheism. He could be saved from a naturalist account only by a philosophy that was “sustained and completed by faith.”150 The Christian existentialists thus provided the ontic counterpart to the Thomist and ontological reading of Heidegger. They homed in on his analy­sis of concrete ­human existence, which was an irreducible part of his ontology; in Dasein, self and being ­were inextricably linked. As the historian Roberto Tommasi has suggested regarding Italy, but in an argument that applies more generally, the early reception of Heidegger demonstrates “a convergence of discussions between what are traditionally taken to be the two tendencies of Christian thought, neo-­scholasticism and so-­called spiritualism.”151 The question was ­whether the path to God, and thus the key to converting Heidegger’s thought back to Chris­tian­ity, passed through the world or through the ­human self.

Secularizing Existentialism Or perhaps neither. Lurking ­behind the vari­ous religious readings of Heidegger was the anxiety that his thought might not be fully recuperable. The Christian existentialists embraced the dialectical theologians’ understanding of secularization, placing responsibility for Heidegger’s atheism firmly at the feet of scholastic “natu­ral theology” or ontology. Conversely, the neo-­scholastics worried that Heidegger’s focus on the ­human person, like that of the Christian existentialists, was only a step or two away from Protestant atheism. Neither neo-­scholasticism nor Christian existentialism could escape the suspicion that ultimately they might be atheistic too, a suspicion that could be exploited by secular phi­ los­o­phers. As Wahl recognized, however, the intertwining of religious

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and secular claims h­ ere could be given the opposite interpretation. Neither version of secularization was truly ­free of confessional, and thus religious, meaning. The prob­lems raised by the religious imprint of both secularizing arguments can be seen in the work of two of Heidegger’s most influential secular readers in the 1930s: Ernesto Grassi in Italy and Alexandre Kojève in France. A native of Milan, Grassi had become one of the first students at Gemelli’s Sacred Heart University in 1921.152 He flunked his course on dogmatic theology, but he was an avid participant in the courses on modern Italian philosophy taught by Emilio Chiocchetti, who in 1911 had encouraged neo-­scholastics to read Husserl.153 As Grassi’s biographer Wilhelm Büttemeyer has argued, at the time Grassi was “neo-­ scholastic, liberal-­Catholic and pacifist.”154 He also showed an allegiance to progressive over strict Thomism. In a 1923 review, Grassi argued that neo-­scholastics should not be considered the “defenders of a philosophy that has been crystalized in its form” but rather “the defenders of Philosophy, the eternal truth.”155 Like the progressives in Milan, Grassi thought that this required an engagement with, if never a full ac­cep­tance of, idealist thought. For this reason he was attracted to the ideas of Piero Martinetti and Bernardino Varisco.156 In reviewing Varisco’s Outlines of Critical Philosophy in 1926, Grassi agreed with the author’s conviction “that one can secure traditional Christian thought ­today only through the critical starting point and critical philosophy.”157 In the mid-1920s, as the orthodoxy in Milan hardened, Grassi’s neo-­ scholastic faith began to falter. In 1925 he had hoped to found, with Enrico Castelli, a journal “dedicated to overcoming [actualist idealism] by means of a negative ­union and collaboration.” Gemelli, however, opposed the proj­ect, which led Grassi to reconsider his own sympathies ­toward neo-­ scholasticism. The following year Grassi started to investigate other forms of Christian philosophy.158 Following in Castelli’s footsteps, Grassi set off in 1927 to Aix-­en-­Provence to study with Maurice Blondel. Grassi was personally smitten—­“the hours I spend with Blondel are wonderful”—­but intellectually disappointed: Blondel’s unpublished work did not seem to offer the basis for a rigorous proof of the transcendent from a non-­ Thomist perspective.159 Grassi’s visit to France, then, should be read less as evidence of his embrace of Blondel than as a sign of his growing



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dissatisfaction with neo-­scholasticism, which remained a major theme in his correspondence.160 Grassi’s ­later interest in humanism and the Re­nais­ sance, and in par­tic­u­lar his role in the 1942 founding of the Institute for the Studia Humanitatis in Berlin can be placed in this trajectory. For Grassi, the rediscovery of antiquity in the Italian Re­nais­sance and its break with medieval philosophy marked the true beginning of modern thought.161 ­After his trip to France, Grassi continued his philosophical trek across Eu­rope, passing through Munich, where he ingratiated himself with Carl Muth (Grassi was preparing an article on Blondel for Hochland, which never saw the light of day) and sought to make contact with Przywara.162 He ended up in Freiburg, where he sat in on Husserl’s last lecture course.163 In Freiburg, however, he gravitated t­ oward the newly arrived Heidegger, a man he soon came to consider the most impor­tant phi­los­o­pher in Germany.164 Grassi was able to secure a short-­term teaching contract at the university, which would be his base for the next de­cade.165 In 1929 he published an essay on Heidegger for the Rivista di filosofia, which appeared only one year a­ fter the first Italian article on the German thinker written by Grassi’s fellow student and friend from Gemelli’s University of the Sacred Heart, Giulio Grasselli.166 Though Grassi emphasized the connection of Heidegger’s thought to Italian actualism when he submitted the essay to Gentile, in the article itself he engaged most directly with the aspects of phenomenology that spoke to his intellectual biography: the fraught relationship between phenomenology and neo-­scholasticism.167 In his correspondence at the time, Grassi almost always prefaced his discussion of Heidegger by recalling how the latter had turned away from his Catholic roots.168 Grassi identified phenomenology’s scholastic heritage, referring to both Brentano’s and Husserl’s criticisms of psychologism and its reliance on the scholastic distinction between existentia and essentia.169 According to Grassi, ­t hese similarities had encouraged some students, like Scheler, Wust, Geyser, and Conrad-­Martius, to develop a realist ontology, thus giving “a boost to a reflourishing of realism and scholasticism.”170 ­Later the scholastic ele­ments of Husserl’s thought would be “exploited” by neo-­ scholastics like Przywara, “twisting” its original and fundamental aspirations.171 What was wrong with this appropriation pointed to what was

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wrong with Husserl’s phenomenology: both w ­ ere bewitched by the successes of the natu­ral sciences, and had tried to construct philosophy on similar lines—as a positivist science, in short a naturalism.172 Grassi was most interested then in Husserl’s anti-­scholastic gestures, particularly the “Cartesian” epoché whereby Husserl focused attention on the “intended as intended.”173 To bring this insight to fruition, however, it had to be scrubbed clean of any Thomist traces. Only then could phenomenology become a “concrete idealism.” This meant that one had to pay attention not to the “cogito as cogitato” but to the “cogito in action,” or, as Grassi ­later argued, the “concrete existentializing act.” H ­ ere, for Grassi, lay Heidegger’s ­great contribution.174 Though beginning his c­ areer as a neo-­scholastic, Heidegger had been led to a new “immanent ontology” in Being and Time by positing the acts of Dasein as the “absolute condition of real­ity.”175 In an article published the following year, Grassi wrote that Heidegger “surpasses Husserl’s phenomenology” by recognizing that “the transcendental foundation of being” was “an immanent metaphysical theory of . . . ​Dasein.”176 That is, Grassi negotiated his increasing distance from the neo-­scholastics by emphasizing ­those ele­ments of Heidegger’s thought the neo-­scholastics had rejected: the anchoring of Heidegger’s ontology to the h­ uman self. And whereas in the late 1920s it seemed that Grassi wanted to criticize scholasticism from within the Catholic fold, a position he maintained in his correspondence with Blondel as late as 1934, now he rejected neo-­scholasticism from an atheistic position.177 Grassi’s emphasis on the acts of Dasein to develop a secular philosophy ran into a difficult prob­lem. For this reading of Heidegger was not too far removed from the one l­ater proposed by Christian existentialists like Carlini, who saw Heidegger’s work as valuable not for the philosophical demonstration of immanence but instead for an intra-­Catholic debate about transcendence. Grassi was not unaware of the difficulty. Already in the 1929 article he had related the priority of the acting subject to Blondel, who had been an impor­tant influence on Carlini and other Christian existentialists.178 In reading Heidegger in this way, Grassi recognized that he had to confront the fact that Blondel had used a similar argument to construct a Christian philosophy: he had to show that the transcendental aspects of subjectivity did not require or imply the affirmation of a transcendent God.179 This was the question motivating a paper Grassi wrote in



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1930 for the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, appropriately titled “The Prob­lem of Heidegger’s Immanent Metaphysics.” Grassi asked ­after “the foundation and absolute unity that dominates the realization of being in its pres­ent incompleteness,” opposing Heidegger’s answer to Blondel’s.180 Whereas for Blondel the real understood as act implied a transcendent unity (for which reason, according to Grassi, it threatened to fall back into an objectivism), for Heidegger it referred back to finite Dasein. Without hesitation Heidegger resolves this prob­lem immanently, with clear consciousness that the absolute value of the pro­cess of existence is not, nor can be, an endpoint, that is an object (no ­matter how postponed)—­but the pro­cess of self-­realization of the entity itself. Being can never be understood as the object of a relation, but only as the relation in act, and only as such is it given to us in its absoluteness.181

Grassi’s criticism of Blondel resembles his ­later criticism of Heidegger. In a 1937 article, Grassi chided Heidegger for thinking that the Nothing preceded and conditioned thought. Instead, Grassi argued, it must be seen as inherent to the act of thought, what he in Gentile’s language called the “pensiero pensante.”182 As Büttemeyer has argued, for Grassi “the ­mental act, understood as a passage from Nothing to being, is more fundamental.”183 Like Carlini’s, then, Grassi’s reading of Heidegger privileged the ­human subject and its acts over ontology. Such an emphasis was crucial to Grassi’s estrangement from neo-­scholasticism, which he thought was mired in naive realism. We can see why, as Rocco Rubini has shown, Heidegger’s 1947 “Letter on Humanism” was just as much a rebuke to Grassi in Italy as it was to Sartre in France.184 But Grassi refused to follow the path taken by figures like Carlini, Guzzo, and Pareyson in appending a “third dimension.” The transcendental did not necessarily imply the Transcendent. In this he was perhaps not that far from Nicola Abbagnano, Guzzo’s colleague at Turin, and the author of the first major existentialist text in Italy, The Structure of Existence (1939).185 Abbagnano relied on Jaspers to curb what he saw as the nihilism of Heidegger’s Angst, but then drew on Heidegger to resist Jaspers’s claims about the “shipwreck” (scacco) and transcendence.186

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Grassi began his philosophical journey in the neo-­scholastic camp and thus sought in Heidegger’s thought aid in moving away from a Thomist theology. Alexandre Kojève, the Rus­sian émigré whose seminars on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études captivated a generation of French intellectuals, approached Heidegger from the opposite direction.187 Working with Jaspers at Heidelberg, Kojève had written his dissertation on the Rus­sian religious thinker Vladimir Solovyov and so turned to Heidegger in order to help him resist a Christian existentialist theology. Consequently, Kojève’s difficulty was the mirror image of Grassi’s. ­Because Grassi used Heidegger to help him flee Thomism, he stumbled onto Christian existentialist territory. When Kojève used Heidegger to break out of the Christian existentialist fold, he wandered unwittingly onto the Thomists’ stomping ground. Kojève’s reading of Heidegger bears the marks of his early training. When he identified two dimensions to Heidegger’s thought, Dasein and being-­present-­to-­hand (Vorhandensein), he picked up the reading (and mimicked the idiosyncratic terminology) of Jaspers’s other disciple, Pfeiffer.188 But Kojève was militantly opposed to what Pfeiffer had identified as Jaspers’s third dimension of transcendence, and he resisted it by foregrounding the very ­t hing that Jaspers had thought transcendence disrupted: ontology.189 Kojève cast the opposition between Dasein and being-­present-­to-­hand as an ontological duality. Humanity and nature ­were two modes of being, irreducible to each other and yet inextricably bound. Presenting ­human finitude as essential to its very being, Kojève hoped to ­counter Jaspers’s argument that in the limit situation we could discern a supramundane transcendence.190 ­Because Kojève’s atheistic arguments ­were addressed to Jaspers’s form of religious philosophy, he found himself making claims that looked quite similar to t­ hose put forward by neo-­scholastics. That is why the Jesuit Gaston Fessard, while by no means an orthodox Thomist, found Kojève’s work so appealing, and felt he could refuse the “religious, or rather a-­ religious” implications that Kojève drew from it.191 Consequently, Kojève had to show why the arguments neo-­scholastics marshaled in defense of Catholic metaphysics implied for him an atheistic position. This is perhaps why Kojève wrote his most extensive and direct analyses of Heidegger in response to none other than the neo-­scholastic Alfred Delp



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and his book Tragic Existence. In the review, which was published in 1936 in Recherches Philosophiques, Kojève was withering in his criticism.192 As he explained at the end, its unusual length of the review (double that of many ­others) was testimony to “the importance we attribute to Heidegger’s philosophical work. As far as Delp’s book goes, we can summarize our attitude by advising you not to read it.”193 Kojève criticized Delp first and foremost for arguing that Heidegger’s philosophy expressed a Kierkegaardian-­Nietzschean worldview. Such an understanding blinded Delp to Heidegger’s properly philosophical arguments, which presented, not an “idealist monism,” where nature was incorporated into Dasein, but instead an ontological dualism.194 It is pos­si­ble, however, to give a dif­fer­ent reading of Kojève’s review, its length, arguments, and final assessment. Kojève’s reliance on a secularization theory cut to fit Existenzphilosophie (ontology preventing all appeals to the transcendent) required him to address the argument that a nonhumanist ontology might be a propaedeutic to faith, an argument he found in Delp’s book.195 That is why the review exercised Kojève so much, why the published version also seemed insufficient, and therefore why he composed a considerably longer response to Delp, which was not published ­until 1993.196 Kojève’s task was to show why Heidegger’s ontology could not be used as the basis of a revised cosmological proof. In the published review, Kojève gives only a sketch of an argument. First, he asserted the priority of Heidegger’s ontological analyses with re­spect to any (implicitly ontic) worldview, and implied that Delp’s arguments reflected such a worldview.197 Clearly unsatisfied with this strategy, Kojève grappled further with Delp in the unpublished note. H ­ ere Kojève related Heidegger’s finitude (and thus atheism) to his understanding of negativity. Kojève worried, however, that in his discussions of attunement (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), and Angst, Heidegger had presented this negativity in an anemic form. To bolster his atheistic conclusions, Kojève translated Heidegger’s analyses into the Hegelian and ontic categories of Begierde, Arbeit, and Kampf (desire, work, and strug­gle).198 But even the Hegelian reinforcement of Heidegger’s finitude must have seemed inadequate. For ultimately, Kojève settled on the rather modest conclusion that we are left with a “­free choice” between Delp’s theistic reading of ontology and Heidegger’s atheistic one. He concluded that, ­because the

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theistic reading implied ­human servitude and the atheistic one freedom, to be true to philosophy one had to opt for the latter.199

Conclusion Come the end of World War II, a secular form of existentialism would dominate the intellectual scene in Eu­rope, to such an extent that it is hard ­today to remember that existentialism was once more closely associated with faith than with atheism. But as I have tried to show h­ ere, outside of Germany that secular form of existentialism relied in large part on ideas forged within religious communities. Christian existentialists came up with many of the most compelling arguments against the Thomists’ theology, and vice versa.200 ­Here Wahl’s meta­phor of the “echo” is apt. The religious notes of much atheistic existentialism should be understood not as the uncomplicated inheritance of a believing antecedent, but rather as the reflection of a more distant voice, directed ­toward and bouncing off a common religious foe. In a confessionally divided Eu­rope, where charges of atheism ­were just as likely to be hurled at religious opponents as nonbelieving rivals, few arguments could be regarded as unproblematically secular. But we should not infer from this that secular existentialism was peculiarly incoherent. For as we have seen, the early Christian readings of Heidegger lacked coherence too, first ­because they figured the religious aspects of Heidegger’s thought in such divergent, and even opposed, ways, and second ­because at the heart of it all was a philosophy (Heidegger’s) that was resolutely, avowedly atheist. All appropriations, w ­ hether of atheistic arguments by religious thinkers, or of religious arguments by atheists, required both inheritance and critique. Which is perhaps a good ­thing, ­because in the 1930s Heidegger’s thought had come to be associated with Nazism, a po­liti­cal movement he had served as rector of Freiburg University. And Heidegger was not the only figure in this story who faced stark po­liti­cal choices. In France, Italy, and beyond, Catholics drew on phenomenology to inform new forms of po­liti­cal thinking in response to the crisis of liberal democracy, which would, once again, turn seemingly academic debates about religion into larger questions about the ­f uture of Eu­rope.

8 The Black Nietz­sche

It is common to argue that “personalism,” the intellectual movement

that swept across Eu­rope in the 1930s, was vague and ill defined.1 In very broad terms, personalism reacted to both the supposed atomism of liberalism and the intrusions of totalitarian (especially Communist) states. Concrete persons required community but could not be reduced to it. Beyond this, however, the po­liti­cal implications of personalism ­were unclear, and it is telling it could be employed for a vast range of contradictory proj­ects: enshrined in the constitution of Vichy France, the “person” took pride of place in the UN Declaration of ­Human Rights and the Grundgesetz of the West German State. Philosophically too, personalism could be grafted onto a variety of traditions. As James Chappel has shown, in France it allied Gaston Fessard’s religious Hegelianism, Jacques Maritain’s Thomism, and Paul-­L ouis Landsberg’s phenomenology, to which one can add the antireligious Nietz­scheanism of Arnaud Dandieu.2 The c­ areer of Alexandre Marc, who did much to introduce personalism into the French-­speaking world, exemplifies its po­liti­cal and philosophical promiscuity. Marc had fled Rus­sia with his ­family ­after Lenin’s revolution, finding a home in Paris and Berlin. This experience kindled in him a deep hostility ­toward Communism, but like many young men of 241

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his age he also dismissed liberal democracy as weak and in­effec­tive. Instead, Marc cultivated an interest in the French and German youth movements, seeing them as the key to a “third way” social renewal, meaning one that steered between the twin dangers of capitalism and socialism. In the early 1930s ­these engagements led to Marc’s participation in the right-­leaning Ordre Nouveau movement, which he encountered at the German-­French youth meeting at Sohlberg in southern Germany in the late summer of 1930.3 But he was also involved in the left-­leaning journal Esprit, and l­ ater fought in the French re­sis­tance. ­After the war Marc became a leading figure of the Eu­ro­pean federalist movement.4 Marc’s po­liti­cal eclecticism is mirrored in his philosophical interests. The Ordre Nouveau was driven by Nietz­schean and often openly atheistic ideas, but Marc hoped to leaven it with a religious sensibility. Raised in a secular Jewish ­family, in the late 1920s he was attracted to Catholicism, and he officially converted in 1933. At this time Marc grappled with Thomism and became a favorite of the Dominicans at Juvisy, to whose journal, Sept, he contributed. But Marc also valued Blondel’s thought, and a­ fter 1937 he moved to Aix-­en-­Provence, Blondel’s home, in part to be closer to him.5 Marc, however, did not dwell on the seemingly irreconcilable differences between ­these dif­fer­ent forms of thought. He found personalism attractive ­because it could bring them into conversation with each other. In a 1935 essay he argued that, explic­itly or not, most personalists relied on an opposition between the individual and the person. Despite its particularity, the individual could still be defined by its characteristics, and thus treated as an object. In contrast, the person was the subject to whom t­ hese characteristics ­were attributed and could not be reduced to them. The individual was a “quid,” whereas the person was a “qui,” best understood as an “activity.”6 Moreover, the latter both founded and transcended the former, which meant that the person instituted a “tension” or “drama” in the heart of the self.7 This agonistic dimension of personalism aligned it with Nietz­ sche. But for Marc, it also drove personalists, sometimes despite themselves, to religion.8 Quoting the Protestant thinker Denis de Rougement, Marc argued that “man cannot escape the pit by pulling himself up by his own hair. An arm must reach out from beyond.”9 This position coincides with that of Christian existentialism—­a tension in the self points to the existence of a higher power—­and it is not



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surprising that Marc took his cue from Gabriel Marcel and René Le Senne. But ­there is another theme ­running through the text, which constituted its very per­for­mance: published in the Revue Néo-­Scolastique, the essay argued that personalism could help build connections between Christian existentialists and Thomists. Marc related Marcel’s distinction between the “subject that I am” and “the qualities that I have” to Garrigou-­ Lagrange’s opposition between personality and individuality, where the former was the “first subject of attribution in­de­pen­dent in its being and action: ‘per se separatim existens, et per se separatim operans’ (Saint Thomas, IIIa, q. 2. a. 2).”10 Similarly, Marc drew attention to the aspects of Le Senne’s work that ­were central to his negotiation with the Thomists. According to Marc, Le Senne had connected “in the most explicit and organic fashion,” the “primacy of the person,” with the “recognition of the world of objects.” Marc was particularly enamored by Le Senne’s account of spiritualization, the idea that a strange and scandalous world could be conquered, if never completely, by the intellect. Marc argued that this position brought Le Senne close to the Thomist intellectualism of Pierre Rousselot.11 Drawing out t­ hese parallels, Marc stretched personalism to span the central division within Catholic philosophy during the 1930s. Although Scheler is not mentioned in the paper, Marc drew his optimism about the unifying potential of the “person” from his encounter with Scheler, who as we saw in Chapter 4 had been embraced by many in the 1920s as the Catholic or “Black” Nietz­sche. Marc had studied in Freiburg in the early 1920s, attending lectures by both Husserl and Heidegger. But in this period he found Scheler’s vision most compelling, and he traveled to Cologne for a personal meeting in 1923.12 Scheler played a determinative role in the formulation of Marc’s personalism. Marc began to translate Scheler into French, an enterprise that ground to a halt only ­because publishers showed l­ittle interest.13 Marc was nevertheless troubled by many aspects of Scheler’s philosophy, especially his turn away from Catholicism ­after 1923.14 Consequently Marc came to embrace the thinking of the man who had done most to translate Schelerian ethics into terms comprehensible for a Thomist audience: Erich Przywara. Przywara is the subject of Marc’s most developed philosophical essay in the interwar period: “The Princi­ple and Method of Metaphysics” published

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in the Archives de Philosophie in 1935.15 It is true, as Thomas Keller has remarked, that “Marc ­handles Przywara’s concepts rather liberally,” but we can nonetheless see a broad commonalty in their goals: to bring together traditional Catholic metaphysics with a modern understanding of the subject.16 For Marc, Przywara’s “analogia entis” was valuable ­because it led him to valorize the tension between essence and existence in the h­ uman self.17 Due to the analogical relationship to God, man could never pretend to the divine identity of existence and essence. Essence instead acted as a calling or vocation: a Catholic version of the Nietz­schean injunction, “Become what you are!”18 Przywara’s analogical approach thus allowed Marc to fold a Nietz­schean concern with tension and becoming into a Thomist metaphysics of the divine order.

Max Scheler and Catholic Outreach The ways Scheler’s thought could facilitate the rapprochement and negotiation between Nietz­schean and Thomist philosophies, and by extension between dif­fer­ent stripes of Christian thought, ­were a central theme of the debates over his thought in Germany ­after World War I. It was also a leitmotif of his reception elsewhere in Eu­rope. As in the case of Husserl and Heidegger, Thomists ­were at the forefront of this reception. In the 1920s, neo-­scholastic journals in France and Italy followed the German debates as they happened.19 In the 1930s, a range of Catholics periodicals—­ such as the French La Vie Intellectuelle, the Italian Rivista, the American Modern Schoolman, the Dutch Thomistisch Tijdschrift, and the Polish Ateneum Kapłańskie—­brought analyses of Scheler’s work to an international Catholic audience.20 Personal connections also played a role. Maritain knew several of Scheler’s supporters: including Jean de Menasce, a Dominican and professor at the École des Hautes Études who would translate Scheler’s book Ressentiment in 1933; and Karl Eschweiler, who would write an article on Scheler in the first, 1928, edition of La Vie Intellectuelle.21 At that time, Maritain hoped that Eschweiler might reproduce the Meudon Study Circle in Germany.22 Maritain was also a friend of Peter Wust. In 1927 Wust had asked Jean Baruzi to introduce him to Maritain, hoping that Maritain might sponsor a French translation of his Naïvety and Piety.23



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Wust was visiting Maritain when Scheler died in May 1928, and afterward Scheler was a constant theme in their correspondence.24 As in Germany, the Thomist readers of Scheler around Eu­rope tended to criticize his overreliance on emotional intuition and the limited role he assigned reason. They attacked Scheler’s “conformity system” between religion and metaphysics, where the realms of emotion and reason ­were aligned only by the unity of the thinking and feeling person. Sofia Vanni Rovighi wondered in 1936: “How does one know that the two paths, philosophical and religious, are parallel if t­here is no point of view from which we . . . ​can see their parallelism?”25 Józef Pastuszka in Poland spoke for many in arguing against Scheler’s claim that value was distinct from existence: “Value is only a realization of an idea of a given ­thing, not an autonomous being itself.”26 But at the same time, Thomists appreciated the enthusiasm Scheler had generated for Catholicism, and his effective criticism of many of the Church’s intellectual rivals.27 Their strategy, for the most part, was thus not to reject Scheler’s philosophy outright, but to integrate it into and secure it by Thomist metaphysics. In 1929 Gaston Rabeau argued in La Vie Intellectuelle that it was pos­si­ble to “absorb the teaching of Max Scheler, while being faithful si­mul­ta­neously to Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas.”28 That is why Thomists outside of Germany tended to prefer Przywara’s more conciliatory approach to Scheler over Geyser’s flat rejection.29 The way Scheler’s thought opened up Thomism to modern philosophy was also recognized by non-­Thomists, who concentrated on a similar set of themes and criticisms. In Louis Lavelle’s early essay, which focused on Scheler’s twin faculties of reason and sympathy, he concluded that the two ­were necessarily interrelated: sympathy would be but “a drive without effectiveness if it distrusted clear ideas, if it refused to inhabit an intelligible world.”30 Scheler’s work also spurred a range of interconfessional studies. In 1932 in Sweden, Harold Eklund published a book teasing apart the Protestant and Catholic ele­ments of Scheler’s thought.31 The ecumenical potential of Scheler’s work is the crucial context for reading Jean Hering’s 1926 book Phenomenology and Religious Philosophy, the earliest phenomenological monograph in a language other than German. When Hering was born in 1890, his hometown of Strasbourg

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had been part of the German Empire, and it was as a German citizen that Hering, known to his friends Johann or Hans, studied in Göttingen with Husserl.32 But France, which had controlled the area before the Franco-­ Prussian War of 1870–1871, disputed Strasbourg’s status as a German town and, ­after victory in the First World War, reclaimed it as its own. When Hering returned to Strasbourg ­after the war to earn a licentiate in theology, it was as a French citizen studying at a French university. The years of German rule left their imprint on the institution, not least in the fact that it had a theology faculty at all. The German university had possessed two theology faculties: one Catholic and one Protestant. Their ­future was placed in doubt by the arrival of the French in 1918, ­because the 1905 law in France separating church and state prohibited state support for religious education. Nevertheless, public outcry provided a stay of execution, and the new authorities reasoned that b­ ecause Strasbourg had not been part of France at the time, the 1905 law did not apply. Both faculties, which w ­ ere ­housed in the same building, survived.33 Teaching in the Protestant faculty, Hering forged a close friendship with his Catholic counterpart, the Abbé Émile Baudin. 34 Baudin is best known t­ oday for his correspondence with Husserl in the mid-1930s about the realism / idealism question, in which Husserl made the claim about his concrete realism that I quoted earlier.35 Such was the interest in phenomenology in Strasbourg that Husserl stopped by on the way home from his Paris lectures from 1929 to pres­ent his ideas, speaking to an audience of members of both religions. Hering thus found himself writing in an interconfessional environment, where phenomenology provided a point of contact between Protestants and Catholics. In Phenomenology and Religious Thought, Hering started by diagnosing a crisis in modern religious philosophy. The “so-­called anthropocentric orientation of our studies” which “seemed to have triumphed definitively over all metaphysical desires” was now “put in question by the ­eager innovators of theocentric ontologies.”36 The assault on the anthropocentric orientation, the “los von Kant!,” was most clear in German philosophy in the return to metaphysics. Hering, however, deplored this “substitution by speculative and outdated ontological methods of t­ hose two incomparable tools: psychological and historical methods.” According to Hering, the Kantian and anthropological heritage needed



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“to be saved from this disaster.”37 And yet he admitted that Kant’s critical turn as developed by Schleiermacher and ­others had led scholars to understand religion merely as an emanation of the ­human mind, and thus had set it on the path to unbelief.38 That is why Hering presented his book as an effort at mediation: transporting the anthropological and psychological riches of nineteenth-­ century religious thought to the metaphysical shores of the twentieth. Phenomenology appeared to him as a “craft” (barque) best suited to achieving this rescue mission. 39 It promised a “synthesis between the theocentric and the anthropocentric tendencies . . . ​a synthesis between personalist and objectivist preoccupations by bringing out religious experiences that are at once personal and objectively valid.” 40 To the extent that ­these tendencies could be coded as Protestant and Catholic respectively, phenomenology had an interconfessional status. Though Hering declined to engage in such “journalistic” endeavors, he claimed that “it would have been easy for us to prove that phenomenology is at bottom no more Roman than Protestant or Greek—­given that it shows affinities with each of t­ hese forms of thought.”41 Thus, although Hering wrote his book for a Protestant audience, he emphasized the ele­ments of Husserl’s thought that had caught the attention of Catholics.42 For instance, like many of his friends from Göttingen, such as Hedwig Conrad-­Martius and Edith Stein, Hering opted for a realist phenomenology, in the sense that he thought it provided access to mind-­ independent idealities.43 Moreover, he related the “first” phenomenological reduction to essences to the scholastic “precisive abstraction,” at which point he referred to Cardinal Mercier.44 Foregrounding the “intentional” nature of consciousness, Hering rejected Husserl’s twin claims in §49 of Ideas: that “immanent Being (that is the ego cogitans), is without doubt absolute Being,” and that the world of transcendent objects depended absolutely on consciousness. As he argued, “all the descriptive analyses and all the ‘eidetic’ discoveries of Ideas seem to us to be, in their intrinsic sense, completely in­de­pen­dent of ­these two ­theses: one can accept the former while rejecting the latter.”45 This orientation explains why Hering spent most of the book discussing Scheler, above all Of the Eternal in Man, and in his account he drew on many of the Catholic or “Catholicisant” authors that we met in

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Chapter  4, including von Hildebrand, Wust, and above all Otto Gründler.46 And while Hering praised Scheler for his theory of the emotional grasping of values and its autonomy, he complained with the Thomists that Scheler had been unable to secure its unity with metaphysics.47 Like them, Hering criticized Scheler’s “conformity system,” ­because Scheler had failed to analyze ­those “acts or phenomena, in which this final identity ‘constitutes’ itself for consciousness,” and had relied purely on a “vague reference to the harmony of h­ uman nature.”48 In the final part of his book, while attributing priority to the former, Hering argued for the necessary interrelation of emotive and cognitive acts, religious philosophy and metaphysics. In this way one could avoid the task of a “laborious identification of the God of philosophy and the God of religion.”49 In the 1920s, then, Scheler’s philosophy was read and analyzed around Eu­rope b­ ecause it seemed capable of reconciling dif­fer­ent theological positions. Much as Wojtyła would do in 1953, Catholic and Protestant scholars valorized Scheler’s sensitivity to religious experience while bolstering his metaphysical claims with a more robust appeal to reason. For all its implications, however, the debate remained at the technical level of theological discourse. The millennial hopes that had marked Scheler’s first reception among Catholics are not in evidence ­here.50 That would change when the po­liti­cal explosions of the late 1920s and early 1930s shook Eu­ro­pean socie­ties to their core and Catholics ­were forced to reevaluate older po­liti­cal stances that ­were poorly suited to the age of extremes.

Catholic Politics in the Interwar To understand why Scheler’s thought resonated with so many Catholics during the 1930s, we need to examine briefly the rocky history of Catholic politics during the previous de­cade. This history did not dictate par­ tic­u­lar positions to any of the thinkers I w ­ ill discuss. Rather, it provided a frame for their debates, furnishing a set of prob­lems that they felt compelled to address, while delimiting the set of possibilities for collective and thus meaningful po­liti­cal action. The years immediately following



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the First World War had seen unpre­ce­dented Catholic engagement in democracy, with the founding of new Catholic po­liti­cal parties in Spain and Italy, and the revival of older po­liti­cal machines in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was also a time when clerical leadership in Catholic politics gave way to the laity.51 In Italy the Partito Populare Italiano (PPI), which stressed its in­de­pen­dence from the Church hierarchy and even presented itself as “aconfesssional,” won 20 ­percent of the vote in the elections of 1919.52 In France, the Parti Démocrate Populaire (PDP), founded in 1924, provided a po­liti­cal voice for ­those Catholics who ­were willing to put aside traditional hostility to republican governments, as did the Partido Social Popu­lar (PSP) in Spain.53 At the same time, the 1920s marked a high point for more traditionalist viewpoints. In Italy, Thomists generally took a skeptical view of Christian democracy. In 1919 Gemelli and Olgiati composed a very public attack on its princi­ples: “The Program of the PPI: What It Is Not, and What It Should Be.”54 They rejected both the party’s “aconfessionalism” and its averred (if never complete) in­de­pen­dence from the Church hierarchy. In France similar views fed into support for Charles Maurras’s Action Française, which seemed to match strict Thomism in its stark rejection of the modern liberal order and nostalgia for the ­Middle Ages. The circulation of Maurras’s periodical tripled from 22,000  in 1912 to 70,000 in 1919.55 The Action Française model was embraced elsewhere, including Poland, where figures like Roman Dmowski promoted an exclusionary Polish nationalism built on Catholic identity.56 As the 1920s progressed, however, both options w ­ ere severely undermined. The optimism that accompanied the gestures ­ toward Catholic democracy quickly faded. The strongest of the Catholic parties, in Belgium, had won comfortable majorities of the limited electorate in the prewar period. But it was blindsided by the King’s demand for universal male suffrage ­after 1919, an extension that Mercier opposed, and in the period afterward, the party was forced to share power in co­a li­t ion governments. 57 In France, support for the PDP never came close to breaking into double figures. The Catholic Demo­crats in Italy entered into co­a li­t ion with the Fascists a­ fter the March on Rome in 1922, and bled support to Mussolini thereafter. The Spanish PSP

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lost out a­ fter General Primo de Rivera co-­opted Catholicism in his 1923 coup. 58 By the end of the 1920s, the potential of Catholic traditionalism appeared exhausted too. Already in his early encyclical, Urbi arcano dei from 1922, Pius XI had criticized “the immoderate nationalism” of many Catholics.59 The concerns ­were heightened when in 1925 a survey for the Cahiers de la Jeunesse Catholique Belge identified Maurras as a considerably more impor­tant figure for Belgian youth than the local Cardinal Mercier.60 In 1926 the Pope condemned Maurras’s organ­ization, and most Catholics, if sometimes reluctantly, fell into line. The papal condemnation resulted in a significant shaking up of Thomist institutions, as Maurrasians ­were forced to recant or resign.61 If the old politics no longer seemed suited to the needs of the moment, the new po­liti­cal options did not seem any better. The Church had long harbored deep suspicions of Communism, due to its avowed materialism and hostility to religion. The Church’s relationship to Nazism was more ambivalent, though ultimately also negative. In the first few months ­after the Nazis’ seizure of power, when the Pope signed a Concordat with Hitler, many German Catholics ­were enthusiastic about the new regime. Most famously, one of the guiding lights of the liturgical movement, Abbot Ildefons Herwegen, used his base at Maria Laach to build up support for the Nazis among Catholics. Quickly, however, the Nazis showed their contempt for the Church, breaching the terms of the Concordat on numerous occasions. It became clear to many that Nazi hostility to religion, its embrace of a racist biological materialism, and its assumption of absolute sovereignty for the state w ­ ere incompatible with Catholicism. This turned many Catholic intellectuals against Hitler, even if the vast majority did not make the move to open re­sis­tance. Przywara’s journal Stimmen der Zeit shifted from cautious optimism in 1933 to intellectual opposition, admittedly keeping its criticism sufficiently veiled to avoid closure before 1941, when the Gestapo stormed its Munich offices.62 Carl Muth’s Hochland also engaged in a muted re­sis­tance, and built a close relationship with the more activist White Rose movement. More dramatically, the Jesuit Alfred Delp, who had written the wildly successful book on Heidegger, was executed in 1945 for his alleged role in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In March 1937, Catholic re­sis­tance to the regime was



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made official with Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, a direct attack on the errors of Nazi ideology that was read out in churches across Germany as the faithful gathered to celebrate Palm Sunday.63 With such limited opportunities for direct po­liti­cal engagement, the Pope and Church authorities placed emphasis on a broader re-­ Christianization of society, achieved through the efforts of Catholic Action. Catholic Action had been an impor­tant presence in Italy since the beginning of the c­ entury, when Pius X reor­ga­nized Catholic voluntary groups, focusing especially on workers and the young, and brought them ­under centralized ecclesiastical control.64 In the interwar period, the Pope encouraged the growth of Catholic Action around Eu­rope. Unlike many of its conservative pre­de­ces­sors, Catholic Action shared the universalist aspirations of the Vatican. At the 1925 Youth Congress in Rome, Pius XI talked of the “International of Catholic Youth,” which would lead to the “true and just International” of the Catholic Church. He implored them to “be united, be holy, be Catholic, be apostolic.” 65 Most importantly Catholic Action represented a shift away from overt politics t­ oward an emphasis on the revitalization of Catholic religious life. In article 43 of the Lateran Accords of 1929, the Pope had declared Catholic Action to be apolitical—­the price of Mussolini’s ac­cep­tance of Catholicism as the only state religion.66 Many members of Catholic Action in Italy embraced what they called “afascismo,” thinking that the regime could be tolerated and in any case was no worse than the liberal system it had replaced.67 As a papal initiative, Catholic Action found considerable support among Thomists. Antoni Szymański promoted it in Poland, where by 1939 it had grown to 750,000 members.68 Armida Barelli, one of Gemelli’s chief collaborators at the Rivista and at Sacred Heart University, helped found its w ­ omen’s youth arm in 1918, and took on a number of other impor­tant institutional roles in the movement throughout the 1920s to 1940s, while Olgiati had been involved from before the war.69 As one supporter argued just a­ fter Olgiati’s death, Olgiati had been “the spiritual or­ga­n izer that determined [Catholic Action’s] developments and nourished its vital forces.”70 Olgiati was guided by the belief that Catholic youth required extensive religious instruction. He saw in the promotion of Catholic education, liturgical practice, and communion the “concrete possibility of constituting ex novo a ‘Christian state.’ ”71 Olgiati regarded

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the new Catholic university as a crucial ele­ment of this proj­ect, educating the leaders of a broader religious renewal. At the opening ceremony in 1921, he declared that with the university, “Christus Dominus resurrexit! Christ rises again, also in the field of knowledge.”72 In France, Jacques Maritain was a crucial inspiration for the type of lay activism Catholic Action promoted. The historian Martin Conway has even gone so far as to describe him as the movement’s “quasi-­official phi ­los­o­pher.”73 Responding to the condemnation of Action Française, Maritain quickly came to embrace the new line. In opposition to Maurras’s “politics first,” Maritain asserted the “primacy of the spiritual,” which better fit the goals and ethos of Catholic Action. Maritain promoted a pluralist society that would allow the in­de­pen­dent flourishing of Catholic belief. Thus, it is crucial to note that when Maritain embraced a “personalist democracy,” he explic­itly distinguished it from the parliamentary po­liti­cal form.74 In condemning the Italian adventures in Abyssinia, Maritain used a language of justice and peace, and eschewed directly po­liti­cal terms.75 Likewise, in organ­izing re­sis­tance to the Spanish Civil War, Maritain studiously avoided choosing sides, framing his intervention as support for noncombatants.76 What­ever the influence of broader Church politics, it is clear that it left room for a variety of po­l iti­cal positions. On the one hand, what James Chappel has called “paternal Catholic modernists” considered certain po­liti­cal systems, especially Schuschnigg’s government in Austria, Franco’s regime, and Italian Fascism, a­ dept at promoting the social and economic forms necessary to Catholic flourishing. Authoritarianism thus could be a tool for spiritual renewal. On the other hand, “fraternal Catholic modernists” ­were concerned that such regimes trampled upon religious freedom, and sought to resist them in the name of antitotalitarianism.77 As Samuel Moyn has argued, the difference can be attributed to dif­fer­ent understandings of dignity: For paternal Catholics, following the 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno, dignity was a quality of collective entities, like the ­family, which could be promoted by an authoritarian state; for fraternal Catholics, it was a quality of the individual, who needed to be shielded from the excesses of state power.78 The divisions between paternal and fraternal Catholics ­were as much an effect of local po­liti­cal conditions as a product of philosophical differences. For instance, while Maritain developed his ideas in an increasingly



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anti-­Fascist direction, especially ­after his 1936 book Integral Humanism, his Thomist counter­parts in Milan negotiated with Mussolini. As we have seen, Mussolini was more than willing to tread on the toes of the Vatican, and consequently the Catholic university in Milan a­ dopted a position of what has been described as “distinction and collaboration,” recognizing ideological differences with the Fascists and yet promoting a working relationship.79 Gemelli came perhaps closest to outright support. In 1933 he argued that the “Fascist conception of the state, as the nation or­ga­nized, [has] led to corporatism [the non-­Capitalist social theory discussed in Chapter 4]. . . . ​T he new doctrine and the new system rest, more than might appear at first sight, upon a conception of the world particularly dear to us and true, according to our way of seeing t­ hings: the primacy of the spiritual.”80 The Pope condoned this fragmented approach, supporting the growing “Latin bloc” of Fascisms in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, along with the clerical authoritarianism in Miklós Horthy’s Hungary and Engelbert Dollfuss’s Austria, while sending encouraging signals to anti-­Fascist Catholics elsewhere.81

The Black Nietz­sche and the Blackshirts The investment of Catholic hope in voluntary, especially youth, groups recalls the situation in Germany in the early 1920s that I discussed in Chapter 4. Circumstances, of course, had changed in the intervening de­ cade. Most importantly, whereas the German Catholic youth movement ­after World War I was self-­consciously in­de­pen­dent of ecclesiastical control, Catholic Action was an arm of the Church hierarchy, with its central office located in the Vatican. In the 1930s Quickborn and other youth groups in Germany followed suit. They sought shelter from the Nazi Gleichschaltung (the extension of Nazi control to all areas of German life) ­under the 1933 Concordat with the Vatican, and ­were integrated into the institutions of the Church.82 Nonetheless, the parallels between the two moments made Scheler’s thought relevant again, now on a Eu­ro­pean scale. Just as a discussion of the “Black Nietz­sche” had helped German Catholics in the early 1920s assess w ­ hether and how the Church could harness a Nietz­schean social movement, in the 1930s it offered them a means for thinking through a pos­si­ble alliance between Catholic Action and Fascism.

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The purely Nietz­schean option was off the t­ able. In the Catholic intellectual imagination that position had been occupied and rendered out of bounds by none other than Martin Heidegger. Though he became disillusioned with the official movement ­after his notorious ser­vice as Freiburg rector in 1933–1934, the taint of his association with Nazism remained a constant theme in discussions of his thought. Consequently, even though Catholics often argued that Heidegger had correctly identified the crisis of modernity, they thought that his solution only exacerbated it. This was one of the main conclusions of Delp’s Tragic Existence. Living in Germany, he did not spell out the po­l iti­cal implications. That was left to Delp’s readers abroad. For the Louvain Jesuit Henri Thielemans, Delp had shown Heidegger to be “the Nazis’ metaphysician,” and this conclusion was picked up elsewhere. 83 Where Heidegger offered nihilistic godlessness as a response to the crisis, Catholic authors recommended religious belief: “Only Christian philosophy can bring the optimistic light of the resurrection into this dark night of a gloomy, tragic pessimism.”84 Although many considered Scheler’s affirmation of the spiritual to be antithetical to Nazism, it did not entail a unified response to Fascism in general. It was unclear ­whether it might be acceptable to collaborate with authoritarian governments that ­were more sympathetic to the Church, such as ­those in Italy and Austria, where Scheler’s student Dietrich von Hildebrand had established himself as a stalwart of the regime. The question boiled down to the precise relationship of the spiritual to the vital ­orders. On this question Scheler’s thought offered his readers two conflicting answers. It implied that Catholicism could not be indifferent to social and economic form—­corporatism was more conducive to the flowering of spiritual values than liberal democracy—­a nd yet it also suggested that authoritarian regimes denied the freedom necessary to spiritual growth. Quite how scholars weighed t­hese two ­factors would determine how they responded to Fascism.

Luigi Stefanini The contradictory implications of Scheler’s personalism are most clearly on show in the work of the Italian Luigi Stefanini. We have already met



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Stefanini at several moments in this book. He was part of the group of institutionally established Christian spiritualists who sought to challenge Gentile’s actualism, by claiming that the “transcendental” required an appeal to the “transcendent.” He also participated in the general Catholic attack on Heidegger for having followed a Kierkegaardian path to secular modernity. Stefanini had been born in 1891 into a petit-­bourgeois and religious ­family in Treviso, Italy. He first gained prominence as a leader of the local Catholic youth movement immediately following the First World War, and leveraged his prominence to become a city councillor for the Catholic PPI in 1919.85 In direct contrast to Olgiati and Gemelli, he embraced the party’s “aconfessionalism.” 86 Moreover, in the early days of Mussolini’s ascendency he thought that the ideals of Catholic Action required re­sis­tance to Fascism. He declared in 1922, “We are apo­liti­cal, but not agnostic in the business of politics, not indifferent to the prob­lems that trou­ble the world of laws, and even less indifferent to parties, as to allow our youth to flirt with Fascism.”87 When Mussolini consolidated power and the PPI collapsed, Stefanini took a post at the University of Padua and refrained from direct interventions into politics. In 1938 Stefanini published The Moment of Education: A Judgment on Existentialism, discussing Scheler alongside Husserl, Heidegger, and ­others. Stefanini recognized the aspects of Scheler’s thought that aligned him with the Church. Scheler had foregrounded our personal relationship to God in “an intimate participation of life and love.”88 “The spirit of Roman Catholicism seems ­here to irrupt triumphantly to distinguish the planes of being, to demarcate the line between man and the divine, between the sacred and the profane . . . ​dissipating the heavy atmosphere of Lutheran pessimism.” Scheler represented “the return of phenomenological existentialism, beyond its transcendentalist diversion, to its Catholic origins.”89 While Stefanini saw much to praise h­ ere, he considered Scheler’s philosophy to be built on unsure grounds, focusing, like the Thomists, on his conformity system.90 Stefanini thought that the disaggregation of the realm of reason (metaphysics) and the realm of values (religion) made Scheler’s understanding of God vulnerable: “What was given as absolutely evident and absolved of any signification was easily able to convert itself . . . ​into an arbitrary given, into a fictitious supposition.”91 Only with

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rational scaffolding could one prevent such degradation. In addition, Scheler’s personalism, insofar as it saw the person as merely “the ­bearer of values” and thus passive with re­spect to them, constituted a sort of “axiological determinism,” relegating h­ uman ­will to a subordinate position.92 In sum, Stefanini argued, Scheler had raised an inviolable and authoritarian intuition over reason and the ­will. The emotional grasping of values denied itself both the means to assess them critically and the power to resist their spell. 93 For Stefanini, this fundamental flaw in Scheler’s thought explained his ­later “atheism.”94 The duality of drive and spirit, as elaborated in The Place of Man in the Cosmos, was the result of Scheler’s early irrationalism, which “makes the system of transcendence in which Scheler had initially consolidated his emotional existentialism flimsy.”95 That is why, even though Scheler had linked his ideas to a form of Augustinian Chris­tian­ity, Stefanini argued for a more recent and more suspect provenance: “The dualism between that which one must love and desire and that which one must know does not come from Chris­tian­ity, but from Kant.”96 An authentically Christian personalism, in contrast, would affirm the interconnectedness of feeling and knowing.97 Quoting Saint Paul, Stefanini asserted that they ­were “coextensive and concentric in the fullness of a life that gains in clarity and perspicuity as it gains in purity and goodness.” 98 In contrast to Scheler’s only loosely united subject, Stefanini argued that the person is a “center of conscious energy, singular and ontically determined in which value catches fire at the acme of the drive produced to conquer it, and goes out or loses itself where this drive is weakened or extinguished.”99 Thus a Christian personalism would accept Scheler’s hierarchy of values, but would secure it not merely by emotional intuition, but also through a “vigilant rational discernment.” Indeed, Stefanini suggested that insofar as Scheler had himself caught sight of this hierarchy, he had relied surreptitiously on the intellect.100 Stefanini’s discussion may seem rather theoretical, but he argued that ­there was a necessary connection between the apparently innocuous “logical exercises” performed in a university classroom and their “most sensational applications in the sphere of social relations and po­liti­cal real­ity.”101 Of all the thinkers he discussed, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Dilthey, Stefanini was most expansive about the po­liti­cal consequences



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of Scheler’s thought, in part b­ ecause, despite his criticism, Stefanini saw in Scheler pointers ­toward a more robust Catholic personalism that he would call his own a­ fter the war.102 Stefanini argued that Scheler’s irrationalism fed into German theories of education. The claim that one should simply accept the givens of emotional intuition, mirrored and encouraged the Nazi claim that students should passively accept the worldview of the state.103 Such an approach tended to divide humanity. Each nation had its “par­tic­u­lar education, with its own truth, ethos, with a politics, economy, art, philosophy, metaphysics, physics, astronomy, even mathe­matics for its own use.”104 Moreover, b­ ecause it sidelined our critical faculties, it subordinated “spirit to nature.” Stefanini argued that this was a “voluntary abdication of the spirit, the genesis of moral evil.”105 ­These arguments formed the basis of Stefanini’s forceful criticism of Nazi racism in the closing pages. ­Because of this criticism, the book had to be removed from bookstore shelves in 1938 and certain “compromising expressions” excised.106 By transplanting reason into Scheler’s personalism, Stefanini thought that he could ward off its more dangerous po­liti­cal effects. Pace Scheler, it w ­ asn’t necessary to consolidate the nation in a metaphysical Gesamtperson (collective person), which threatened to swamp the individual, and whose religious and universalist aspirations ­were too weak to resist vitalist corruption. Instead Stefanini argued for a “unity of consensus and communion,” mediated by reason.107 Insofar as one could rationally engage a shared worldview, it meant that the racial and ethnic roots of a p ­ eople could be seen not as a “norm,” but as a “limit” to be overcome. In this way Geist (spirit) would be ensured its priority and control over Boden (soil), Recht ( justice) over Kraft (strength), the former transfiguring and ennobling the latter.108 ­After the war Stefanini would use ­these arguments to align his personalism with the norms of the new demo­cratic Italy.109 But in the 1930s Stefanini would foreground other aspects of his reading of Scheler to justify a reconciliation and collaboration with the Fascist regime. While Stefanini reiterated the Church’s official indifference to po­liti­cal form, he drew from Scheler the lesson that the spiritual realm depended upon the proper cultivation of the vital, and thus that not all po­liti­cal systems ­were equally conducive to its flourishing. In a book written in 1944 on the

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Catholic Church, Stefanini gave his fullest account of Catholicism’s relationship to secular power. In the modern age, the state had come to assume such authority that one could no longer divide its prerogatives from ­those of the Church following the body / soul opposition. Liberal democracies, especially in France, had favored a “separation” between church and state. But separation had become a synonym for neglect, and liberals tended to promote values that w ­ ere antithetical to the faith, insofar as the influence of the enlightenment and the “Masons” had rendered them hostile to Catholicism. The opposition between Catholicism and liberalism was so deep that when Christian demo­crats sought to “catholicize liberalism,” they often found themselves captured by the ideals they sought to contest.110 Stefanini’s hostility to the liberal order was such that, when laying out the dangers of existentialism, he reserved his harshest language, not for ­those forms that led to the idolatry of the state, but rather for t­ hose that promoted individualism—in his words, the “ ‘satanism’ of the affirmation of the exceptional, beyond good and evil, or the lowly bourgeois spirit that looks ­after . . . ​its own well-­being as the only ideal.”111 So too, Stefanini found Scheler’s thought most valuable for its recognition of the singularity of the “person,” in contrast to the universalist abstraction of Kant’s subject, which he took to be the intellectual foundation of liberalism, and he criticized Scheler most pointedly for being unable to “realize that hierarchical order of values, conquered energetically and consciously, that alone can save us from the materialistic egalitarianism of democracy.”112 Rather than a “separation” of church and state, Stefanini argued for their “distinction.” Though they ruled dif­fer­ent realms, the two institutions w ­ ere not completely in­de­pen­dent. The state had the responsibility to “provide the means to its citizens to realize in its orbit their integral humanity,” which implied that it must also pay attention to their spiritual well-­being.113 For Stefanini, then, the spiritual mission of the Church depended upon the collaboration of the state, which in turn had to be infused with the values of the Catholic faith. At the pedagogical level the primacy of the spiritual entailed the rejection of an earlier liberal pedagogy that subordinated the teacher to the whims and interests of the student. Stefanini thought that the Germans ­were right to assert “authoritarian



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f­ actors in education,” even if they had used that authority for irrational ends.114 The teacher needed to inculcate eternal and universal values in his or her students. “We are guided by the idea that, placed in front of objective truth and eternal values, life ­will perfect itself . . . ​in the progressive victorious affirmation of spirit over ­matter.”115 At the economic level, it meant that the state had a responsibility to guide commercial and industrial life to make sure it was informed by ethical values, especially as concerned the working class.116 At the po­liti­cal level, it implied a preference for an authoritarian state that supported the Church and its “historically constituted hierarchy,” over a liberal state that was indifferent or hostile to it.117 On this basis, Stefanini praised (at least in theory, ­because he noted the challenges in practice) the way Italian Fascism had recognized the proper relationship between life and spirit, state and Church, in the Lateran Accords.118 In a pre­sen­ta­tion to the 1938 meeting of the Società Italiana per il progresso della scienze in Bologna, Stefanini made the po­liti­cal implications of his book explicit. He reiterated his argument about the failings of biological racism and the errors of Nazism, which shut itself off from religion and reason. But it is significant that Stefanini could pres­ent his analy­sis as an internal critique, which in correcting a misguided ally might “bolster in the field of ideas the solidarity operating on the terrain of politics.”119 Stefanini presented his version of the state as a perfection and completion of the Nazi one: the state that recognized and respected religion, and thus served all the needs of its ­people, was more “truly totalitarian.” Similarly “racial defense . . . ​must be seen on our soil, in the lights of our cultural traditions, as an act of the sovereignty and transcendence of the spirit.”120 In the 1930s Stefanini, like many other Italian Catholics, came to accept the Fascist regime: He joined the party in 1932, and worked with the Fascist authorities increasingly as he ­rose up the ranks of the university administration in Padua. On this basis, he was tried, and then acquitted due to insufficient evidence, during the “purification” t­ rials at the end of the Second World War. Many of his actions, of course, can be attributed to pragmatism, and even at his most enthusiastic, Stefanini was critical of the way in which Mussolini continued to infringe on the rights of the Church. Once the tide of the war turned, he rebuffed the overtures of

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the Italian Social Republic, a last-­ditch effort to preserve Fascist rule in Italy, and he prob­a bly did not mourn their defeat.121 Nonetheless, like many Catholics Stefanini was undeniably attracted to some aspects of Mussolini’s Italy, in par­tic­u­lar its social and economic order as well as its recognition of Catholicism as the only state religion. The lesson to be gleaned from Scheler’s philosophy was that spiritual flourishing had very par­tic­u­lar conditions, and an authoritarian regime was acceptable, as long as it used that authority for the benefit of the Church.

Paul-­Louis Landsberg While Stefanini used Scheler to justify his acquiescence to Mussolini’s regime, Paul-­Ludwig (now Paul-­Louis) Landsberg used him to develop a theory of re­sis­tance to Fascism. Landsberg was, as we saw, one of the most impor­tant figures in the early Catholic reception of Scheler in Germany. He remained ­there during the 1920s, teaching at Bonn from 1928, and became close to the Frankfurt School, even publishing in their journal in 1933.122 Due to his Jewish heritage, Landsberg had to emigrate when the Nazis seized power. He moved first to Switzerland, then to Paris. For a short while he was a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Barcelona and Santander, before returning to Paris at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.123 Landsberg became friends with Maritain, whom he prob­ably met in Spain, and when he arrived in France, he attended the study circle at Meudon.124 In his most direct treatment of Scheler in French, an essay for Recherches Philosophiques, Landsberg returned to the Nietz­sche comparison that had been so impor­tant for him in the 1920s, and which he had already developed in a 1935 essay in Spanish.125 Nietz­sche had started from an “inward movement,” withdrawing from the world, which was the source of values, and thus had ended up with nihilism. In contrast, Scheler started from the subject’s “being-­in-­t he world,” “as integrated within it, as responding fatally to it and provoking its responses.”126 Through this contact with the world, Scheler had uncovered an “order,” the hierarchy of values, where the religious was higher than the agreeable, heroic, and spiritual but did not deny them their function and dignity. Landsberg explained, “The Christian soldier is admirable” ­because he placed his



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heroism in the ser­vice of religion, but “the soldier who only believes in his strength, the fanatical soldier is dreadful.”127 A similar argument concludes Landsberg’s first essay in French, published in 1934. Referring to Dürer’s engraving “St. Jerome in His Study,” which depicts the saint sitting at a t­ able with a lion lying quietly at his feet, Landsberg argued that the image showed how Jerome’s “animal vitality” did not dominate, but was “remade” in the saint’s image.128 This argument opposing nihilism and religious order appears in dif­ fer­ent forms across Landsberg’s writing. In the 1934 essay, Landsberg distinguished a “humanism oriented solely ­toward man” and a “Christian personalism.”129 The former sought the “realization of personal singularity as such, regardless of its content.” The latter was oriented by the relationship to the “divine personality” of the creator.130 Such w ­ ere the terms in which Landsberg criticized Heidegger. While Heidegger saw the ­human person as “existence t­ oward death” and thus the “nothing,” Landsberg asserted that the person “is led ­toward the realization of itself and ­toward eternity . . . ​metaphysics does not originate in the nothing revealed by angst, but in being in which the philosophical Eros participates by its nature.”131 Landsberg thus developed ­here a position similar to Stefanini. The vital drives needed to be oriented and guided by a higher power. For Stefanini, as for the Thomists, we access this order in part through reason, uncovering the rationality of God’s creation. But Landsberg criticized Thomism for the way it prioritized the categories of exterior or sense experience. He sided with Augustine, claiming that only ­those who had already received God in their hearts could discern the vestigia Dei in the world.132 If we sought the rational order, and thus our place within it, through a study the outside world, Landsberg thought, we would come to objectify the person, which we could come to understand as the “realization of an always unique idea that would have existed previously in the divine mind.”133 As such, the ­human essence would be bound to an unchanging idea, like an architect’s plan of a building, denied the freedom that was necessary to salvation.134 Landsberg summarized his concerns in a 1936 letter to Maritain: “The possibility of a synthesis between Greek and Christian philosophy seems to me very problematic.”135 In contrast, Landsberg suggested that the person needed to be understood through an appeal to “inner experience,” as foregrounded by

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phenomenology.136 This led Landsberg to define the person by his or her acts, “perpetually producing a meaning” out of the encounter (both “cooperation” and “strug­gle”) with material ­factors.137 As this directed and meaningful activity, “the person can be grasped in a more adequate manner as the pro­cess of personalization, rather than as a static substance.”138 Equally, God had to be understood as a person, not as a repository of static ideas.139 God did not have a prescriptive plan, but instead called us to our “vocation,” and thus to our place in the cosmos. The shift from outer to inner experience dramatically changed the temporality of Landsberg’s theory. A vocation existed in “tension” with ourselves and real­ity; it was a goal to be realized. As such it could not be read off the world as it currently existed.140 Consequently the concept of vocation demanded a close interrelation between knowing and acting. Posing the question w ­ hether love discovers or creates values, Landsberg answered that “it discovers while creating, and creates while discovering.”141 To know a value is to want to realize it, and vice versa. This activist reformulation of Scheler’s theory of functionalization had found its most influential expression in Landsberg’s 1937 essay “Personal Engagement,” published in Esprit. Landsberg defined engagement as “concrete assumption of the responsibility for a task that is to be realized in the f­ uture.”142 The choice of a cause had to be a “total act.” The “fidelity to a chosen direction is the form of existence that is essential to the constitution of this personal life.” This is why “authenticity” was a “definitive value” for personalism.143 Landsberg formulated this idea in the language of “impulsion” and guidance, which had been at the center of his German writings. Only if we engaged in the world would we be able to direct its blind drives. Conversely, an apperception of values was only pos­si­ble in “an engagement that has deci­ded ­either for or against.” For this reason, Landsberg explic­itly rejected a “pure intellectualism” that, in seeking a neutral position by separating knowing and w ­ ill, tended “at the end necessarily to deliver the control of the world to the blindest forces.” Intellectualism, he argued, was “the common adversary . . . ​of all the youth movements in Eu­rope.”144 ­Because we can uncover a higher order only in endeavoring to realize it, we are limited by the concrete possibilities for action that exist at any moment. “Our own life can only gain its meaning by participating in the his-



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tory of the collectivities to which we belong.” Engagement c­ ouldn’t sacrifice the good to the best. It necessitated a “decision for an imperfect cause, ­because we d ­ on’t choose between abstract princi­ples and ideologies, but between the real forces and movements that drive from the past and pres­ent to the region of ­future possibilities.” In fact, the recognition that all ­causes are imperfect is valuable in the sense that it keeps us from fanat­i­cism, and encourages a “perpetual criticism tending ­toward the greatest perfection of the cause we have ­adopted.”145 In language he used elsewhere, Landsberg claimed that any order on this earth could only exist by “analogy” with the City of God, and thus was as much a proj­ect as a real­ity.146 One might think that Landsberg’s emphasis on the phenomenological method and downplaying of the intellect would have rendered his thought vulnerable to the allure of Fascism. ­After all, this was what the Thomists had argued when they had criticized the epistemological foundations of Scheler’s thought in the 1920s: B ­ ecause the divine order was accessed through the emotions, it was ultimately beholden to the vital forces it was meant to discipline. In the 1930s, however, ­these arguments had dif­fer­ent implications. Stefanini had foregrounded the intellect, and ­because this allowed him to reveal God’s order, it permitted him to enlist the authoritarian state in its ser­vice. For Landsberg, in contrast, the divine order is always to come and can never be fully worked out. For that reason, authoritarianism runs the risk of shutting down the pro­cess by which the true order is revealed. Like Stefanini and most Catholics at the time, Landsberg ruled out both anti-­Christian totalitarianism and liberalism as po­liti­cal options. In the personalist model, individuals had to search freely for their own vocation, realizing some values rather than ­others, following some models instead of ­others.147 This is why Landsberg rejected Nazism and Communism, which both produced a “uniform collectivity, an elite or popu­lar mass as the product of a guided hereditary se­lection, or the transformation of the social milieu.” Both denied personal freedom. And yet the freedom to choose a vocation ­wasn’t the same as that suggested by liberal individualism, ­because ­every vocation took its place in the overall value hierarchy and so each person was embedded in a “community constituted by irreplaceable personalities.” This is why “true personalism must be solidarity,” oriented ultimately ­toward God.148

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Landsberg’s criticisms of totalitarian collectivism and liberal individualism w ­ ere not, however, symmetrical. B ­ ecause for him order was always to come, si­mul­ta­neously discovered and created by our po­liti­cal engagement, the most impor­tant condition for h­ uman flourishing was freedom to follow our vocation, and conversely “the greatest earthly evil is the slavery of a community and the persons that compose it—­that is, a po­ liti­cal state of affairs that deprives persons of the possibility of accomplishing their vocation, stopping them from becoming themselves.”149 ­T hose who said they preferred slavery to death, Landsberg remarked, “­don’t know much about slavery.”150 We can see why Landsberg’s rejection of totalitarianism had priority. Totalitarianism was dangerous in itself, but liberal individualism had to be rejected primarily b­ ecause it might allow the rise of totalitarianism. Landsberg criticized liberal “neutrality” for ignoring even ­those forces that challenged its guiding values of liberty and justice.151 Though Landsberg thought that “the state can and must be neutral on a number of questions,” it could not be “on the one that concerns its own vocation in the history of humanity, which is to found peace in justice and the true liberty of all its citizens.”152 ­These considerations explain why opposition to Fascism became the guiding princi­ple of Landsberg’s politics. In a letter written in January 1939 to his friend José Bergamin, the Spanish poet, Landsberg remarked that the Nazi takeover of Germany and the rise of Franco in Spain had robbed him of his earlier innocence, impressing upon him “the power of evil on the earth” and the necessity to fight it.153 In addition, Landsberg’s experience in Germany had shown that this fight could only be successful before the “modern dictatorship” had established itself, ­after which re­sis­t ance was futile. This is why the Spanish Civil War, where the ­battle against Fascism was not yet lost, occupied a singularly impor­t ant position in his thought, and why he was so critical of the “so-­called” pacifists who “would deliver all of humanity without re­sis­tance to slavery and arbitrary rule.”154 In 1939 his longest and most passionate intervention was an attack on pacifism in response to the Nazis. Given their ideology, he argued, peace with the Nazis could only be a degraded and temporary one; true peace required armed conflict.155 Despite his re­sis­tance to collectivism, this stance rendered Landsberg more receptive to Communism, especially in its revolutionary (that is,



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nonstate) form. In a 1937 essay for La Vie Intellectuelle, Landsberg laid out familiar criticisms: Communism denied the person by dissolving individuals into society and neglecting ­human freedom. Endowed with immortal souls, persons could not be reduced to their class, just as they could not be reduced to their race.156 But b­ ecause it was written at the time when the leader of the French Communist Party offered the famous main tendu—­the appeal for Communist-­Catholic collaboration—it is significant that the majority of Landsberg’s essay was an attempt at recuperation. In fact, even though Landsberg was suspicious of Marxist metaphysics and renounced cooperation with Stalin’s USSR, he was not unilaterally opposed to Marxist politics. Many so-­called idealists, Landsberg argued, ­were motivated by material interests, but many Marxists ­were driven by ideal values, such as justice and love. “It is without a doubt better to act well and think badly than vice-­versa.”157 Moreover, while the “partial” humanism of Marxism needed to be corrected by the “integral humanism” of Chris­tian­ity—­its emphasis on the body supplemented by an emphasis on the soul—­w ith re­spect to the corporeal realm, Landsberg seemed to imply, Marxism had the right idea. In its rejection of a timeless ­human essence and embrace of a future-­directed praxis over detached intellectual analy­sis, it correctly recognized our historicity. And it drew our attention to basic ­human needs. Man might not live by bread alone, but “daily bread” was a condition of the spiritual development that led to salvation.158 Marxism thus at least has the merit of reminding us that, despite a facile idealism, the social prob­lems posed by the conditions of h­ uman life in our industrial society cannot be left without solution if one wants to avoid the worst catastrophes. For a philosophy that is at once spiritualist and realist, this solution cannot limit itself to a ­simple change of consciousness; it is also necessary to transform the world in which we live.159

Landsberg lived his philosophy. He supported the Popu­lar Front in 1936, and sought new relations with the anti-­Stalinist left through the German journal in exile, Die Zukunft.160 A ­ fter the Nazi invasion of France, he made contact with the Re­sis­tance, working for the newspaper Combat before being captured in 1943. He died of exhaustion in the Oranienburg concentration camp a year ­later.161

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Stefanini and Landsberg could come to such dif­fer­ent conclusions about Fascism ­because they had divergent understandings of the relationship between the Nietz­schean and Christian ele­ments in Scheler’s work. Stefanini used Scheler to argue that lower values needed to be fostered in a way to promote religious flourishing. ­Because the spiritual order was embodied in Catholicism’s “historically constituted hierarchy,” the prime requirement of a po­l iti­cal system was that it should govern the earthly realm with an eye to the needs of the Church. For Landsberg, in contrast, ­there was no clear and ready-­made spiritual order to guide the vital realm. It is telling that the institution of the Church plays no significant role in his writings. Instead that order would emerge out of our f­ ree engagement in history. Therefore, what­ever succor it could offer Catholicism, Fascism had to be rejected.

A Catholic Nietz­scheanism: Esprit The contradictory po­l iti­cal implications of the Scheler reception help shed light on the early c­ areer of the journal Esprit, which would become one of the leading leftist intellectual periodicals of the postwar period. Esprit was founded in 1932 when its editor, Emmanuel Mounier, was only twenty-­seven years old. Though he presented Esprit as a nonconfessional journal, Mounier, like the other figures I have been discussing h­ ere, was keyed into the organ­izations of Catholic Action: Esprit was pitched at a younger generation and drew heavi­ly for its readership and writers on the JEC (the Christian Student Youth organ­ization) and the JOC (Christian Worker Youth).162 Esprit’s navigation through the treacherous world of 1930s politics has led to a sharp division in its reception. In par­tic­u­lar its relationship to Fascism vexed both its contemporaries and l­ater scholars. Supporters, following the line set by Michel Winock’s early study, have emphasized Esprit’s leftist credentials, drawing attention both to its critique of Fascism, starting from a 1934 edition on the issue, and to its po­liti­cal interventions, such as its condemnations of Italian actions in Ethiopia and Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Esprit openly supported the 1936 Popu­lar Front and opposed the compromises of Munich in 1938 in a way that put it at odds with the vast majority of the Catholic



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world. That same year Esprit followed Landsberg in forging relationships with leftist German Catholics in exile around Die Zukunft, an anti-­Fascist, anti-­Stalinist journal.163 Such inclinations ­were recognized at the time. In Italy, many appealed to Mounier to develop po­liti­cal arguments presenting demo­cratic understandings of authority in opposition to the Fascists.164 In Poland too, Esprit captured the interests of Catholic intellectuals like Władysław Bartoszewski and Jan Strzelecki as a journal of the left, and Mounier’s work offered inspiration to the Polish underground re­sis­tance to the Nazis during the war.165 In contrast, other scholars, such as Ze’ev Sternhell and John Hellman, have argued that in its first de­cade Esprit promulgated an ideology that came very close to Fascism, especially in its rejection of liberal democracy, republicanism, and capitalism.166 This proximity can be seen in the Esprit group’s own compromising (if never uncritical) overtures to Fascist and authoritarian regimes: Mounier accepted an invitation from the Italian Fascists to visit Rome in 1935, even if he used it as an opportunity to admonish Mussolini’s government; and Esprit’s supporters in Belgium moved in a direction that Hellman has labeled “crypto-­Nazism.”167 Taking account of such tendencies, some of Mounier’s contemporaries, such as Paul Nizan, declared Esprit’s ideology a “French National Socialism.” Much of this debate has focused on Mounier’s actions during World War II. A ­ fter the strange defeat of 1940, Mounier collaborated with the Vichy Regime and played a central role in its youth movement at the École nationale des cadres de la jeunesse d’Uriage.168 For Sternhell and Hellman, such actions revealed Mounier’s under­lying sympathy for Fascism. O ­ thers, however, have pointed out that Mounier used his position to try to mold the national revolution in a Christian personalist image. Winock goes too far when he argues that “against Vichy, Mounier had chosen the war of the fox” b­ ecause “it was not in his power to wage the war of the lion.” Nonetheless, Mounier’s criticisms of the regime w ­ ere sufficient to ensure his ouster in July 1941. His journal was banned a month l­ater. Mounier was then thrown in prison and on his release entered the Re­sis­tance.169 ­These po­liti­cal tensions can be understood by mapping the opposing ideological forces brought to bear on Mounier and his journal. Esprit owed much to the group that gathered around Maritain at his Thomist study circle in Meudon. ­After arriving in Paris in the fall of 1927, Mounier

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was a regular participant, alongside other founding members of the journal like André Déléage and Georges Izard. Maritain helped win Mounier the support of the publishing h­ ouse Desclée de Brouwer, sought out a list of contributors, and secured financial support for the new journal.170 As Michel Winock has argued: “It is not excessive to say that Esprit was founded ­under Maritain’s more-­or-­less hidden patronage.”171 Given this support, it should not be surprising that at the beginning, at least, Mounier followed Maritain in reading the “primacy of the spirit” as a disavowal of direct po­liti­cal action.172 Though Esprit presented itself from the outset as a revolutionary journal, opposing, as it famously argued in the March 1933 issue, “the Christian order” to the “established disorder,” like Maritain, Mounier dedicated his efforts not to po­liti­cal revolution but to a revolution of the soul.173 In the first few years of the journal and at Maritain’s encouragement, Mounier balanced out the “ ‘activist’ tendency” of Déléage and Izard, who sought to involve Esprit more directly in the cut-­ and-­thrust of politics.174 Nonetheless, if Mounier was, at a stretch, a Thomist, he was never orthodox. Trained by the Catholic Bergsonian Jacques Chevalier, he showed ­little patience for the Thomists’ “esprit de système.”175 Of the vari­ous patrons of the journal, Mounier was prob­a bly philosophically closer to Marcel than to Maritain, and he was fascinated by the Ordre Nouveau, in which Gabriel Marcel had also played a role. In the summer of 1932 Mounier wrote to Marc to ask for help in founding Esprit, which he said would be “inspired by ideas close to Ordre Nouveau’s—­but Catholic.”176 Mounier then offered Marc an office opposite his own at Desclée de Brouwer, to facilitate the collaboration. Though open to Christians such as Marc, the Ordre Nouveau was by no means a Christian venture. When Marc confessed that he was a believer in 1931, his co-­founder Robert Aron responded dismissively: “Religion, what shit!”177 For his part, Dandieu thought that Marc’s personalism was compatible with his, but only ­because it kept its distance from Catholic “orthodoxy.”178 The unifying ideology of the group was Nietz­schean, emphasizing the agonistic aspects of h­ uman existence.179 ­These tendencies made many in the Ordre Nouveau sympathetic ­toward (if still critical of) “left Nazis” in Germany like Otto Strasser.180 In their infamous 1933 “Letter to Hitler,” the Ordre Nouveau posed their critique of National



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Socialism as a friendly one. They welcomed the way the Nazis had overturned the liberal po­liti­cal order and capitalism, while criticizing the idolization of the state and racism. Such w ­ ere the tendencies of the Ordre Nouveau that Maritain wrote to Mounier in the early days of the journal to ask him to keep his distance from Dandieu’s “goose-­stepping philosophy.” Nonetheless, the relationship persisted, at times clandestinely, throughout the 1930s.181 One of Mounier’s most pressing intellectual challenges in the early days of Esprit, then, was to reconcile Nietz­schean personalism along the lines of Ordre Nouveau with his Catholic faith and perhaps even Thomism: Dandieu and Maritain. We can hear echoes of this attempt in Mounier’s inaugural article in the journal, “Redo the Re­nais­sance,” which combines a Thomist skepticism ­toward post-­Reformation thought with a recognition that the modern analy­sis of the ­human self had much to offer. We can see why Mounier might have turned to Marc, who sought to engineer such a reconciliation in his own work. In turn, Marc wanted to convince Mounier that Christian Nietz­scheanism was not a contradiction in terms, ­going so far as to fabricate a German theologian, “Otto Neumann,” to prove his point.182 Mounier was intrigued and pressed Marc for more information, forcing Marc to stall. To prevent the ruse coming to light, Marc concocted a story about Neumann’s death in a tragic car accident.183 In the end Mounier did not need a fictional German theorist to help think through the relationship between Nietz­schean agonism and a Catholic, perhaps Thomist, order—­because in 1934 he got to know a real one. That year he met Landsberg, and through him learned about Max Scheler. Mounier never discussed Scheler at length, but Schelerian ideas form a barely hidden undercurrent of his thought, and at times of personal and po­liti­cal crisis, Mounier would turn to Scheler’s work directly. At the outbreak of war in 1939, for instance, Mounier was sent to work at a Chasseurs alpine camp, and as Hellman recounts, he would wander off in ­free moments “to read Max Scheler in a nearby woods.”184 Such was Scheler’s importance for Mounier that he would ­later ask Maurice de Gandillac, a fellow regular at Meudon, to translate of Scheler’s Formalism book, a proj­ect that was only completed in 1955.185 Most importantly, Mounier drew on Schelerian ideas to help negotiate his fraught relationship with both Dandieu and Maritain. When tensions

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between the two ­were at their peak in early 1934, Mounier invited Landsberg to run the study group tasked with defining “the personalist-­ communitarian philosophy of our movement.”186 The immediate result of this study group was a pair of programmatic essays, on which the imprint of Scheler’s ideas is clear. The first, “What Is Personalism?,” opened a 1934 special issue of Esprit on the theme, which contained Landsberg’s essay on personalism, discussed earlier. Of all the contributions, Landsberg’s was the only one Mounier w ­ holeheartedly embraced.187 Mounier’s introduction is structured by two versions of personalism: one associated with the Ordre Nouveau and Dandieu, the other with Landsberg.188 The first path, Mounier argued, “would end up with the apotheosis of personality, that is the values of tension, ‘aggressivity,’ mastery, heroism. Its ideal is the hero. The Stoic branch. The Nietz­schean branch. The Fascist branch (they are not exactly the same).” In contrast to this heroic self-­affirmation, the second path offered the paradox where persons found themselves “in forgetting themselves, in giving themselves—­ Christians take this to its ultimate conclusion: in abandoning themselves.” Though Mounier denied that this necessarily had religious meaning, he did argue that for the believer, it implied that “man only finds himself in God.” Whereas the first path was forged by the “hero,” the second path was opened by the “saint.”189 Mounier’s argument shows that although he was attracted in many ways to Ordre Nouveau personalism, when he explained to Marc that he wanted to found a journal close to their ideas “but Catholic,” the qualification made all the difference. Recalling his engagement with Dandieu and Marc, he reversed the former’s analy­sis of the latter. While Dandieu believed that Marc’s thought was close to his own, and consequently ­couldn’t be squared with Catholic orthodoxy, Mounier “grant[ed] the orthodoxy of it, but [denied] that Marc’s interpretation owes allegiance to Dandieu’s thought.”190 Mounier may have drawn on Ordre Nouveau’s ideas, but in converting them to Chris­tian­ity he thought that he had changed them beyond all recognition. Mounier never wavered from this critical stance t­ oward the Ordre Nouveau and by extension Fascism, but that did not mean that he disavowed any form of collaboration. Like Stefanini, Mounier emphasized the failings of liberal democracy and the value of some of the innovations made



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pos­si­ble by authoritarian and Fascist regimes, especially if they could be made receptive to religious ideas.191 In the second programmatic essay from 1934, “Communitarian Revolution,” Mounier presented both Fascism and Communism as “the first bursts of the huge communitarian wave that is starting to break over Eu­rope.”192 They ­were perhaps the “most disparate, perhaps even the most crazy departures.” Nonetheless they participated in the “second re­nais­sance” that Mounier had heralded in the opening issue of Esprit.193 Mounier suggested that, though insufficient, Communism and Marxism produced the “first degree of community,” above the faceless society of liberalism and the mass, b­ ecause they prioritized the personal “we” over the impersonal “one.”194 He also argued that the Fascist rejection of liberal society was necessary and valuable ­because, what­ever its faults, Fascist totality was better than liberal individualism.195 While Mounier’s reading of Scheler allowed him to identify the positive aspects of Fascist rule, he differed from Stefanini and aligned with Landsberg in recognizing that the ideal community was “not of this world,” but rather the “goal and distant example of all h­ uman community.”196 The never-­completed pro­cess of perfecting society required continuous po­liti­cal engagement. As Michel Winock has shown, around 1936 Landsberg “gave Mounier and his friends the possibility of correcting the idealism that . . . ​they had for the most part hardly left ­behind.”197 Mounier and his successor as editor, Jean-­Marie Domenach, concur that Landsberg was instrumental in rescuing Esprit from its “utopian temptation” and leading its contributors to “engage in history.”198 Like Landsberg, Mounier was convinced that b­ ecause true community is a proj­ect rather than a real­ity, it depends upon ­human freedom.199 “The we follows the I or more precisely—­because they ­don’t constitute themselves one without the other—­the we follows from the I, the former c­ an’t precede the latter.”200 This is why Fascism failed. By jumping too quickly to the community, by dissolving the “I” into the “we,” it had stifled the ­human person, which alone could realize higher forms of community. Mounier argued that society’s “mission was neither to subordinate persons nor to take over the development of their vocation; but to ensure them, first of all, that zone of isolation, of protection, of play and leisure that ­will permit them to recognize that vocation in full spiritual freedom.”201

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Concretely this meant, “on the po­liti­cal plane, the pluralist State, on the economic plane, the decentralized economy.” Only t­ hese could safeguard the freedoms “necessary to the protection of the person.”202 The two positions ­were not necessarily incompatible. A state could both grant its citizens the freedom to choose their vocations and furnish the type of community that promoted faith. This is, a­ fter all, what Mounier meant by a “personalist democracy.” But the messy po­liti­cal history of the 1930s often required one to make a choice. Mounier neared Landsberg’s position, when he expressed his “deep-­seated joy” on the election of the Popu­lar Front, a clear and decisive break with the majority of his co-­religionists.203 Like Landsberg, Mounier treated the Popu­lar Front as an “imperfect cause” demanding engaged criticism, especially with re­ spect to its military policy, rapprochement with USSR, and secularism. But it also seemed the most effective obstacle to Fascism, and the first step ­toward a pluralist state.204 With regard to the war in Spain, Mounier seems to have been torn, holding to Maritain’s “double abstention”—­rejecting Franco’s Fascism without being able to bring himself to endorse the anticlerical Republicans—­a position which nonetheless elicited consternation from a Church hierarchy that mostly supported Franco.205 In 1940, however, Mounier split with Landsberg over his initial response to Vichy, which, despite many misgivings, he thought could be used to promote religious revival. Landsberg entered the re­sis­tance at the very beginning, a decision that Mounier would only take in 1941.206 That is, Mounier joined Maritain in the anti-­Fascist camp, not ­because of his embrace of Thomism, but rather when, in his reading of Scheler, he followed Landsberg in emphasizing t­ hose aspects most clearly opposed to Thomist metaphysics. The dual considerations arising from Mounier’s reading of Scheler also helps explain his po­liti­cal position ­after the war, when he came out strongly in support of the French Communist Party (the PCF), securing Esprit’s reputation as a left-­Catholic journal. Even if Communist publications rarely returned the f­ avor, Mounier drew a much more positive picture of the USSR a­ fter 1945 than he had before 1939, 207 and Esprit supported wide-­ranging socialist reforms of the economy and constitution, including nationalization and worker participation, while publishing a revised “Declaration of the Rights of Man” in a communitarian vein.208



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Certainly throughout this period, Mounier remained critical of Marxist materialism, especially for its rejection of the spiritual as an autonomous and creative real­ity. That is why he never dedicated himself seriously to a study of Marx’s texts. But Mounier increasingly came to see an alliance with Communism as crucial to his spiritual revolution, b­ ecause he thought that it embodied both logics that had guided his po­liti­cal engagement before the war. First, Mounier believed that despite its metaphysical materialism, Communism promised freedom, understood ­here as the overcoming of economic oppression. As early as 1936 Mounier had noted that “Marxism . . . ​is the symbol of liberation for this world at the pres­ent time.”209 ­A fter the war, Dominique Olivier could write in Mounier’s journal that Communism was “the only solution for the restoration of ­human freedom.”210 This view coincided with the humanist reading of Marx, which saw Communism as the solution to cap­i­tal­ist alienation.211 Marxist revolution now seemed a precondition of the freedom that for Mounier was central to engagement. Not only that: for all its flaws the PCF seemed the only party capable of achieving meaningful change. Already in 1944 Mounier had associated the de­cadence and “feminization” of Chris­tian­ity with its failure to attract workers. Chris­ tian­ity had become “a religion of ­women, of old men and the petit-­ bourgeois. It has pretty much dis­appeared in the tough ele­ment of our modern populations: the workers.” As he continued “a plebeian Chris­ tian­ity, in the era of the masses, is the first condition of a virile Chris­ tian­ity.”212 Mounier reiterated this assessment in one of the first editions of the new Esprit from December 1944: “A g­ reat revolution is ­under way, ordered by an obscure movement of history, which lies beyond our formulas, or our ­will, and also our goodwill.” Mounier declared that “good historical sense demands not that we stop rivers, but that we channel them.”213 In the closing years of the war, Communism was yet another “imperfect cause.” But second and ironically, Mounier identified in Communism the social and po­liti­cal ground for a religious revival, in much the same way that, at a dif­fer­ent historical moment, Stefanini had identified such a ground in Fascism. Ever since the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Mounier believed that his spiritual revolution implied a form of socialism. While vehemently anticommunist, and soft-­peddling its criticism of Fascism,

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Quadragesimo anno was still an anticapitalist document, demanding that greater attention be paid to the working classes.214 During the 1930s, Esprit showed considerable sympathy for socialism along the lines presented in the nineteenth ­century by Frenchman Pierre-­Joseph Prou­dhon and in the twentieth c­ entury by the Belgian Hendrik de Man.215 Moreover, Mounier kept his distance from the Ordre Nouveau in part b­ ecause he thought it maintained an “aristocratic contempt” of workers, and instead backed a universal minimum wage as the material condition for spiritual growth.216 It was thus only a small step in the 1940s to a fuller support of Communism in France.

Conclusion In his 1947 book, Introduction to Existentialisms, Mounier picked up again the philosophical morality play that had guided his po­liti­cal engagements in the 1930s. The script had been updated for the postwar period, with a new theme and a new cast member. Rather than a ­battle between personalisms, Mounier now discussed a conflict between dif­fer­ent va­ri­ e­ties of existentialism.217 In this conflict, Jean-­Paul Sartre had assumed the role previously played by Dandieu: the unrepentent Nietz­schean. Sartre was the heir to stoicism and had recognized the importance of the person and of a tension in the self, and thus was a power­ful force opposing the “one” of fallen everyday life.218 But insofar as Sartre’s existentialism had been denatured by an embrace of Nietz­sche’s atheism, it had led to a “disoriented and delirious freedom” cut off from higher values. In lines that recall his dismissal of Dandieu’s personalism, Mounier argued that “when the accent is shifted from the universal order to the intensity of the engagement, the content and the impact of action risk being devalued excessively in ­favor of the passion of the act.”219 As before such prob­lems reverberated throughout Sartre’s philosophy, leading to prob­lems at the level of intersubjectivity and of engagement. While Mounier refused the “journalistic” trope of identifying Sartre’s thought with Nazism, he thought t­ here was a grain of truth in the charge. Sartre had denied himself the (spiritual) means with which to challenge Nazi inhumanity.220 Thomism had only a walk-on part in 1947, but when it did tread the boards, it formed one-­half of a double act. In contesting what he saw as



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Sartre’s overly subjectivist existentialism, Mounier invoked both Thomism and Marxism: Medieval philosophy and con­temporary Marxism are without doubt the two forms of thought that, though u­ nder an often coarse objectivism, best sensed the irreducible solidity of the world of t­hings, what one could name its own subjectivity, the autonomy it affirms confronted with ­human imperialism, the necessary competition it brings to our destiny.221

Medieval Chris­tian­ity is invoked another time in a similar way: Mounier argued that Sartre played the role of “Luther” in the Marxist Church, reasserting the individual against the “secularized God” that was the Marxist conception of history.222 In both cases Marxism mirrors Thomism in its recognition of an exterior order. This is what gave it power and direction. A ­ fter criticizing the failures of Sartre’s theory of action, Mounier remarked that “a sort of inability to act seems ­today in Eu­rope to affect the best, when they ­don’t feel communist or Christian fervor.”223 The heroes of Mounier’s 1947 book ­were ­those thinkers who combined the Thomist / Marxist appreciation of an objective order with the stoic affirmation of subjectivity, just as in the 1930s he had promoted a personalism that mediated between Maritain’s Thomism and Dandieu’s Nietz­ scheanism. Like the Marxists, one should recognize the power and in­de­ pen­dence of the world, but unlike the latter and like Sartre, one should not “give any less of its greatest burden to the responsibility of the individual.”224 Mounier thus argued that we should recognize the tension and anxiety of the self, while orienting them by a higher value that, though never objectively graspable, was indicated by our very existence. In 1947 Mounier thought that the right balance had been struck by Sartre’s Christian existentialist opponents, but in a nod to his earlier thought he included u­ nder this rubric two of his teachers from the interwar period: Paul-­Louis Landsberg and Max Scheler.225 Mounier’s account of existentialism can stand in for an account of postwar phenomenology more broadly. For it brings to light the ways in which the confrontation between Thomists and Christian existentialists, which helped propel phenomenology around Eu­rope during the 1930s, prefigured many of the debates involving non-­Catholics in the postwar

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period. In fact, as we have seen, from the beginning ­these intra-­Catholic debates had a tendency to spill over, producing intellectual resources that could be used by an ever-­growing range of thinkers: The neo-­scholastic debate over Husserl’s realism provided an opening for Christian existentialists; the clash between dif­fer­ent groups of Catholics over Heidegger’s ontology produced arguments useful to secular thinkers; while the fierce arguments between Christians over the po­liti­cal consequences of Scheler’s phenomenology provided resources for existentialists trying to negotiate their relationship to Communism. As this pro­cess continued, the Catholics who had helped promote phenomenological ideas around Eu­rope withdrew from the stage. The script that they had written, however, persisted, to be picked up and adapted by new actors.

III Catholic Legacies 1940–1950

9 Saving the Husserl Archives

The first attempt to get Husserl’s papers out of Germany was perhaps

too close to a movie plot to be a ­viable plan. It was the late summer of 1938, and though Husserl had died only four months before, rising anti-­ Semitism in the German Reich made the ­future of his scholarly papers ­there uncertain at best. International tension heightened the dangers. Nazi saber-­rattling over the Sudetenland brought Eu­rope to the brink of war, and the pressure reduced, temporarily, only at the end of September when Neville Chamberlain came to terms with Adolf Hitler in Munich. B ­ ecause Freiburg was so close to the French frontier, Husserl’s w ­ idow, Malvine, feared that it would be an early casualty in the coming conflict. The time had come for Husserl’s papers to leave Germany. The Benedictine nun Adelgundis Jägerschmidt, who had been one of Husserl’s students before entering the Freiburg Lioba Convent and had remained close to the ­family, volunteered herself and her order for the rescue. In mid-­September she or­ga­nized the transportation of the papers down to Constance, a small German foothold on the southern shore of the Bodensee, and planned to transport them into neutral territory; the nuns would smuggle the papers over the border and into the Swiss Alps. Jägerschmidt called off the plan at the last minute ­because the nuns considered it excessively risky. Instead, she handed the papers over to a young priest, who accompanied them to 279

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Berlin, where they would be sent through diplomatic mail to his homeland of Belgium.1 T ­ here the priest would establish, first in secret and ­after the war to ­great public acclaim, the Husserl Archives, which would become one of the world’s foremost centers for phenomenological research.2 In 1910 Léon Noël had brought Husserl’s ideas into new lands through his writing and teaching. Thirty years ­later, his student Herman Leo Van Breda accomplished the same task, but this time with trains and traveling cases. It would be too ­simple to cite the history of the Husserl Archives as evidence that phenomenology was essentially compatible with Catholicism. As we ­shall see, the ambiguity of the relationship is at play in this part of the story, too. At first the promise of thousands of pages of previously unpublished notes led neo-­scholastics to resurrect earlier hopes of finding an ally in Husserl. The picture that emerged from the manuscripts did not, however, live up to ­these expectations. Conversely, in the postwar period the Catholic connection would become more a hindrance than a help to Van Breda and his young institution. Catholic connections ­were necessary for bringing phenomenology into new lands, but they had to be set to one side for it to fulfill its potential as a continental philosophy.

The Foundation of the Husserl Archives Leo Van Breda was born on February 28, 1911, to a relatively prosperous ­family based in the small town of Lier (Lierre) just outside of Antwerp. At the beginning of the ­Great Depression, two of his ­brothers, Jos and Maurice, founded a provincial bank, which still exists ­today.3 Leo had a less worldly vocation. Entering the Franciscan order, he was ordained a priest on August 19, 1934, taking the name Herman. Two years ­later he began his studies at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (ISP), earning his bachelor’s degree in 1937 and the licence the following year, based on a thesis treating Husserl’s early work.4 With the licence fresh in hand, Van Breda deci­ded to continue his studies in phenomenology for a doctorate, and in mid-­August of 1938 he set off for Freiburg to undertake research. He had already hatched a plan to examine and perhaps edit the unpublished manuscripts Husserl had alluded to in his published writings. On the first of September, less than



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a week a­ fter he had first made contact with her, Malvine Husserl summoned Van Breda to her home to broach a slightly dif­fer­ent topic.5 She had deci­ded that the manuscripts ­were no longer safe in Germany and needed to be transported out of the country. Gaston Berger, who happened to be visiting Freiburg at the time, vouched for Louvain as a suitable destination. Van Breda wrote to Noël, then president of the ISP, to win his backing. A ­ fter gaining some assurance that the Institute would support the proj­ect, Van Breda moved onto the practical question of how to smuggle the papers over the border. It was at this point that Jägerschmidt proposed her rescue plan. When Van Breda got news that the nuns had deemed the plan too dangerous, he took over the task himself. On September 21, Malvine Husserl signed a document transferring the papers to Van Breda, at which point he escorted them to Berlin and the Belgian Embassy. He then returned to Belgium to secure their transfer to Brussels, by appealing, via Noël, to the Belgian prime minister, Paul-­ Henri Spaak. The papers left Germany just before the anti-­Jewish vio­ lence of Reichskristallnacht, and w ­ ere safely in Louvain by the end of 6 November. Once the papers had been secured, Van Breda turned his attention to getting Malvine Husserl out of Germany too. He had hoped to bring her to Belgium, where she would board a ship for the United States, the country that had welcomed her son and ­daughter six years earlier. Despite some initial prob­lems, on January 13, 1939, Van Breda managed to secure a Belgian visa for three months.7 Malvine Husserl arrived in April. An American visa, however, proved more difficult. Only a­ fter the war ended did Malvine Husserl cross the Atlantic and re­unite with her ­children. ­Until then she made her home at a convent three kilo­meters outside of Louvain at Herent. Van Breda described it in a letter to Jean Hering: it was “an institution run by nuns, where they admit w ­ omen or young ladies who are looking for a quiet place to rest or to spend the last years of their lives.”8 Getting the archives and Malvine Husserl into Belgium was only the beginning of Van Breda’s l­abors. First, the task of editing Husserl’s papers turned out to be far greater than Van Breda had ­imagined. Through his actions that fall, Van Breda had managed to gather some 40,000 pages of Husserl’s handwritten notes, an enormous quantity that almost

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scuttled his proj­ect from the start. In the difficult times caused by economic and impending international crises, Noël was reluctant to write Van Breda a blank check, especially for an edition of Husserl’s papers. His hesitation was relayed to Van Breda in Freiburg by his doctoral adviser, Joseph Dopp.9 Such a proj­ect “could seriously interest [Noël]” but “only if it is a ­matter of one or relatively few volumes, and if ­there is no fear of costs that could arise ­later.”10 The difficulties posed by the extent of the archives w ­ ere matched by their content. The papers ­were not immediately accessible. Husserl had composed his notes using a relatively common form of German stenography. But over more than forty years of research, he had adapted it to his needs. As a result, only three of Husserl’s former assistants ­were able to decipher the writing. Their collaboration in a transcription proj­ect was required if Van Breda’s larger plans had any hope of success. Both Ludwig Landgrebe and Eugen Fink expressed interest in the proj­ect. The third assistant, Edith Stein, who had since entered a nunnery, was not available for work, but Van Breda did manage to visit her in 1942 to discuss the plans.11 Fink and Landgrebe arrived in Belgium in the spring of 1939 and stayed u­ ntil the following May, when, ­a fter a brief internment in France, they ­were called up for military ser­vice in the German army. On parting, they each took 1,500 pages of manuscripts in the hope that they could continue the transcription work.12 In 1942 a new set of collaborators joined the archive, including Stephan and Gertrude Strasser and Lucy Gelber, all from Austria. The emigration of the archives thus entailed the emigration of a group of phenomenologists; the proj­ect was ballooning in size and cost. Some funding could be found for Van Breda, as a doctoral student at the ISP, and so Dopp urged him to involve himself personally in the edition work.13 But the employment of Fink and Landgrebe posed greater difficulties. The national research foundations in Belgium, the FNRS and the Fondation Universitaire, would not be of any help. They only provided funds for Belgian nationals. Further, as the plans w ­ ere taking shape in late October 1938, Noël had felt it necessary to assure the rector that “­there is in no way question of attaching persons to the university in any fashion at all.”14 ­There existed, however, another option, a funding source that had been established with the express pur-



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pose of raising the profile of Belgian science in the world at large: the Fondation Francqui. Émile Francqui had been an official for the Belgian government, and in the early twentieth ­century he had made a lucrative ­career in the world of banking. A ­ fter World War I, Francqui considered the success of Belgium’s universities to be crucial to national reconstruction, and he was involved in the creation of both the Fondation Universitaire (1920) and the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (1928). In 1932 with support from the American president, Herbert Hoover, he founded the Francqui Foundation to promote “disinterested research.” The foundation ran three separate programs. One, the “Prix Francqui” of 500,000 francs, was awarded annually to “a Belgian who has made an impor­tant contribution to scholarship [science], the value of which has increased Belgium’s international prestige.” Another allowed students to travel for a year to other Eu­ro­pean universities. The third program fit Van Breda’s needs best. It provided funds to “invite renowned foreign scholars to teach for one academic year at one of the four Belgian universities.”15 In his first letter soliciting support, Dopp emphasized the racial f­ actor in Husserl’s treatment in Germany: “During the last years of his life, the German press obeyed the injunction to minimize the importance of this thinker of Jewish origin. ­T hose of his German disciples who had the courage to remain loyal to him ­were systematically dismissed from all positions.” Dopp thus presented the founding of the Husserl Archives to the Francqui Foundation as a case of Belgian fair-­mindedness in the face of German racial prejudice. As Dopp explained, both Fink and Landgrebe w ­ ere “of German nationality and race, but are in disfavor due to their attachment to the memory of a phi­los­o­pher of the Jewish race. At the moment one like the other finds himself with an uncertain ­f uture.”16 The pitch clearly worked. On October 27, 1938 (that is, while some of the archives ­were still making their way to Belgium), the Francqui Foundation awarded a grant, providing an annual subsidy of 70,000 Belgian francs over two years.17 In 1942 Noël again applied for money from the Francqui Foundation, gaining another 25,000 Belgian francs, followed by a grant of 48,000 in 1944.18 It was still a hand-­to-­mouth existence. The l­ater sums ­were considerably smaller than the first grant, and inflation had eaten away at the buying power of what ­little remained. In a report from 1951

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Van Breda claimed that the Francqui funding in the period 1941–1944 needed to be supplemented by bedeltochten (begging trips).19 Money was one ­thing, but a more serious prob­lem followed from the worsening international situation. In the fall of 1938, Belgium had seemed an ideal haven for the archives, out of reach of the Nazis. But by May 1940 it had become another victim of Hitler’s ambition. The dangers Van Breda had just eluded caught up with him again. Whereas flight had been the best option in 1938, in 1940 Van Breda opted for secrecy. He l­ater wrote to Marvin Farber, the American phenomenologist and founder of the Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The laws and the general conduct of the occupier with re­spect to non-­ Aryans and against the literary production of the same rendered the existence of the archives of such an impor­tant non-­Aryan author particularly precarious; above all since the occupier could consider Louvain’s collection to be the result of what one could call spiritual emigration. The work on such an archive was naturally seen as an anti-­German enterprise. It was necessary to camouflage every­thing, hide every­thing, and remain ­silent.20

Discovery would have been particularly dangerous for the new members of the team a­ fter 1942. Lucy Gelber, Stephan Strasser, and his wife, Gertrude, all came from Jewish families, which made them targets for the Nazi regime. In March 1944 another archive employee was arrested by the Gestapo and, in Van Breda’s ominous words, “sent to Poland.”21 Already in 1939 Noël had pressed upon Farber the need to delete any reference to the archives in his publications. Further, in publishing the papers, Van Breda and Noël made clear that the participation of Fink and Landgrebe would have to be kept a secret. Any reference to their work on Husserl, Van Breda feared, would result in an expedited trip back to Germany.22 Van Breda took similar precautions in his correspondence. When writing to Landgrebe and Fink a­ fter they had been mobilized into the German army, he made sure not to mention Malvine Husserl by name, referring to her only as the “Dame de Herent.”23 In official paperwork all references to Husserl ­were scrubbed out. Fink and Landgrebe had been brought into Belgium on a visa in 1939 to teach modern German



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philosophy, without mention of Husserl.24 When they had to return to Germany in 1940, the official notification of their work emphasized research on other German phi­los­o­phers. According to Noël’s declaration, Fink had worked on Heidegger, in par­tic­u­lar (in what must have been an inside joke) his concept of “aletheia” or uncoveredness.25 What was at the time a useful device for deflecting suspicion would cause Fink more difficulties ­after the war, when Gerhart (Husserl’s son) heard a rumor that Fink was preparing his Habilitation u­ nder Heidegger, and so threatened to break off relations.26 The monies from the Francqui Foundation also had to be carefully arranged to avoid tipping off the authorities to the archives’ existence.27 Only in early 1945, when Belgium had been liberated, did Van Breda feel he could dispense with such precautions. He then wrote to Farber to suggest that they could now conduct an “open collaboration.”28 In September 1945 Van Breda’s name was added to the list of “foreign consulting editors” at the Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the first articles about the archives appeared ­there.29 In the short term the allies would pose as much a threat to the archives as the Nazis. In the spring of 1944 British and American forces began bombarding Belgian towns, and an unlucky strike might have destroyed all that Van Breda had worked so hard to secure. He recounted to a visiting researcher from Paris, “I instituted a system of dispersion, hoping thus to save, even in the most unfavorable scenario, at least one of the transcriptions, part of the nontranscribed originals, and a large part of the library.”30 Though some of the Husserls’ belongings ­were destroyed during an allied air raid at the port of Anvers in 1940, and an impor­tant part of Husserl’s correspondence was lost, the other papers w ­ ere not damaged.31 ­After the war Van Breda sought to consolidate what he had begun. The first priority was to gather all of Husserl’s papers together. In the 1930s Landgrebe had brought about 1,500 pages of Husserl’s manuscripts to Prague, where they w ­ ere cared for u­ nder the auspices of the Prague Phenomenological Circle and Jan Patočka. In 1938, when he was preparing the rescue of the papers, Van Breda had visited Patočka, but since the Munich accords had just been signed, Patočka did not consider the manuscripts to be in any immediate danger and merely accepted the offer

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of a refuge for the manuscripts in the Belgian Embassy should events take a turn for the worse. 32 In 1946 Van Breda renewed contact with a much-­weakened Philosophical Circle, and Patočka agreed that the papers should be transferred to Louvain.33 In addition Van Breda put out a request in the 1947 edition of the Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: any correspondence with Husserl, course notes, or phenomenological lit­er­a­ture held by readers should be sent in copy to Belgium.34 During the war, Van Breda’s ambitions had already extended beyond the founder of phenomenology. A ­ fter Edith Stein’s fatal deportation to Auschwitz in 1942, the Carmelite order in Echt (Dutch Limburg) managed to smuggle her handwritten papers to Louvain. The archives remained the property of the Carmelites, but w ­ ere loaned to the Husserl Archives for the purposes of preparing an edition, which appeared in the early years a­ fter the war u­ nder the direction of Lucy Gelber.35 The end of the war brought other opportunities. The émigré Munich phenomenologist Moritz Geiger had died in the United States in 1937, and his wife turned to Marvin Farber with his papers. Deciding that he did not have the time to deal with them, Farber proposed sending the archives to Louvain in 1947.36 At about the same time, a greater prize seemed in reach: Max Scheler’s archives. Many of Scheler’s papers had been destroyed during the war, but the remainder ­were now in Godesberg, a small town outside Bonn, in the possession of his ­w idow, Maria Scheler. 37 In the winter of 1947–1948 Van Breda tried to curry f­ avor with Frau Scheler, by sending coffee, cocoa, sugar, milk powder, tea, and even stockings from Belgium to the more-­tightly rationed Germany. 38 Further, in his correspondence he said he would provide for Frau Scheler and her son in Belgium for a period of five years, a remarkable offer given the financial constraints on the archive at the time. 39 According to Walter Biemel, Van Breda also approached Martin Heidegger about his papers.40 The plans for expansion did not develop as Van Breda had hoped. ­After 1947 t­ here is no more mention of Geiger’s or Heidegger’s papers, and the Stein archive was not destined to remain in Louvain. Work with Gelber was challenging. In 1955 Van Breda complained to a collaborator at Les Études Philosophiques, “­those responsible for the Stein papers have con-



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tinued to take decisions concerning the consultation and edition of the papers, without wanting to fix a line of clear and objective conduct. I ­can’t manage to shake the impression that arbitrariness is often the rule t­ here.”41 Eventually Van Breda broke off relations with the archives, and they ­were transferred back to the Dutch Carmelites, ­later finding a permanent home in Cologne. Then in April 1948, Maria Scheler opted for a competing offer from the Tübingen Max Scheler Society.42 Walter Biemel claims that Frau Scheler had turned down Van Breda’s offer in late 1947 b­ ecause she feared that the University of Louvain would downplay Scheler’s criticism of Catholicism.43 The notes from that meeting, however, tell a more complex story. First, Frau Scheler did not formally reject the offer ­until four months ­later. Second, while she did raise concerns that Scheler’s work from 1922– 1927 had a “certain anticlerical affect” and thus might “cause offense at the Catholic University,” she also dismissed the worry that Louvain was an unsuitable home for Scheler’s papers. She assured Van Breda that it was “false to speak of a fall from Catholicism. [Scheler] had repeatedly told her that he was Catholic in body and soul, and even if he wanted to, he could not renounce his Catholic roots [Verwurzelung]. His reaction was aimed rather against the ‘organ­ization’ of Catholicism.”44 Scheler’s papers now reside in the phenomenology collection at the Munich Staatsbibliothek. Van Breda was more successful in his publishing ambitions. Before the fighting ended, the wheels had been set in motion for an edition of Husserl’s papers: the Husserliana. ­Because paper was in short supply, Van Breda turned first to his sister-­in-­law, who was an editor for the Panthéon Press in Antwerp and who agreed to publish the edited papers as well as Van Breda’s doctoral dissertation and a number of books relating to the archives.45 The relationship with Panthéon does not seem to have developed smoothly. In his correspondence from 1944, Van Breda gave the impression that the publication of the first volumes of the edition was imminent, but in real­ity ­there was ­little pro­gress.46 Perhaps due to t­ hese frustrations, Van Breda opened up conversations with competing presses in 1947, approaching the Dutch firm of Martinus Nijhoff in September. A contract was signed in early 1948, with the first volume appearing in 1950.47

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A Catholic Archive? In the first years of the Husserl Archives, it was clear that it enjoyed a close institutional and intellectual relationship with the Catholic University of Louvain, not least in purely ­legal terms. Malvine and then Gerhart Husserl (their son) had transferred rights over the papers to the ISP, and the ISP bought Husserl’s library in 1940 for $2,500.48 Moreover, according to the contract, Noël had executive control over the archives and his permission was required for the publication of any part of the Nachlass—­such as the manuscript D17, which appeared in the Husserl memorial volume edited by Farber in 1940.49 The early reports to the Francqui Foundation emphasized the fact that Van Breda worked ­under the direction of Noël and Dopp, a connection that provided institutional cover for an other­wise young and inexperienced scholar.50 ­After all, when he rescued Husserl’s papers, Van Breda was only twenty-­seven years old and had only recently completed his first degree. When he finished his studies, the ISP provided Van Breda employment. On gaining his doctorate in 1941, he became a “substitute professor” ­there, teaching courses on scholastic cosmology in Flemish.51 Not only did the Catholic University have nominal authority over the archives, it also ploughed significant resources into it. Writing to Farber in 1945, Van Breda emphasized that since 1939 the ISP had taken on “heavy financial burdens, and had had to invest g­ reat sums in the work of the Husserl Archives.”52 In 1949 Van Breda admitted to Gerhart Husserl that “the University of Louvain has provided our archives with very beautiful facilities; I now have the use of four large offices, where every­ thing required for the conservation of the manuscripts (safe, ­etc.) is provided for.”53 The previous year, the university had paid for the installation of a particularly expensive cork floor. 54 The archive stayed and remains to this day within the grounds of the ISP, now the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte ­after the Flemish and French-­speaking universities split in 1970. Van Breda, like all the archive directors ­after him, was an employee of the university, and the archive’s steering committee, while including scholars from elsewhere, was dominated by professors from the ISP, like Dopp, de Waelhens, and Van Breda. Its first president, Edgar de Bruyne, was an alumnus. According to the Archive Statutes from 1950, the presi-



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dent of the ISP was automatically a member.55 This support did not pass unnoticed. Though we should note the persuasive intention, Fink made a point of referring to it in a May 1939 letter to Gerhart Husserl: “That your f­ ather’s phenomenological philosophy . . . ​­will rise again is thanks exclusively to the ‘Institute.’ ” Fink noted that ­there was a growing interest in phenomenology in a variety of countries, naming France, Poland, and Amer­i­ca, but “the gumption and the g­ rand attitude, which proved itself truly in sacrifices and achievements, could only be found h­ ere in Louvain.”56 The close association with the ISP left the impression on many outside Louvain that the Husserl Archives ­were a Catholic enterprise. The case of Tran Duc Thao, the Viet­nam­ese Marxist whose 1951 book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism would cause a sensation in France, is instructive. In 1943, when Thao wanted to visit the archives to pursue his work on Husserl, he seemed to think that expressing interest in scholasticism would help win Van Breda over. In addition to his work on phenomenology he declared his intention to prepare a “thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas.”57 Van Breda took Thao at his word, though ­there is no evidence the latter ever followed up on the proj­ect.58 Van Breda would also receive several letters requesting that he explain the relationship between phenomenology and Catholicism, requests he politely declined.59 The Catholic connection was particularly impor­tant for Malvine Husserl, as it enabled her to commit her husband’s spiritual remains and ­later indeed her own ­future to a young priest she had only just met.60 When she recalled the events in a set of letters to her c­ hildren during the war, she described her ­mental state in the summer of 1938: My main concern was the security of the archival manuscripts: a high bookshelf of folders. A seizure from inside the country was not out of the question, even less than a bomb from outside it. Where did I find advice and help in my foresakenness and powerlessness? Oddly enough, only from the Catholics.61

Malvine Husserl emphasized the Catholic connection ­because the purpose of her letter was to justify her own conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism on March 21, 1942. She explained that she and her husband

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had raised their ­children as Protestants ­because of where they had lived: Halle and then Göttingen. But when the ­family moved to Catholic Freiburg, she had become more involved in Catholic circles, and this set her on the path to conversion. In addition, many of Malvine Husserl’s supporters in the 1930s, when she felt increasingly isolated in Freiburg, ­were Catholic, including Jägerschmidt and her h­ ouse­keeper, Josephine Näpple.62 While the Catholicism of the ISP helped reassure Husserl’s wife, for o­ thers the Institute’s reputation as a center of scholastic learning was crucial for legitimizing Van Breda’s plan. In an early report, Dopp argued that the difficulties facing the edition of the papers ­were “curiously analog to ­those that are posed by the deciphering of the manuscripts of medieval authors.” The Institute’s experience in the latter made it an appropriate home for the former.63 Van Breda l­ater made the same connection in his account of the rescue.64 While, in line with progressive neo-­scholastic norms, the collaborators at the archive studiously avoided any doctrinal influence—­Fink and Landgrebe ­were not Catholics, and, as we have seen, Fink’s reading of Husserl had come to represent the incompatibility of phenomenology with Thomism—­t he connection to the neo-­scholastic Institute was still palpable. In his ­later work Landgrebe came to be interested in religious questions, and other collaborators, such as Stephan Strasser and Lucy Gelber, ­were Catholics. For them faith played a determinative role in their philosophical work, even if Strasser moved away ­later from neo-­Thomism. Most importantly, Van Breda’s reading of Husserl can be seen as a product of the Catholic milieu, and understood in continuity with earlier neo-­ scholastic interpretations of phenomenology.

Van Breda’s Phenomenology In his recollections Van Breda claims that he had first learned about Husserl in courses given by Noël.65 Though it has not survived, the subject of Van Breda’s licence thesis on the early Husserl suggests a similar reading to his teacher. When Van Breda first set off to Freiburg in August 1938, he had originally intended to continue this line of inquiry.66 Writing to Malvine Husserl and Heidegger about his plans, Van Breda described his doctorate as “a bio-­bibliographical study, in addition to a discussion of



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Husserl’s life up to 1900.” In the letters Van Breda posed several questions about Husserl’s education in the period before the publication of the Logical Investigations, including his studies in Halle and relationship to Carl Stumpf, with whose work Noël and Gemelli had associated phenomenology in the first blush of enthusiasm for phenomenology around 1910.67 That is, Van Breda wanted to concentrate on the period and the themes leading to what Noël had identified as Husserl’s “conversion.” Van Breda did not downplay the stakes of his proj­ect. He presented his work to Malvine Husserl as part of the phenomenological ferment at the ISP: “Several professors at this university have in the last two or three years dedicated their lectures to phenomenology and in par­tic­u­lar its founder and principal proponent Dr. Edmund Husserl. Several students study Husserl’s philosophy or that of his students for their doctoral work.”68 Van Breda’s dating of this resurgence in interest suggests that it was a by-­product of the critical realism debates. Whereas scholars like Gilson had yoked the progressive proj­ect to Husserl’s phenomenology in order to delegitimize it, ­others like Vanni Rovighi and Kremer had sought to show that phenomenology, and by extension progressive neo-­scholasticism, was not destined to arrive at idealist conclusions. Husserl’s manuscripts provided a tantalizing possibility of resolving this question once and for all. Just as the promise of a second volume to Being and Time allowed a diverse set of thinkers to proj­ect their own concerns onto Heidegger’s philosophy, the untapped archive became a repository for the hopes and fears of Husserl’s Thomist readers. What­ever fantasies Van Breda might have cultivated about Husserl’s papers in the summer of 1938, they ­were quickly dispelled. First, it was readily apparent that the manuscripts shed very ­little light on the period he had chosen for his dissertation (1887–1900). Van Breda shifted his attention to the ­later stages of Husserl’s work.69 Second, their contents did not provide a ­simple confirmation of the progressive reading. On Tuesday, March 20, 1945, Van Breda presented his work at the Archives to the Société Philosophique de Louvain. ­After detailing the transcription work, Van Breda outlined the interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy that it made pos­si­ble. He identified the transcendental reduction as the decisive ele­ ment of Husserl’s thought, which opened up the path to the transcendental ego. The task of phenomenology, Van Breda argued, was to use

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intentional analy­sis to describe how the ego constituted its objects. This analy­sis was more fundamental than, and provided justification for, the Wesensschau. In presenting phenomenology in this way, Van Breda had almost completely inverted the traditional progressive neo-­scholastic reading, which emphasized the grasping of essences and rejected or sidelined the transcendental reduction. A ­ fter all, other Christian scholars like Berger had used the reduction to depict Thomism as naively stuck in the natu­ral attitude. Van Breda admitted at the end of his pre­sen­ta­tion, “One w ­ ill still won­der about the possibility of using all of this in a scholastic Institute.” Noël prob­ably spoke for many of ­those pres­ent, when he expressed his disappointment: “Less than we thought.”70 Van Breda did not publish widely. He devoted his time and efforts primarily to the management of the Archives. But what he did write shows how he grappled with the surprising and (to a Thomist) prima facie disappointing nature of the archives’ contents. Van Breda did not shy away from the prob­lem, focusing his work on exactly ­those ele­ments of Husserl’s philosophy that seemed most incompatible with Thomism. His first article, published in 1941  in the Tijdschrift voor filosofie, examined Husserl’s concept of the “pure phenomenon” (Zuivere phaenomeen)—­the phenomenon ­after the epoché. His doctoral dissertation from the same year, which was awarded a prize by the Belgian Acad­emy but remained unpublished due to “the cultural politics of the occupier,” treated the transcendental reduction during Husserl’s idealist period, 1920–1938.71 From his earliest essays to the latest, Van Breda followed a remarkably consistent line of argument. Unlike other progressives, he was clear that Husserl’s epoché irrevocably bracketed existence. Van Breda hammered the point home in his final sentence of the Tijdsschrift article: for Husserl, the pure phenomenon was “immanent meaning, as immanent significance to my pure, immanent consciousness life.” In it “any claim to real­ity, any claim to ontic validity in the phenomenon is radically removed and put out of action.”72 Intentionality, he recalled, was not our relationship with an extra-­mental existence but rather a relationship between our signifying activity and a meaning.73 It was thus not equipped to be the foundation of a critical realism, as the progressives had thought. In a similar vein, Van Breda embraced Husserl’s transcendental reduction and



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theory of constitution. Far from being a dispensable radicalization of the epoché, for Van Breda the reduction ensured the “truly philosophical character of phenomenology.”74 In his l­ater work, Van Breda presented the reduction to “thought as thought” as a form of authenticity, ­because it revealed the way we constituted a world that seemed alien to us. The reduction was both an act of freedom and what revealed the freedom of the ego.75 For ­these reasons Van Breda recognized that, as presented in his published works, Husserl’s thought came close to idealism. Van Breda believed nonetheless that it was pos­si­ble to align phenomenology with Thomism. That is, to bring Thomism and phenomenology together, it was not necessary to set the transcendental reduction to one side, or identify constitution with divine creation, as progressives had previously thought. First, the existence Husserl had bracketed in the epoché was not the “being of the School [Thomism], but existence ad modum entis physici [in the manner of a physical entity].”76 In fact, Van Breda thought, a more fundamental access to being, an “Ur-­ Gegebenheit” or “primordial givenness,” lurked at the root of the constituting power of the ego. ­Here, Van Breda claimed, Husserl’s analyses in the archives could be used to challenge his more systematic published statements. Van Breda wrote in 1945, “One of the most impor­tant corrections brought by the unedited manuscripts is precisely the far greater importance of intuition, and thus of the objective real given in perception.” Even if Husserl “sometimes seemed to forget it,” the manuscripts showed that transcendental constitution relied on a “pre-­rational” or “pre-­categorial intuition,” which took into account “the existence of ­things and realities prior to our constitutive ­labors.”77 This is why, despite their personal friendship, Van Breda was vehemently opposed to Fink’s reading of phenomenology. The transcendental realm was not the “origin of the world,” but instead depended upon a prior intuitive grasping of being. In late 1945, Van Breda wrote to Merleau-­Ponty to warn him of the dangers of Fink’s position: “Although [Fink] hid his opposition well and in his splendid naivety Husserl himself did not notice it—at least as concerns the article in Kantstudien,” the former’s arguments ­were ultimately a “criticism of the very foundations of Husserl’s thought.”78 ­Because the givenness of the real in

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intuition was fundamental, constitution could not be described as “creative.” Rather, it was the “active grasping . . . ​of an immediate given.”79 Van Breda preferred the term “canonization” over “constitution” or “foundation,” b­ ecause it highlighted the secondary and derivative nature of the pro­cess.80 In a 1959 essay Van Breda went so far as to claim that though Husserl had never developed this line of argument, the transcendental reduction opened a “metaphysical dimension” and thus brought the phenomenologist to the prob­lem of being.81 This being, Van Breda clarified, was not the mind-­independent real—­what the scholastics called the ens ut existens—­but being insofar as it was intelligible: the ens ut verum.82 As such, Van Breda noted, it recalled “the veritas ontologica of High Scholasticism.”83 Van Breda’s metaphysics thus had a dyadic quality, presenting the subject as “openness ­towards . . .” and the object as “revealed to. . . .”84 It followed directly from the Husserlian understanding of man as “being in the world.”85 Van Breda concluded with a comparison between Husserl and Edward Pusey, one of the leading lights of the Oxford movement in nineteenth-­century Britain. Leo XIII had described Pusey as a “bell that, while remaining outside, called believers to church.” So too, according to Van Breda, Husserl had guided ­others into the ­temple of metaphysics even if he had stopped at the threshold.86 The conviction that phenomenology and metaphysics ­were compatible led Van Breda to integrate Husserlian insights into his classes on Thomistic cosmology and medieval philosophy at the Institute.87 As Van Breda’s comparison to Pusey hinted, he also thought that one could build a religious philosophy from this metaphysical reading of Husserl’s thought. Van Breda aired this possibility at the 1948 International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam, where he presented a paper titled “Husserl and the Prob­lem of God.” He argued that ­because Husserl’s idealism had inhibited his development of a religious philosophy, t­ here ­were very few substantial discussions of religious questions even in the unpublished manuscripts. Nevertheless, Van Breda was adamant that “Husserl the man” was an “au­then­tic Christian” and believed personally in the existence of God, which suggested that his philosophy did not foreclose the possibility of belief.88 At the Congress, Van Breda was content to relay the reasons Husserl had been so reluctant to work out this



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possibility. But in a letter composed at about the same time, he provided a more positive account. While updating his 1939 book on the religious thought of con­temporary phi­los­o­phers, the Jesuit Paul Ortegat asked Van Breda to put together a few pages on Husserl.89 Van Breda responded in a long letter, referring to his previous claim about the priority of the intuition of being, which challenged Husserl’s idealism. Adopting this reading of phenomenology, he argued, one could develop a “natu­ral theology” on a phenomenological basis. Such a theology would take the “conception of religion and God of our cultural milieu” as its starting point. Applying the epoché, it would then seek the “rational” and “au­then­tic core” of this religion in the Lebenswelt. Most importantly, an intentional analy­sis of this core would reveal its ultimate foundations in intuition, the final source of theological meaning.90 Van Breda’s argument that we needed to put to one side the scientific understanding of real­ity to discover our primordial access to being in a way that justified religious belief aligned him, like many of the younger generation of progressive neo-­scholastics, with the Christian existentialists. In 1945 he received a letter from a group of students he had taught at a seminary in Poitiers before his studies in Louvain. They asked for advice about how to respond to contemporaneous philosophy: We are trying to bring together our personal experiences in order to take an attitude with re­spect to the movement of con­temporary ideas, and even to insert you in the place that is appropriate. We are particularly struck t­ oday by the force of the existentialist movement, without however letting it impose on us. We would nonetheless be happy to know more about its genesis, to grasp more profoundly its meaning and implications.91

In his response, Van Breda spoke warmly about existentialism. It was, he argued, “the manifestation of a sane reaction. Wanting to escape the maze of a reasoning reason (which reasoned moreover very often falsely) [existentialists] wanted to reinstitute the rights of direct and lived experience, the final source of our knowledge and our entire conscious life. The g­ reat idealist ideals had shown themselves to be hollow and in­effec­ tive.” And yet at the same time Van Breda suggested that existentialism

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must not completely lose faith in higher values: “When one uses existentialist philosophy in order to throw at the world one’s absolute disgust . . . ​ of all h­ uman values . . . ​­there is nothing that remains standing, even if the existentialist in question is of the exceptional philosophical quality of a Sartre.”92 For this reason, Van Breda recommended to his students the Christian existentialists and their Thomist interlocutors: “R. Le Senne, L. Lavelle and G. Marcel (all three teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris). E. Gilson and J. Maritain, and above all Maurice Blondel (Aix-­en-­Provence), all French and contemporaries.” Van Breda lamented that t­hese phi­los­o­ phers ­were not more prominent in the Catholic world. They would have been more widely read, he argued, “if many priests and even laypeople did not take the juridical prescription to teach Thomist doctrine . . . ​as a dogmatic rule, according to which in philosophy it is necessary to think again what was taught by the ­great masters of the thirteenth ­century.” The difficulty was that when one refused this dogma, one risked “error in rebus philosophicis [­matters of philosophy] and consequently condemnation.” While Van Breda admitted that dogma was impor­tant for the institution of the Church, he thought it led too many Catholics “to distrust the true Christians, ­those who prefer the spirit of St. Thomas to the letter of the Summa.” In this way, it hindered “philosophical renewal,” and prevented the possibility of “thought for thought’s sake.”93 Van Breda’s discomfort with Church dogma in philosophy informed his plans for the archives. He quickly became convinced that its reputation as a Catholic institution was an obstacle to its f­ uture success, undermining the impression that it was governed by the scholarly princi­ples of disinterested research. Certainly, the Catholic connection elicited considerable hostility from certain quarters. Farber, for instance, was highly suspicious of Van Breda and nixed the archives’ funding application to the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation ­because of Van Breda’s religious affiliation. In an informal report from October 1945, Farber claimed that the Husserliana proj­ect would be of “doubtful value if directed by von Breda [sic] alone.” Farber worried that the edition would be “capitalized” for Catholic ends. He concluded: “­There is no question of the value of the material, but only of its coming out u­ nder exclusively Catholic auspices.”94



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Van Breda strug­gled to ­counter this hostility from the start. When writing to Farber in 1939, Van Breda downplayed the role played by the Catholic University: “The only goal of centralizing every­thing to do with the Husserl papers in the hands of the Institute is to make the work easier, greater, and more efficient.” 95 At other times, he preferred to avoid the issue entirely. In his correspondence for the archives and in his publications, he would often neglect to add the “RP” (Reverend F ­ ather) before or the “OFM” (Order of Friars Minor) ­after his name, except where he thought the religious connection might be an advantage, such as when promoting the archive in the Philosophisches Jahrbuch or Les Études Philosophiques.96 Van Breda believed that the archives would flourish only if they became in­de­pen­dent of the Church. In a report to the Francqui Foundation in late 1943, Van Breda suggested that the ­future archives should be “quite distinct from the Institute and the University of Louvain.”97 He made the first steps ­toward realizing this goal in 1947. In a meeting in July, he laid out plans to make the archives an “in­de­pen­dent ­legal entity . . . ​dissociated from the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie.”98 In a discussion l­ater that year with Marvin Farber, Van Breda made it clear that it would be advantageous “if it was known to the public that the Husserl Archives [did] not belong to the university, nor directly to the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, but [was] an in­de­pen­dent, international research fa­cil­i­ty.”99 Van Breda wrote to Gerhart Husserl the next day to keep him abreast of the plans. While reassuring Husserl that the work at the Institute and the archives was purely scholarly, and f­ ree from ecclesiastical interference—he went so far as to claim “that a greater academic freedom reigns in Louvain than in the so-­called ‘­free’ universities”—­Van Breda wanted to “avoid the impression that [the archives] ­were closely bound to the Catholic University or the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, which he thought might “scare off” some phi­los­o­phers. As a first stage in this pro­cess Van Breda proposed forming an international and (he d ­ idn’t have to add) non-­ Catholic “Comité de Patronage” of prominent scholars from around the world.100 The committee would include Marvin Farber, Gaston Berger, Jean Wahl, Roman Ingarden, and Hendrik J. Pos.101 The contract transferring the rights and responsibilities for the archives from the ISP was

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not completed ­until July 1962, though even ­today it counts as one of the research groups of the university.102

A Secular International From early on in its history, Van Breda hoped that the archives might become an “international phenomenological center.”103 He was well placed to realize this ambition. In Louvain, or Leuven as it was known to the Flemish who made up the majority of the population t­ here, life was conducted in a number of languages. ­Because Belgian national borders cut across linguistic borders, Belgian intellectual communities ­were knitted into both the French and the Dutch academic worlds. Van Breda’s own archives speak to this internationalism. Around a half of the documents are written in French, and a significant proportion are in Flemish and German. In addition, one can find letters composed in Italian, Spanish, and En­glish. Internationalization was easier in Louvain than elsewhere, but it was also more necessary. If the archives ­were to be a success, they could not simply be a Belgian affair. One could speculate that if it had been a French scholar who had managed to rescue Husserl’s papers from Germany, ­these considerations would not have played such an impor­tant role. The size and importance of the intellectual community in France allowed at least the pretension to self-­sufficiency. Such illusions held ­little sway in Belgium. Given his institutional relationship to the ISP, one might imagine that Van Breda would have used the transnational networks of neo-­ scholasticism to achieve his international aspirations, and it is true that he did rely on its connections when building up contacts across the world. But ­because he was concerned about associating the archives too closely with the Church, Van Breda cultivated relations with non-­Catholics. That is why when, at the end of 1939 in New York, Marvin Farber founded the International Phenomenological Society, an organ­ization with no vis­i­ble connection to the Church, Van Breda was quick to make contact. As we have seen, Van Breda remained in close communication with Farber throughout the war and involved him in some of the most impor­ tant decisions about the archives’ ­future once the conflict was over.



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This does not mean that the relationship was ­free of friction. In one of the first meetings of the new archives, Van Breda complained that both Farber’s society and the journal it edited “­were without any idea of Husserlian orthodoxy.”104 And although he praised the quality of its articles, Van Breda criticized the journal for lacking a real phenomenological center. Writing to a French priest ­after the war, Van Breda argued that the “journal, which calls itself phenomenological, and wants to be the continuation of Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung and at the same time the organ of a phenomenological society, does not dedicate sufficient space to phenomenology as such.” Van Breda also bemoaned the fact that Farber’s review often took an anti-­Catholic line.105 Meanwhile, he grew frustrated with Farber’s lack of orga­nizational skills, poor French, and failure to understand the difficult conditions in postwar Belgium: he remarked to Fink at the end of 1946, “­there is no ‘Spannung [tension]’ between the [International Phenomenological] Society and us, but certainly a malaise.”106 The overtures to the United States reflected Gerhart Husserl’s priorities more than Van Breda’s. As early as December 1938, when the archives had only recently arrived in Belgium, Gerhart had talked with excitement about phenomenology’s prospects in the New World, expressing his conviction that more works needed to be translated into En­glish.107 In contrast, Van Breda placed ­great store in reaching out to phenomenologists elsewhere in Eu­rope. He published articles to advertise the archives in journals across the continent, including the Algemeen Nederlands tijdschrift voor wijsbegeerte en psychologie (1946), the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (1947), the Swedish Theoria (1947), Les Études Philosophiques (1954), and the Revista Portuguesa de filosofia (1956). In the 1950s Van Breda would or­ga­nize a series of international phenomenological colloquia—in Belgium (1951), Germany (1956), and France (1957)—­ which served as some of the first official meetings between French and German members of the movement.108 Reflecting on the way he acted as an intermediary in a 1939 discussion between Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Van Breda styled himself as a “translator between phenomenologists of dif­fer­ent nationalities . . . ​a role that, in the years to come would befall me quite often.”109

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The Husserliana displayed this secular internationalism prominently. The first volume was the German version of the Cartesian Mediations. By choosing the text where Husserl distinguished his work most clearly from scholasticism, Van Breda demonstrated his in­de­pen­dence from the ISP. But the text also best represented the international diffusion of phenomenology, ­because it developed the lectures Husserl had given in Paris in 1929, which played such an impor­tant role in the French reception. The form of the Husserliana placed this internationalism front and center. Five nations ­were implicated in the first volume: the book was published in The Hague (Netherlands), directed by the team in Louvain (Belgium), and included a “préface” by Van Breda in French and a German “Einleitung” by the Swiss Stephan Strasser. A companion series of phenomenological monographs, Phaenomenologica, first appeared in 1958 with Fink’s Being, Truth, World. It would publish books in En­glish, German, and French. The most impor­tant aspect of this internationalization proj­ect was the creation of branch archives. Van Breda had made five transcriptions of the manuscripts: One was secured in a bank vault, but the o­ thers w ­ ere intended for distribution.110 Given the French orientation of the ISP, it is not surprising that the first negotiations should have been opened with Paris. In the early 1940s Van Breda was in contact with Tran Duc Thao, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, and Jean Cavaillès.111 He also had connections to other French phi­los­o­phers through de Waelhens, who had briefly studied in Paris and was a close friend of many of the existentialists ­there. In 1942 Van Breda visited Paris to lay out his plans for a branch archive to a group of young phi­los­o­phers, which included—in addition to Cavaillès, Merleau-­ Ponty, and Thao—­Jean Hyppolite and the Dominican Aquinas scholar Louis-­Bertrand Geiger.112 Through t­ hese he also reached out to Jean-­Paul Sartre. This self-­proclaimed new generation hoped to engage in scholarly work on Husserl to mark their distance from prewar philosophy. In a letter dated June 1942, Merleau-­Ponty suggested that the r­ unning of the archive should be left to the young. Scholars from the “preceding generation” such as Le Senne and Lavelle ­were to be left out.113 Van Breda, however, insisted on the inclusion of more established scholars, and negotiations continued with Émile Bréhier and Le Senne, even to the point where a contract was drawn up in early 1944 for loaning



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a se­lection of the transcriptions to the Bibliothèque Victor Cousin at the Sorbonne.114 Unfortunately finances ­were the undoing of this undertaking, and Le Senne wrote to Noël only a few days ­later to decline the offer.115 When Van Breda tried to set up negotiations a­ fter the war, he too asked that Le Senne be left out, preferring to deal with Bréhier and Jean Nabert at the library.116 This time Bréhier turned down the opportunity, b­ ecause he thought that Louvain was sufficiently close to Paris and that the most in­ter­est­ing manuscripts had already been published.117 ­After plans for the Paris archive fell through, Van Breda proposed a Strasbourg branch to be headed by Paul Ricoeur, who had visited Louvain in January 1947 while working on his translation of Husserl’s Ideas. The transcriptions w ­ ere sent over in 1949.118 In 1948 Van Breda cultivated new opportunities in Germany. Fink had gained a professorship at Freiburg, as part of the restitution of Husserl’s philosophy ­there, and was interested in obtaining a copy of the archives. At around the same time a similar opportunity emerged in Cologne, ­because of the support of the Nordrhein-­Westfalen government.119 The Freiburg and Cologne branches opened in 1950 and 1951, respectively. In addition, copies of the transcriptions ­were sent to the University of Buffalo, in the United States, u­ nder the care of Marvin Farber.120 T ­ hese ­were only the successful negotiations. In 1947 Van Breda had discussed setting up an archive at the Dutch university at Nijmegen, ­under the auspices of the psychologist and philosophical anthropologist F. J. J. Buytendijk.121 In the 1950s, discussions began with Harvard and the University of Saint Louis, but they seem to have come to nothing. Instead, in the 1960s the New School for Social Research opened a branch, which exists to this day.122

UNESCO The need to establish the archives as an international institution was most pressing, given Van Breda’s efforts to secure their financial ­future. The 1944 grant from the Francqui Foundation was specified as the last.123 In 1948 Van Breda managed to secure a stopgap measure—­a grant of 200,000 francs from the Belgian government—­but this too was only a one-­off subsidy that could only tide the Husserl Archives over for so long. A longer-­ term solution needed to be found, and Van Breda started to look beyond

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Belgium’s borders, through Farber to the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation in Amer­i­ca (a venture that Farber did his best to scuttle), and most importantly the newly founded UNESCO. The Belgian del­e­ga­tion presented the Husserl Archives’ first application to the 1947 meeting of that body in Mexico.124 The application w ­ asn’t successful ­because the newly founded organ­ization did not yet possess the necessary funds.125 Yet at the same meeting, the council ­adopted the resolution to establish “an International Council of associations concerned with philosophy and humanistic studies, similar to the International Council of Scientific Union.”126 The International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH) was formed in January 1949 in Brussels, with the goal of facilitating “mutual understanding between the p ­ eoples and a knowledge of Man, by encouraging the greatest mea­sure of international co-­operation in the field of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies.”127 Almost immediately, Van Breda submitted a new application asking for a subvention of a l­ittle over $7,700 a year.128 The Council met on January  19–20, 1950, and approved a grant of $2,000.129 It was considerably less than Van Breda had wanted, even less than the more modest $3,000 request the Council had ultimately voted on. But it was still enough to ensure the continued functioning of the archive. In February the Executive Council of UNESCO cleared the bud­get, and the funds ­were secured. The Husserl Archives won further UNESCO grants ­every other year, up ­until the 1960s. Success had not been guaranteed. It is true that the cards ­were stacked in Van Breda’s f­avor. Hendrik J. Pos, who was deeply interested in phenomenology and served on the archives’ Comité de Patronage, was president of the International Federation of Philosophical Socie­ties, the relevant subsection of the CIPSH. Another supporter, the progressive neo-­ scholastic Ferdinand Sassen, was a member of the Dutch del­e­ga­tion, while Berger represented the French. But UNESCO had long had a reputation of being hostile to religion, which might have counted against the archives. In a 1953 speech, the newly appointed director-­general of UNESCO, Dr. Luther Evans, confirmed this reputation in trying to deny it: UNESCO is suspected, even accused, of atheism. Truthfully, all religions, all beliefs, all philosophies are represented in its member



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states. But at the level of its action, UNESCO does not have to choose from this diversity one dogma or one system that it would profess or reject. ­There too, its universality is a welcoming disposition, of cooperation, not a desire for uniformity.130

When commenting on the 1947 application with a view to revising it, Jacques Havet, who worked as the “program specialist” at the Philosophy and Civilization Division of UNESCO, seems to have worried about the limited (read Catholic) appeal of the Husserl Archives. He warned Van Breda that the proj­ect must be seen to have “a par­tic­u­lar importance for all phi­los­o­phers.”131 This concern was magnified b­ ecause UNESCO’s International Federation of Philosophical Socie­ties only had very limited funds to disburse. For 1950 the organ­ization only had a bud­get of $5,000, of which the lion’s share would eventually go to the Husserl Archives. Moreover, Van Breda’s application was an outlier among the ­others that UNESCO received and voted on. In the first year, the grantees included four international philosophical congresses ($500 each), as well as the “third and last volume of the philosophical bibliography of the war years” ($1,000).132 In the 1950s the total annual grants amount grew to about $8,000, distributed to about five proj­ects, mostly subventions to international philosophical congresses and for the publication of philosophical dictionaries or chronicles. That is, during the 1950s the vast majority of successful applications ­were for one-­off events or general reference works. The only comparable grant was for an edition of Aristotle in Latin, and that was a considerably smaller amount.133 Angling to be the recipient of the largest single grant, Van Breda was not ­going to take any risks. In composing the 1949 application he made sure to downplay the Catholic connection. The application was made in the name of the Comité de Patronage, in order, as Van Breda put it at a meeting of the archives’ board, to show that they ­were “an international center of research and ­don’t in any way belong to the University of Louvain or the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie.”134 In an appendix to the application that gave a narrative history of the archives, Van Breda recognized the financial support of the Belgian government and the Francqui Foundation, but neglected to note the contributions of the Catholic

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University: for the period ­after 1943, when this support was crucial, Van Breda stated merely that the archive had relied on “the generosity of several individuals.”135 The Catholic University was effectively written out of the archives’ history.136 Instead, Van Breda highlighted the connections he had forged with secular institutions. Van Breda flagged his relationship to Farber’s International Phenomenological Society.137 When the grant was approved in January 1950, the Council raised concerns that the edition did not truly count as an “international collaboration.”138 Worried that the application would be shot down once it reached the executive council of UNESCO in February, Van Breda wrote to Farber to make the relationship to the International Phenomenological Society more official.139 ­After consulting with the board of the society on February 7, Farber agreed.140 A declaration was added to the third volume of the Husserliana. But the time needed for the correspondence to cross back and forth over the Atlantic was more than Van Breda could spare. Anticipating a positive reply, he wrote back to UNESCO on February 1, declaring that the edition was “officially patronized by the International Phenomenological Society.” Van Breda emphasized the point: “The Husserl Archives should be considered as an international center of phenomenological research.”141 Not only did Van Breda pres­ent the archives to UNESCO as a secular international proj­ect, he also drew strong links between its work and democracy. The centerpiece of the 1949–1950 application was a set of recommendation letters from phi­los­o­phers around the world, including Banfi from Italy, Patočka from Czecho­slo­va­k ia, Ingarden from Poland, letters from Mexico, Argentina, and Sweden, in addition to large contingents from the United States and France. From Germany, in recognition of its diminished standing in the postwar world, only Fink and Landgrebe wrote references.142 In all, the letters ­were written by forty phi­los­o­ phers from three continents and twelve countries.143 Despite the diversity of their origins—­t he letters ­were written in French, En­glish, Spanish, Italian, and German—­their content was remarkably similar. Not only did they foreground Husserl’s opposition to and suffering u­ nder the Nazis, but they also claimed a positive and robust connection between phenomenology and the goals of UNESCO. First, they asserted the value of the archives for international unity: Eugen Fink argued that



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“supporting the archive in its mammoth task, which is of the highest ideal significance, is certainly one of the most elegant possibilities for proving the international solidarity of the spirit,” while Landgrebe mentioned Husserl’s focus on “the prob­lem of a Eu­ro­pean solidarity, founded on f­ ree philosophical self-­examination.” Second, they promoted the demo­cratic and humanist implications of Husserl’s thought. For Sofia Vanni Rovighi, Husserl’s was “the only conception . . . ​that could found a ­human régime, a demo­cratic society.” In par­t ic­u ­lar, the letter writers suggested that Husserl’s phenomenology would be invaluable for the re-­democratization of Germany. For Ricoeur, “the edition that is now u­ nder way would be a decisive ele­ment in the intellectual and spiritual recognition of Germany in a demo­cratic, humanist, and universalist sense.” Aron Gurwitsch concurred: “Husserl’s philosophy constitutes without doubt one of the most efficacious f­ actors that could contribute to the renewal, as much intellectual as moral, of Germany, thus to the establishment in that country of a demo­cratic current of thought.” ­Others developed variations on the theme. Hyppolite asserted that phenomenology would help protect Germany against a resurgence of racism. Le Senne claimed that Husserl’s thought “is one of the forces on which we must count to bring Germany’s spirit into the path of demo­cratic cooperation with other ­peoples.” In the underlined hyperbole of Edgar de Bruyne, “It is in the interest of humanity, that [Husserl’s] worked be gathered in their entirety, carefully conserved, and critically edited.”144 The broad similarities in content w ­ ere a result of Van Breda’s careful orchestration. Following Van Breda’s initial application, Havet had written to him to give advice. Clearly enjoying himself, Havet explained that winning a grant was g­ oing to be an uphill strug­gle: “It is not finished. Indeed, we ­w ill replace the ‘seventh day of rest,’ in the manner of Malebranche, with the continual creation of Descartes. And . . . ​we ­will still need an incarnation, a redemption (hopefully without a crucifixion). Thus the Archives ­will be . . . ​SAVED.” Havet considered an initial positive result likely. The difficulty lay in convincing the CIPSH not to cut the Husserl Archives grant when the final funding decisions needed to be made. This is where Havet recommended the barrage of recommendation letters. They would have to demonstrate, Havet argued:

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a) The philosophical value of Husserl’s mss. b) Their relevance for con­temporary philosophy. c) Their international character, and above all the fact that this is not “German philosophy” in the sense that could shock ­people (your experience with the French must have made you aware of that); and even less a Nazi or pre-­Nazi philosophy (it would be 1,000 times more difficult to edit Heidegger in the same fashion)—­insist on the fact that Husserl had to leave Germany at the birth of the Third Reich. d) The international character of the Comité de Patronage, and the role that it could play in the International Federation of Philosophical Socie­ties (President: Pos) . . . e) The interest ­there is to associate young German phi­los­o­phers, who would hold scholarships, with the work, for the “democ­ratization of Germany,” to make the Germans conscious of their relationship to the non-­Nazi philosophical tradition.145

Van Breda had already suggested seven phi­los­o­phers to write letters, mostly from Belgium and Holland, but including a ­couple of Americans, and Gaston Berger from France.146 Havet encouraged him to be more ambitious: “I’ll give you a ­simple piece of advice: a list is never too long nor too international.” Havet recommended a number of thinkers who might be amenable. Following this suggestion, in July 1949 Van Breda sent out letters to forty-­three scholars across the globe, careful to state precisely what he expected from them. He then edited the letters in a set of highlights, reinforcing the themes that Havet had proposed.147

Conclusion The UNESCO application was more style than substance. As Van Breda’s efforts show, talk of the archives’ international importance and po­liti­cal significance was a strategy to get funding rather than a clear-­eyed assessment of the state of global phenomenology. His silence about the Catholic connection likewise spoke more to Van Breda’s concerns about UNESCO than to the history of the archives. The Church and the ISP ­were instrumental in saving the papers, hiding them during the war, and supporting the archives afterward. Nevertheless, downplaying religious connections was compatible with the self-­presentation of progressive neo-­scholastics.



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And we should note the irony that in figuring the archives as a secular proj­ect, Van Breda did more to raise the profile of the ISP than most other progressive efforts at outreach. What­ever his motivations, Van Breda’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the archives became a self-­fulfilling prophecy. He sought, slowly but surely, to extricate the archives from their relationship to the ISP, to pres­ent them as an in­de­pen­dent philosophical center with no religious commitments. That proj­ect became a real­ity. Even though the archives are still a part of the Catholic University in Leuven, ­t here is ­little suggestion that the edition work is a Catholic undertaking. ­Today, the most obvious link between the archives and Catholicism is the Franciscan cassock worn by Van Breda in many of the photo­g raphs on the walls. That it is so easy to forget the religious motivations that helped found and preserve the archives in the first place is not just down to Van Breda. For when in 1945 he first publicized the existence of his archive, the work of Edmund Husserl had come to be most closely associated with a group of phi­los­o­phers who explicitly rejected the Christian faith. Phenomenology was supported in its international expansion by a Franciscan priest in Belgium—­Walter Biemel would l­ ater argue that the Husserl Archives was responsible for the “worldwide re­nais­sance of phenomenology”148 —­but the f­uture renown of the movement would have as much, if not more, to do with the new existentialist revolution taking place two hundred miles to the south. For all their differences, however, the Husserl Archives in Louvain and the new existentialist phenomenology in Paris had a strangely similar genealogy. Both could trace their roots back to the intra-­Catholic debates of 1930s Eu­rope.

10 Postwar Phenomenology

At the end of World War II ­there ­were many reasons to want a clean

break with the past. ­After the defeat of the Axis powers, the citizens of Germany and Italy w ­ ere ­eager to draw a line and start afresh. The Germans referred to May 1945 as “Stunde Null” (zero hour). But even ­those countries that had fought on the winning side, like France, had much they wanted to forget. The chaos intervening between the retreat of the German forces and the reestablishment of the French state allowed a semi-­official purging (in French, l’épuration). This makeshift and often brutal form of justice had to do less with punishing the guilty than with recasting the Vichy Regime and the Occupation as the work of a small band of collaborationists against a nation of resisters. In intellectual life too, a new generation sought to detach itself from what had come before. The existentialism that had Paris abuzz in the autumn of 1945, which draped itself in the colors of the Re­sis­tance and liberation, looks very dif­fer­ent from the one I have traced over the last five chapters. Its leading figure, Jean-­Paul Sartre, was profoundly hostile to Chris­tian­ity and was dismissive of thinkers like Marcel and Jaspers. He proposed a very dif­fer­ent version of existentialism, where the priority of existence over essence found its justification in the denial of a creator God. And yet, as in po­liti­cal life, the declaration of a new start was more a 308



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per­for­mance than a ­simple statement of fact. In his famous Existentialism Is a Humanism lecture from October  1945, Sartre expended considerable critical energy delegitimizing the Christian existentialists.1 The assault was not only coming from the secular left. In the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII condemned existentialism, including Christian existentialism, as a form of irrationalism, while reasserting the value of Thomism.2 Even though the headline of the new intellectual movement seems alien to the story I have been telling ­here, one only has to scratch beneath the surface to reveal the enduring traces of the Thomist and Christian existentialist debates. Their imprint is particularly significant for the two figures who would have the greatest impact on postwar academic phenomenology in France: Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and Paul Ricoeur.3 Both w ­ ere men of the new era. Merleau-­Ponty was one of the leading figures of the secular existentialist movement. Co-­founding Les Temps Modernes with Sartre in 1945, he taught at the Sorbonne ­until 1953, when he assumed a chair in philosophy at the Collège de France. Ricoeur, who translated Husserl’s Ideas into French, was from 1956 a professor at the Sorbonne and an influential teacher of ­later figures like Jacques Derrida. Neither was a practicing Catholic: Merleau-­Ponty was an atheist, Ricoeur was Protestant. And yet both had been inducted into philosophy in general and phenomenology in par­tic­u­lar in the fraught space of Catholic thought in the 1930s, which left a lasting mark both on their work and on the broader contours of postwar intellectual history.

Intertwined Biographies Merleau-­Ponty was a member of the Pa­r i­sian elite. Born in Rochefort-­ sur-­Mer on France’s Atlantic coast in 1908, he had lived in the French capital since he was a child, and made his way through its most prestigious academic institutions: the Lycée Janson de Sailly, the Lycée Louis-­ le-­Grand, and then the École normale supérieure (ENS). Even though his ­family had fallen on hard times since the death of his ­father in 1913, Merleau-­Ponty was also part of the haute bourgeoisie, and unlike many of his ­later collaborators at Les Temps Modernes, he was at ease with his class status. By all accounts he was out­going and fun. As Simone de

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Beauvoir described the young student, he had a “limpid, rather beautiful face, with thick, dark lashes, and the gay frank laugh of a schoolboy. . . . ​ He was not averse to parties and sometimes went dancing: why not? he asked me with an innocent air which disarmed me.”4 Ricoeur was a few years younger than Merleau-­Ponty. He was born in 1913 to a more modest f­ amily in Valence in the southeast of France, where his ­father was a lycée teacher. Ricoeur’s m ­ other had died when he was still a baby, and ­a fter his ­father was declared missing in action during World War I, Ricoeur was sent across the country to live with his paternal grandparents and aunt in Rennes, Brittany.5 Though he excelled in his studies, he remained in Rennes ­after high school, completing his licence degree at the university t­here. The early lives of Merleau-­Ponty and Ricoeur thus map out some of the most impor­tant fissures in French social life: they w ­ ere divided by class and geography. They ­were also divided by religion. Though he was raised a Catholic, Merleau-­Ponty had a mostly secular education up through lycée.6 When Simone de Beauvoir first met the young Merleau-­Ponty in 1927, she identified him as a fellow unbeliever.7 In contrast, Ricoeur was brought up according to the austere values of the French Huguenot tradition. Nevertheless, the two men w ­ ere united by a common contact with Catholic philosophy. Once he entered the ENS in 1926, Merleau-­Ponty fell in with the “Talas,” ­t hose students who “went to mass” (vont-­à-la messe), one of whom was his friend Maurice de Gandillac.8 ­Under their influence, Merleau-­Ponty gravitated back to his childhood faith. By 1929 his return to the fold was, by all accounts, complete. In the summer of that year, Merleau-­Ponty went with de Beauvoir and her close friend Elisabeth Lacoin (also known as Zaza) to a discussion on “humanity and humanities” between Jacques Maritain, Henri Massis, Julien Benda, and ­others. Lacoin remarked on a group of rowdy Action Française supporters who had disrupted the meeting. Yet she refused to extend her distaste to the Action Française as a w ­ hole, attributing her restraint to Merleau-­Ponty, 9 among ­others. A few days ­later Lacoin recounted an intense conversation between the three friends, which had “for the orientation of my life and for my religious fervor the greatest importance.” Merleau-­Ponty was, she asserted, with re­spect to de Beauvoir “on the same plane as me,” and she marveled at his re­sis­tance to de Beauvoir’s atheistic arguments. He



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was “the example of an intellect subject to the Christian faith without being constrained or distorted.”10 In part due to their common religious convictions, the two fell deeply in love over the summer and fall of that year, with talk of a f­ uture marriage. The burgeoning romance was cut short by Lacoin’s tragic illness and death in November 1929.11 Not only did Merleau-­Ponty return to the Church in late 1920s, it seems that he also embraced Thomism. In her diaries de Beauvoir recalled a conversation with Merleau-­Ponty in 1927 during which he had promoted a rationalist philosophy of substances, where reason could reveal “the secret of the world.” Picking up the terms and preferences of contemporaneous Thomism, Merleau-­Ponty argued that it was “better to sacrifice becoming than being.”12 T ­ oward the end of that year, Jacques Maritain listed Merleau-­Ponty among ­t hose who wanted to attend the Thomist study circle at Meudon. He participated throughout his time at the ENS.13 Though his Mémoire (the equivalent of a masters’ thesis) has not survived, its topic suggests a sustained interest in the Catholic tradition: Merleau-­ Ponty wrote on the Christian neo-­Platonist Plotinus. Ricoeur’s intellectual trajectory also brought him into contact with Thomism. He had felt personally excluded from the Catholic community in Rennes, but he built up a close intellectual relationship with Roland Dalbiez, his philosophy teacher at the lycée ­there. Ricoeur would l­ater name Dalbiez as his “premier maître.”14 Dalbiez was a friend and student of both Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, and a regular at Meudon during the 1920s. He played a significant role in the introduction of psychoanalysis into France through his 1936 book Psychoanalytic Method and Freudian Doctrine.15 While rejecting Freud’s materialism, Dalbiez was attracted to the way psychoanalysis challenged the primacy of consciousness. The Thomist influence filtered through to Ricoeur through Dalbiez’s teaching. As Ricoeur tells it, in classes Dalbiez set his sights on idealism, which he compared to psychosis, asserting in contrast “the priority of the real with re­spect to knowledge conscious of itself.”16 This early exposure to Thomism had, as we s­ hall see, a profound if subtle effect on Ricoeur’s and Merleau-­Ponty’s thought. At the beginning of their ­careers, however, the most significant Catholic influence came from the other side of Thomist / Christian existentialist divide: Gabriel Marcel. In the period immediately following World War II, Merleau-­Ponty

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was reticent about his debt to Marcel.17 In 1959, however, during a radio broadcast on “The Philosophy of Existence,” Merleau-­Ponty named Marcel as one of the primary conduits through which he and o­ thers in France became familiar with the philosophy of existence. He emphasized Marcel’s role in introducing themes of incarnation, the mystery, and relations with ­others.18 It is pos­si­ble that Merleau-­Ponty had met Marcel at Meudon, when they both attended Maritain’s study circle in the late 1920s, but the two men forged a closer relationship the following de­cade. ­After success at the agrégation in 1930 and a year of military ser­vice, Merleau-­Ponty taught philosophy at the lycée in Beauvais. Seeking to return to Paris, in the spring of 1933 he composed a three-­page outline of a research proj­ect for a fellowship at the Caisse nationale des sciences, the forerunner of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Merleau-­Ponty planned to draw on Gestalt psy­chol­ogy, neurology, and philosophy in order to challenge “a doctrine inspired by criticism.”19 His strategy involved shifting attention from the intellect as the unifier of vari­ous dif­fer­ent sensory inputs (vision, touch, muscular sense) to the claim that this unity was “ensured by the very functioning of the ner­vous system.” That is, he wanted to argue that before any cognition, the body already or­ga­nized our perception, from which cognitive judgment took its cue. As its ground and source, “the universe of perception would not be assimilable to the universe of science.”20 ­T hese concerns brought Merleau-­Ponty close to Marcel, to whom he was prob­a bly referring.21 He identified the same philosophical opponents: Brunschvicg’s “flyover philosophy” and the objectifying tendencies of the empirical sciences. And like Marcel, he foregrounded our bodily experience. On winning the fellowship and arriving in Paris in the fall of 1933, Merleau-­Ponty started to attend Marcel’s soirées.22 Merleau-­Ponty’s second article, published in 1936, was a lengthy and largely appreciative review of Marcel’s Being and Having for the Catholic journal La Vie Intellectuelle.23 At about this time, Merleau-­Ponty started to have serious doubts about his faith.24 Acting as a character witness in 1937 for the annulment of de Gandillac’s marriage, Merleau-­Ponty denied the revealed character of the Bible.25 His skepticism coincided with a renewed friendship with de Beauvoir and, through her, Sartre in 1938. Ironically, they reestablished



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contact at Marcel’s soirées; Sartre and Merleau-­Ponty w ­ ere both courting 26 another participant, Colette Gibert. In writing to de Beauvoir at the time, Sartre expressed amazement at the transformation of this “monk.”27 Merleau-­Ponty would become even closer to de Beauvoir and Sartre ­after the outbreak of war, when he joined their re­sis­tance cell, Socialisme et liberté.28 By December 1945 he wore his atheism on his sleeve. In his essay “The ­Battle over Existentialism,” for the journal Action, Merleau-­Ponty defended Sartre against his Christian critics, including Marcel. Nonetheless, it seems that Merleau-­Ponty continued to participate in Marcel’s soirées u­ ntil the outbreak of war.29 Merleau-­Ponty’s time in Paris was only interrupted when he took up a teaching job in Chartres during the academic year 1934–1935, which coincided with Ricoeur’s opportunity to study in the French capital. Though they traveled in the same intellectual circles, it is quite pos­si­ble that the two men did not meet.30 A ­ fter gaining his licence in philosophy from the Université de Rennes in 1933 and a brief stint teaching at the nearby Lycée de Saint-­Brieuc, Ricoeur won a scholarship to study for the agrégation in Paris.31 ­After arriving in the fall of 1934, he accompanied his friend Maurice Chastaing to Marcel’s discussion group; he l­ater recalled that he attended ­every Friday, presenting papers at least twice. 32 Though Ricoeur’s time with Marcel was limited—at the end of the academic year he moved to teach in lycées outside of Paris, first in Colmar, and then, ­after his military ser­vice, in Lorient—­Marcel’s influence can hardly be underestimated. 33 When Ricoeur returned to Paris ­a fter the end of the Second World War, he headed straight to Marcel’s home, where he was received “as a son, with open arms.”34 Marcel was the subject of Ricoeur’s first single-­authored book ­after the war, a 450-­page tome comparing Marcel’s thought to Jaspers’s, and many texts a­ fter that. In 1991 Ricoeur became the president of the Association Présence de Gabriel Marcel, which he had helped establish sixteen years earlier.35

Introductions to Phenomenology Their participation in Marcel’s study group had a considerable impact on Ricoeur’s and Merleau-­Ponty’s developing thought. Most importantly, all the best evidence suggests that this was the milieu in which they first came

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to grapple with phenomenology. As he tells the story, Merleau-­Ponty became interested in phenomenology ­after Sartre returned from his year in Berlin in the summer of 1934.36 It may well be that Merleau-­Ponty’s interest in phenomenology received a boost from Sartre’s recommendation, but this account needs to be viewed with suspicion for two reasons. First, as we have seen, Merleau-­Ponty was not close to Sartre in the first half of the 1930s. 37 Second, by the time Sartre returned from Berlin in June, Merleau-­Ponty had already embarked on a study of phenomenological texts.38 In his initial 1933 grant application, Merleau-­Ponty had not mentioned phenomenology, but when he applied (unsuccessfully) for the fellowship to be renewed the following spring, he gave it a central position in his proposal. He had spent a portion of the preceding year familiarizing himself with the phenomenological lit­er­a­ture, and in June 1934 when he registered his complementary thesis, he chose as his topic “The Prob­lem of Perception in Phenomenology and in ‘Gestalt Psy­chol­ogy.’ ”39 That is, Merleau-­Ponty first committed himself to phenomenology not on the advice of his atheist friend but at some point during the time he was participating in Marcel’s study group. Not only did Merleau-­Ponty’s reading of Husserl coincide with his engagement with Marcel, he also associated the two thinkers: according to Merleau-­Ponty, both sought to break the stranglehold of the natu­ral sciences and reconnect us to the experience of our body and emotions.40 In his 1936 review of Being and Having, Merleau-­Ponty argued that Marcel had been able to reformulate his earlier analyses in ontological terms through his reading of Husserl’s intentionality: existence and objectivity ­were not simply two dif­fer­ent “contents of thought” but also two “regions of being.”41 If Husserl could be credited for the most significant development in Marcel’s thought during the 1930s—­one that, we should note, had helped align his work with the Thomists—­Merleau-­Ponty still considered Marcel’s existentialism to be an advance. In his first published article from 1935, also for La Vie Intellectuelle, Merleau-­Ponty criticized German phenomenology for restricting itself to the realm of essences and assuming “a sort of transparency.” In contrast, Marcel attended to an obscure existence “in all its forms.”42 ­These arguments guided Merleau-­Ponty’s work up ­until 1938, when he completed his first thesis, with the title “The Structure of Be­hav­ior”:



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philosophy should avoid both naturalism and critical idealism by shifting attention to embodied subjectivity, which puts us in contact with existence.43 As Merleau-­Ponty stated at the outset of his thesis, be­hav­ior (both ­human and animal) provides a valuable object of study ­because it escaped the traditional categories of physiology and psy­chol­ogy.44 For most of the text, he focused on the former: be­hav­ior could not be reduced to physical causality. For instance, the ­simple mechanism of the reflex—­a stimulus leading to a fixed response—­did not explain the variety and adaptability of h­ uman and animal engagement with the environment.45 Merleau-­Ponty elaborated on ­t hese be­hav­iors, sketching a hierarchy of structures rising up from the physical to h­ uman consciousness.46 The emergence of consciousness in his account allowed Merleau-­Ponty to turn to the second aspect of his argument: an attack on critical philosophy.47 The hierarchy of be­hav­iors shows that our consciousness of the world is “founded” on and conditioned by lower-­order, nonconscious structures, even if t­ hese do not exhaustively explain it.48 This implied that perception was not or­ga­nized solely by a detached transcendental subject, but also by noncognitive bodily pro­cesses: The natu­ral “­thing,” the organism, my be­hav­ior and that of ­others, only exist by their meaning [sens], but the meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object, the intentional life that constitutes them is not yet a repre­sen­t a­t ion, the “understanding” that gives access to them is not yet an act of the intellect.49

Continuing and adapting Marcel’s proj­ect, Merleau-­Ponty used an analy­sis of be­hav­ior to argue for an embodied consciousness, as a retort to both the objective sciences and idealist philosophy. Despite Merleau-­Ponty’s growing religious doubts, his development ­after 1938 was also channeled by the Catholic milieu. ­After reading some of Husserl’s l­ater texts in the January 1939 edition of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Merleau-­Ponty followed the advice of Jean Hering and visited the newly founded Husserl Archives in Louvain. He was the first international visitor. T ­ here he consulted other late texts, including parts of Husserl’s Crisis series as well as the second, unpublished volume of Husserl’s Ideas, which offered a phenomenological affirmation

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of Merleau-­Ponty’s preexisting interest in embodied subjectivity.50 In Louvain he entered into a long conversation with Eugen Fink, mediated, due to Merleau-­ Ponty’s relatively poor German, by Van Breda. 51 Merleau-­Ponty’s familiarity with the late Husserl, and in par­tic­u­lar Fink’s interpretation, was deepened in 1942 when he spent part of the summer in Aix-­en-­Provence visiting Gaston Berger.52 Due to his close connection to Louvain, Merleau-­Ponty was at the center of Van Breda’s mid-­war negotiations to form a Pa­ri­sian branch of the Husserl Archives.53 Ricoeur’s first engagement with phenomenology can also be traced to the group around Marcel. Ricoeur credits Chastaing, the person who first brought him to Marcel’s soirées, with introducing him to Husserl.54 In his recollections of the period, Ricoeur, like Merleau-­Ponty, associated Husserl with Marcel: both showed a concern to move beyond philosophical and scientific systems and describe the “concrete.”55 The earliest mention of Husserl in Ricoeur’s archive is in an essay written while he was in Paris preparing for the agrégation.56 ­There, Ricoeur presented phenomenology as a neutral descriptive method that allowed him to sidestep the realism / idealism debate. Phenomenology showed that consciousness was the “same that apprehends the other, all while remaining the same.” This “contradiction” could then be interpreted according to one’s metaphysical preferences: as the presence of the physical ­thing (realism) or the construction of the mind (idealism). As such, Ricoeur argued, the phenomenological method could be deployed by authors “as varied as the Epicureans . . . ​t he stoics, the scholastics, Berkeley, Fichte, Hegel,” as well as “con­temporary phenomenologists.” 57 For his part, Ricoeur followed the example of Marcel’s friend René Le Senne. He argued that the unreachable ideal of an exhaustive and divine knowledge drove us continually to overcome the “scandals” thrown up by experience.58 Ricoeur’s assumption that phenomenology was metaphysically neutral did not last long. In a 1940 pre­sen­ta­tion to the Cercle Philosophique de l’Ouest on the “phenomenological study of attention and its philosophical connections,” Ricoeur again foregrounded the way phenomenological description spanned the idealism / realism gap, but now he took a stronger line on Husserl’s transcendental turn: “Unfortunately Husserl surrendered to the idealist tradition in seeking the subject of attention in some transcendental ‘ego’ that he opposed to the empirical self.”59 Like



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o­ thers at the time, Ricoeur posed Marcel’s existentialism as a necessary antidote to Husserl’s idealism, ­because it started from the embodied subject rather than the uprooted spectator.60 Ricoeur trained his critical gaze on Husserl’s idealism during the war. Captured in the rapid German advance of 1940, Ricoeur spent the years 1940–1945 in a prisoner-­of-­war camp in eastern Pomerania.61 Alongside his new friend Mikel Dufrenne, Ricoeur used the time for further study, reading much of Jaspers and Husserl.62 Writing to Marcel in May 1941, Ricoeur explained his increasing discomfort with Husserl’s work: “I am more and more persuaded that the epoché is a castration of existence, exactly solidary with a misrecognition or a refusal of the ego’s incarnation.” 63 Thus, although ­a fter the war Ricoeur continued to argue for a similarity between Marcel and Husserl at the level of their descriptive methods, he now cast their differences in terms of the phenomenological reduction.64 For Marcel, the reduction did not make sense ­because it denied our participation in being.65

Merleau-­Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-­Ponty’s 1945 book The Phenomenology of Perception ranks with Husserl’s Ideas and Heidegger’s Being and Time as one of the most impor­ tant and influential phenomenological texts of the twentieth ­century. His thought had developed in impor­tant ways since the 1942 Structure of Be­hav­ior, but in broad outlines his approach remains the same.66 His central argument was that science was a “second-­order expression,” which found its ultimate ground in an originary but ambiguous realm of perception.67 ­Because science was disclosed in experience, to which it was thus “proportioned,” the laws it discovered could not be assumed to be in the world “in the realist sense,” nor could they be used to explain the experience from which science arose. That is why Merleau-­Ponty could argue that philosophy was “the act of bringing truth into being.” It was “constructive” or “ge­ne­tic.”68 In the book, Merleau-­Ponty sought to set aside the accreted assumptions of science and attend to this originary perception. The task was, he admitted, extraordinarily difficult, b­ ecause the intentional structure of perception, which thrusts us out into the world, blinds us to its

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functioning.69 But it was worthwhile b­ ecause it promised to alter dramatically our understanding of how consciousness and world are related. In par­tic­u­lar, it led us to discard the commonsense idea that sensation, elicited by the action of external stimuli on our sense organs, is the basic unit of experience.70 If we attend to our immediate perception, it becomes clear that we ­don’t initially see an assemblage of shades and colors from which we conclude that we are seeing a person or a h­ ouse. Rather, we first perceive a w ­ hole, the h­ ouse or person. And that w ­ hole is given as part of a context: the h­ ouse on a street, the person in a room. Atomized sensations, instead of being the building blocks of perception, are in fact abstractions from it. When we perceive an unevenly lit piece of white paper, it takes time and training to discern all its par­tic­u­lar shades. Merleau-­Ponty summarized: “The sensible quality, far from being co-­ extensive with perception, is the peculiar product of an attitude of curiosity or observation.”71 Correlatively, the idea that judgments come to be applied to an other­wise chaotic realm of sensation was a distortion of our real experience, which for Merleau-­Ponty was already “pregnant with an irreducible meaning.”72 While the empiricist model underestimated the structures inherent in perception, the “intellectualist” model overestimated them. Assuming that consciousness constitutes its objects, it regards the discovery of the objective world as akin to “coming to” a­ fter fainting, a return to what we already knew. But for Merleau-­Ponty, such an understanding failed to take into account the pro­cess of learning, the emergence of something new in experience, through which the unity of the object of knowledge is “reestablished” at a new level. It also made judgment the norm of perception, when in fact it was its product.73 The core error of the empiricist and intellectualist accounts is that they both assumed that the subject confronted a world that was spread out before it.74 A close examination of perception, however, demonstrated that we did not encounter the world as detached beings over and against the objects we perused. Rather, our perception of the world was dependent upon our bodily existence in the world. This realization had two major consequences: First, thanks to the “facticity of experience,” seeing the world from a par­tic­u­lar location and time, our perspective “is never other than partial and of limited power.”75 Second, perception is not merely or even primarily cognitive or m ­ ental. As Taylor Carman has written, “Our



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bodies are constantly, though unconsciously and involuntarily, adjusting themselves to secure and integrate our experience and maintain our grip on the environment. This ongoing self-­correcting bodily orientation constitutes the perceptual background against which discrete sensory particulars and explicit judgments can occur.”76 This is why, in a crucial transitional chapter of his book, Merleau-­Ponty could argue that “the theory of the body is already a theory of perception.”77 Merleau-­Ponty develops this argument in a fuller and more rigorous form, but its basic outlines should be familiar. In arguing that we needed to put to one side the claims of the objective sciences in order to recover a realm of pre-­ rational and embodied experience, which was marked by our existential participation in being, Merleau-­Ponty was channeling Marcel. Not only did Merleau-­Ponty follow Marcel in placing emphasis on the body, he also understood that body in Marcelian terms: it could not be grasped by conventional categories, like “subject” and “object.” This is what Merleau-­Ponty meant by “ambiguity.” Merleau-­Ponty wrote that if I try to think the body “as a cluster of third person processes—­‘sight’, ‘motility,’ ‘sexuality’—­I observe that ­these functions cannot be interrelated, and related to the eternal world, by causal connections, they are all obscurely drawn together and mutually implied in a unique drama. Therefore the body is not an object.” But at the same time “my awareness of [the body] is not a thought, that is to say, I cannot take it to pieces and reform it to make a clear idea.”78 The way the body escaped our usual categories extended to perception. Take the famous Müller-­Lyer optical illusion, where two straight lines are book-­ended with arrows, one set pointing inward, the other pointing outward. From a scientific, objective point of view, the two lines are the same length, but as we perceive them they are “ambiguous”: “neither of equal nor unequal length,” they are “positively indeterminate.”79

Ricoeur: The Voluntary and the Involuntary Paul Ricoeur’s thesis also bears the traces of Christian existentialism. Published in 1950  in Le Senne and Lavelle’s Philosophie de l’Esprit series, Ricoeur’s The Voluntary and the Involuntary was dedicated to  Marcel. Ricoeur begins with an eidetic analy­sis on the lines of

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­ usserl—­not of perception or judgment, which w H ­ ere Husserl’s preferred themes, but instead willed action. Ricoeur applied a phenomenological bracketing, which for him meant excluding from consideration h­ uman “fault” and “transcendence,” both of which resisted thought and thus impugned the study’s intelligibility.80 Ricoeur then conducted a preliminary analy­sis, showing that willed action comprised three parts (not necessarily ordered temporally)—­decision, movement, consent—­each of which was assigned one section of the book.81 For each part, Ricoeur’s argument follows the same developmental arc, so ­here I ­will take my lead from the first. Ricoeur’s eidetic analy­sis of decision led to three major claims. First, it showed that decision is intentionally aimed at a “proj­ect,” what I intend to do. This proj­ect had to be within my capabilities: I ­can’t choose to fly to the moon or become invisible.82 Second, the choice of a proj­ect is si­mul­ta­neously, if implicitly, a decision about the person I am: Am I brave or cowardly, miserly or kind? This “prereflexive” choice could become an object of study in self-­reflection. 83 Third, decisions have motives. This did not mean that decisions are “caused.” Ricoeur was adamant that causality only applied to the objective world. Nor could motivation be seen as a form of ethical determination. According to Ricoeur, motives “historialize” values (a version of what Scheler had called “functionalization”) in the sense that ­those values do not have an existence prior to or in­de­pen­dent of the decision that brought them into play.84 Instead, motives justified actions, which consequently w ­ ere not 85 “arbitrary decree[s].” Ricoeur noted that in his eidetic analy­sis he had run into two types of difficulty. First, in examining the “prereflexive” choice of the self, Ricoeur had denatured that self. The self that was imputed in the decision could only be studied by splitting the participating self into a detached observer and observed object.86 The reference to Marcel h­ ere was clear. B ­ ecause the choice involved “active participation” in my existence, it could not be thought, but only lived—to which Ricoeur added, “as a mystery.” “To be understood and rediscovered, this mystery which I am demands that I become one with it, that I participate in it, so that I do not observe it as confronting me at a distance as an object. Such participation is at odds with the higher objectivity of phenomenology.”87 The self thus challenged



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the clarity of Husserl’s phenomenological analyses. T ­ here was a trade88 ­off, Ricoeur argued, between the clear and the deep. The second difficulty took up more of Ricoeur’s time. At multiple moments in the eidetic analy­sis of the voluntary, Ricoeur had bumped up against what escaped its grasp. As dependent upon our capabilities, proj­ ects are not simply ­free choices. The ­will is “victim” to the necessities resulting from our bodily condition.89 So too phenomenological analy­sis suggested that our motives are not chosen in any s­ imple way.90 “I can refrain from eating . . . ​[but] I cannot help being hungry.” 91 In a l­ater summary of his thesis, he drew out the implications of this analy­sis: the constant irruption of the involuntary in eidetic analy­sis showed how “naive” it was for the subject to “set itself up as a primitive real­ity.”92 The body never submitted fully to the mastery of the ­will. Ricoeur turned to ­these recalcitrant ele­ments, the “nontransparent aspects of the cogito,” in the second chapter, on “motivation and the corporeal involuntary.” H ­ ere he drew on the results of objective analy­sis. B ­ ecause the involuntary lay at the limit of eidetic description, it was “often better known empirically, in its form, albeit degraded, of a natu­ral event.” As degraded, however, ­these natu­ral events could not be taken as face value, but instead had to be read “diagnostically” to recuperate the subjective experience that they indicated, but also obscured.93 The limitations of our body ­were limitations only insofar as they obstructed our action, and its possibilities ­were possibilities only to the extent that they ­were understood in the context of a proj­ect. The first two chapters in the first part thus aimed to go beyond the opposition of soul and body, subject and object, to understand their reciprocal relationship. Ricoeur summed up, “The involuntary is for the ­will and the ­will is by reason of the involuntary.”94 In the third chapter, however, Ricoeur sought to show that the voluntary and the involuntary could never be fully reconciled. ­There he analyzed “attention,” a topic he had identified before the beginning of the war.95 ­Because involuntary motives are not ­causes, they do not determine our action.96 The bodily involuntary pres­ents a disordered and indeterminate set of motives, without any pre-­given or necessary consequences. In the pro­cess of deciding, I “hesitate” between vari­ous motivations: I am hungry, but I want to support a po­liti­cal cause through a hunger strike; I want to defend a friend, but d ­ on’t

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want to steal the document that would prove her innocence.97 ­There was, Ricoeur argued no mechanical way to decide. Rather, decisions result from a pro­cess of attention, which sweeps over and clarifies the vari­ous motives. Attention consists in “turning ­toward or away from.”98 Ricoeur’s analy­sis of attention allowed two contradictory readings of the choice: one emphasizing continuity and the other emphasizing discontinuity with the involuntary. Insofar as choice followed from involuntary motivations, it existed in continuity with them. Choice was merely the clarification and then weighing up of our vari­ous motivations, and so was rational and determined. “The eliminated alternative evaporates by itself ­because it appears incompatible with the rules invoked in the debate.” 99 But if we instead focus on the fact that our understanding is “limited and finite”—­human, not divine—­and thus that we could never encompass and clarify all motivations, we would realize that the decision also involved bringing the pro­cess of deliberation to an end. This introduced a form of discontinuity into the decision, highlighting our freedom from the involuntary.100

Ambiguity and Fault Ricoeur’s and Merleau-­Ponty’s t­ heses show a similar Marcelian bent: they bracketed the objective sciences to make us aware of our embodiment, which connects us to existence and thus challenges idealism. Attuned to ­these similarities, Ricoeur would ­later describe his thesis as the “counterpart in the practical order of Merleau-­Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.”101 Nonetheless, we can already see subtle differences between the two authors, which had far-­reaching implications. For Ricoeur, when we incorporate the body into phenomenological argument, the involuntary appears “as a hostile force.”102 That is why he could discern a “dialectic” between the voluntary and the involuntary, which, while overcoming any ­simple opposition between subject and object, never fully erased their duality. From this Ricoeur drew a radical conclusion: Why is this dualism, in the virulent form of dualism of freedom and necessity, seemingly invincible? . . . ​W hy? if not b­ ecause the rent lies not only in the weakness of the intellect in grasping the mystery of



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the ­union of soul and body, but also up to a certain point is a lesion in being itself . . . ​a secret wound . . . ​inscribed in the ­human act of existing.103

This was the moment, Ricoeur claimed, when the idea of “fault,” originally bracketed in the eidetic analy­sis, had to be raised again.104 The “fault” was the nub of Ricoeur’s disagreement with Merleau-­Ponty. He gave the fullest account of the differences in a 1951 essay, which provided a summary of the thesis.105 For Ricoeur, when Merleau-­Ponty identified perception as an ultimate ground, it led him to “stabilize” his reflection “at the level of this indivisible movement of ­human existence.” As such, he failed to account for the radical incompatibility (not just ambiguity) of the objective viewpoint and freedom. This led Merleau-­Ponty to ignore the “existential fault [ faille existentielle] in my own incarnation,” which resisted the fusion of proj­ect and situation and instituted a “dramatic or polemic duality.” Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology of perception thus resulted in exactly the type of “indistinct existential monism” that Ricoeur had wanted to “shatter.”106 Ambiguity, Ricoeur implied, was merely a muffled echo of the rupture in being.107 Ricoeur accounted for their divergence by their differing orientations within Husserl’s corpus. Ricoeur had used his time in the prisoner-­of-­war camp to deepen his knowledge of the early Husserl of Ideas. In his work, Ricoeur recommended starting from the type of eidetic descriptive analyses Husserl had performed in that book. From the eidetic perspective, Ricoeur thought, it was clear that the involuntary could not be assimilated fully to the voluntary. That is why, when one expanded the subject “to the very limits of incarnation,” it challenged and disrupted phenomenological analy­sis.108 According to Ricoeur, Husserl had not accounted sufficiently for the “obscurity” that this expansion entailed, the way the involuntary rendered the “meanings in the region of consciousness . . . ​ fragile and transitory.”109 In other words, by holding to the earlier “idealist” Husserl, Ricoeur could dramatize the phenomenological encounter with existence as a collision. An existential philosophy of the body would then be a counterpoint and a challenge to Husserl’s thought. This productive tension was obscured, Ricoeur thought, if one leaped “straight away to the writings from the period of the Crisis” as

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Merleau-­Ponty had done. For Ricoeur, Merleau-­Ponty had “sought in the theory of the Lebenswelt inspiration for a description that was, in my opinion, too quickly synthetic.”110 During his visit to the Husserl Archives in 1939, Merleau-­Ponty had examined the l­ater and unpublished work, which had allowed him to see phenomenology as compatible with his earlier Marcelian stance. As Emmanuel de Saint Aubert has written, “the framework of the Marcelian . . . ​problematic of the sensible / sensitive [sensible] body precedes, and orients, the merleau-­pontian reception of [Husserl’s] Leib and Leibhaftigkeit.”111 Merleau-­Ponty’s encounter with the ­later Husserl nonetheless had an impor­tant effect. For, unlike the Christian existentialists, Merleau-­Ponty came to the conclusion that we could reach the embodied subject not by rejecting the transcendental reduction but instead by working through it. In contrast to Ricoeur, Merleau-­Ponty’s war­time reading convinced him that transcendental phenomenology and existentialism ­were compatible. Merleau-­Ponty’s and Ricoeur’s differing orientations within Husserl’s oeuvre informed and ­were informed by the ways they read phenomenological texts. In his preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-­ Ponty argued that phenomenology presented two f­aces. On the one hand, it was a philosophy of essences, bracketing the existence claims of the natu­ral attitude. On the other, it put ­those “essences back into existence,” starting with ­human facticity and accepting that the world is “always ‘already ­t here’ before reflection begins.”112 Merleau-­Ponty did not choose between ­these two positions. Rather, he wanted to show that one led to the other. ­Because the reduction took us not to a detached but to an embodied subject, ­t here was no gap between self and non-­self that needed to be bridged.113 That is why we should understand phenomenological reduction merely as a provisional first stage, which in bracketing the received claims of science revealed our intentional relationship to existence. Consciousness had a “primordial knowledge of the ‘real.’ ” We could doubt par­tic­u­lar perceptions, but only by defining perception as “access to truth.”114 The very notion of an illusion was dependent upon a distinction internal to perception.115 Merleau-­Ponty summarized his position: b­ ecause the transcendental reduction reveals our being-­ in-­t he-­world, “the greatest lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”116 Thus, Merleau-­Ponty presented his work as a



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transcendental philosophy, but he denied that it was a transcendental idealism. This argument should sound familiar. Merleau-­Ponty (like Van Breda) had taken the progressive neo-­scholastic reading of the epoché and extended it to include the transcendental reduction: The reduction was a methodological device, which by drawing attention to the embodied subject allowed us to recognize our intentional relation to the real. Merleau-­Ponty’s famous description of phenomenological reflection could function as a poetic encapsulation of the progressive position: phenomenology “slackens the intentional threads that attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.”117 Like the progressives, this reading of Husserl allowed Merleau-­Ponty to reconcile phenomenology, and by extension neo-­scholasticism, with existentialism. On this basis, many progressives thought that Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology could be co-­ opted for their proj­ect. In a 1952 review for the Revue Néo-­Scolastique, the Jesuit André Hayen endorsed Merleau-­Ponty’s “ ‘pluralist’ and ‘personalist’ realism,” saying that “[it] appears to us to constitute a positive contribution, the most positive perhaps in con­temporary phenomenology, to the Thomist realism of perception.”118 In contrast, Ricoeur’s reading of Ideas followed the strict Thomists, who sought to show that Husserl’s epoché and reduction ­were incompatible with realism. Just as Maritain had done in 1932, Ricoeur identified an irreducible tension within Husserl’s work. In a 1953 article for Esprit Ricoeur declared, “The more I read Husserl, the more I am convinced that the method practiced pulls the phi­los­o­pher in a direction that is less and less compatible with the method interpreted philosophically.”119 Ricoeur thought that Husserl’s reliance on intuition, and thus description, ran up against and challenged his claims that phenomenology was a constructive idealism. This idea framed Ricoeur’s translation of Husserl’s Ideas, which he had started in the camp and published in 1949.120 Over the course of his introduction, Ricoeur presented Husserl’s Ideas as caught in an intermediary moment, where it had not fully overcome an earlier and purely negative understanding of the reduction. Around 1907, Ricoeur argued, Husserl had been beset by doubts about his proj­ect and in this skeptical crisis had introduced the reduction as the “abolition” of the natu­ral world.121 ­These arguments remained active in

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Ideas, especially in §49, where Husserl presented nature as contingent and relative to consciousness.122 As Ricoeur remarked elsewhere, the idealist strain in phenomenology reached its apogee in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, where the world was “not only ‘for me,’ but draws ‘from me’ all its ontological validity.”123 His strict Thomist reading of Husserl’s transcendentalism explains why Ricoeur could pres­ent the appearance of the involuntary and existence in the phenomenological sphere as disruptive intrusions. For Ricoeur the idealist interpretation sat uneasily with phenomenological practice. A close description of phenomena would show that, far from being purely constitutive, the subject was itself passive with re­spect to a “proto-­constitution” of the self, time, and hyle.124 That is, phenomenological description challenged the doctrines of transcendental idealism, by showing that the subject is embedded in and engaged with the world.125 The conflict between t­ hese two versions of phenomenology—­one eidetic, the other existential—­led Ricoeur to declare that Husserl’s inheritors had to work away from him: “Phenomenology is in large part the history of Husserlian heresies. The structure of the master’s work implies that ­there is no Husserlian orthodoxy.”126

Between Religions Mapping Ricoeur’s and Merleau-­Ponty’s articulations of phenomenology and existentialism onto the neo-­scholastic debate over Husserl from the 1930s is useful b­ ecause it allows us to relate their phenomenological work to their religious stances. In dealing with religious questions, both returned time and time again to the Thomist / Christian existentialist opposition, which had structured Catholic philosophy before the War and had ­shaped their own philosophical beginnings. In a 1936 essay for the Protestant journal Le Semeur, Ricoeur presented Thomism as the counterpoint to dialectical theology: Citing Maritain and Gilson, he referred to a Thomist natu­ral theology where reason “can ascend, u­ nder its own power, to a rational God”; and referring to Barth, he discussed a theology that denied our power to arrive at God through ­human means and thus required revelation. In Ricoeur’s view, the disagreement came down to dif­fer­ent views on the “Fall,” which was “situated at the very point of the



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rupture between Protestantism and Catholicism.” ­Were we made in the image of God and entrusted with divine reason? Or w ­ ere we fallen creatures, endowed with only the most inadequate intellectual tools?127 For Ricoeur, Christian existentialism occupied the space between the two. Against the Thomists, Ricoeur denied that Christians could use philosophy to defend religious dogmas. Against the Barthians, Ricoeur did think philosophy retained an impor­tant role. It could challenge the pretension of science to have provided “a final solution.” Christian philosophy would thus be a “science of limits, an essentially Socratic, ironic position . . . ​forbidding all thought to be totalitarian.” Having set up its own limits in this way, philosophy left open space for faith, even though that faith depended ultimately not on our rational powers but on God’s command: “You, follow me!”128 The idea that Christian existentialists could marshal philosophical means in order to challenge the presumptions of Thomism and thus make space for faith is still at work in Ricoeur’s 1949 thesis.129 Thomism appears at several moments of the book: Ricoeur drew heavi­ly on his teacher Dalbiez in order to explain the involuntary aspects of the Freudian unconscious, and he compared his analy­sis of attention to the Thomist understanding of f­ree ­w ill.130 Aquinas thought that we could clarify our involuntary motivations and thus provide an account of the decision that was both rational and causal. In Ricoeur’s terms, Aquinas gave a “continuity” reading of the decision, ignoring the indetermination introduced by finite attention.131 Thus, though Aquinas’s system provided an account of h­ uman freedom (with re­spect to finite goods), that freedom was ultimately contained within and limited by a larger (naturalist) cosmology in which “the subject has lost his privilege of being a subject. It has become a part of nature, an outcropping in the hierarchy of appetites which by themselves presuppose no freedom and are moved by their object.”132 ­Because Ricoeur followed the strict Thomist reading of Husserl as an unreconstructed idealist, he could pres­ent Thomism and phenomenology as mirror images of each other: Aquinas’s theory ultimately resolved onto a monism that was the realist counterpart of Husserl’s. As such, both blinded themselves to the mismatch between the voluntary and the involuntary. Existentialism could serve as a corrective to both. By continuously disrupting the eidetic, it brought attention to the “fault.” As Ricoeur

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elaborated in the final chapter of the book, thanks to the “fault,” a final reconciliation between voluntary and involuntary ele­ments required “consent,” which is an active affirmation of the vari­ous limitations to my w ­ ill: my situation and my intransigent body. Such consent is neither self-­ assertion nor submission. Rather, it is an “acquiescence,” driven by the pre-­rational hope that the “world is a pos­si­ble stage for freedom”—­that despite the limits to my w ­ ill, ­those limits are not insuperable. To be ­free, Ricoeur argued, consent required a value judgment on the w ­ hole universe, and ­because the universe exceeded the scope of the cogito, it could not be rooted in the knowing subject.133 Rather, referring to Jaspers, Ricoeur argued that consent implied the leap from existence to transcendence, even if that leap seemed “arbitrary and superadded to one who does not make it.”134 To the believer too, this leap to transcendence is never certain or ensured. Transcendence could only be invoked and read “in the ciphers which are its scattered symbols.”135 For Ricoeur, then, Thomists w ­ ere unable to make a compelling case for Christian belief. Instead of propounding a rational religion along Thomist lines, it was incumbent on the phi­los­o­pher to show the limits of reason. Such a task could be achieved most easily, according to Ricoeur, if one began with a phenomenological analy­sis of the subject and showed how it was troubled by the intrusions of the real. In a language that permeates the thesis as well as numerous other essays from the time, Ricoeur argued that the “second Copernican Revolution,” which turned from the ­human subject to God, never took place in Thomism “­because the first [revolution]” (from the objective world to the subject) “ha[d] not, ­either.”136 The path forward was instead staked out by existentialist phi­los­o­phers like Marcel and Jaspers. In opening up the possibility for true religion, Ricoeur argued, they had followed “the spirit of medieval philosophy that one must find beyond its letter.”137 While Ricoeur’s strict Thomist reading of phenomenology accentuated the disruptive effects of existentialism, Merleau-­Ponty’s reading, which paralleled that of the progressive neo-­scholastics, modulated them.138 Phenomenology still grappled with the “ambiguity” of the body, but this simply complicated philosophical analyses—it did not mark their limits. That is why many Thomists considered Merleau-­Ponty’s philosophy to



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be compatible with their cosmological arguments. In a 1951 debate in Geneva, Catholics confronted Merleau-­Ponty with this possibility.139 Dominique Dubarle, ­f uture director of the Institut Catholique, argued that Merleau-­Ponty’s claims recalled t­ hose of Aristotle, who saw the soul as “the act of the or­ga­nized physical body.” In Dubarle’s view, the two parted ways when Merleau-­Ponty ascribed ambiguity not just to our way of thinking about the world but also to that world itself.140 But as the Jesuit priest and f­uture cardinal Jean Daniélou argued, this was not a necessary consequence of ambiguity, but instead a par­tic­u­lar “interpretation” of it. Merleau-­Ponty had used his analy­sis of ambiguity to show that the soul and body w ­ ere not distinct entities. For Daniélou, in contrast, body and soul had dif­fer­ent natures, a fact that thought could draw out from an other­wise ambiguous experience: “I think that ambiguity expresses very precisely the ‘given’ such as we reach it immediately, but philosophy consists in detecting the ambiguities inside this ‘given’ and in determining the dif­fer­ent ­orders.”141 In arguing that Merleau-­Ponty’s ambiguous perception could provide the foundation for a Catholic metaphysics, Dubarle and Daniélou ­were following the lead of Merleau-­Ponty’s most enthusiastic and prominent neo-­scholastic supporter: Alphonse de Waelhens, the Louvain interpreter of Heidegger we encountered in Chapter 7. Merleau-­Ponty had asked de Waelhens to write a preface for the 1949 edition of his Structure of Be­ hav­ior, and two years ­later de Waelhens expanded that introduction into the full-­length monograph A Philosophy of Ambiguity.142 In his preface and book, de Waelhens praised Merleau-­Ponty for overcoming Cartesian dualism, which he thought had been preserved in the less-­developed existentialisms of Sartre and Heidegger.143 For de Waelhens, Merleau-­Ponty followed Sartre and Heidegger in turning his attention to being, but unlike them, his work “goes directly against all that modern philosophy has taught us to think with re­spect to this being.”144 While de Waelhens saw much to like in Merleau-­Ponty’s work, he found his critical voice in the final chapter, on metaphysics.145 He attempted to show that Merleau-­Ponty’s thought was compatible with a “real transcendence” (God). According to de Waelhens, Merleau-­Ponty’s theory of ambiguity was itself ambiguous:

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If it means that all ­human knowledge originates in the concrete and pursues the explication [of the concrete], every­t hing that has been said in this book appears to establish it. If, on the contrary, one wants to understand it such that we can never in any way leave the immediate and to explicate that immediate reverts simply to living it, ­t here is no doubt that the task of philosophy becomes immediately contradictory.146

For de Waelhens, the choice was ­simple: ­Either ­humans are able to build on an ambiguous perception in order to achieve knowledge, or philosophy is not pos­si­ble. What­ever his explicit position, de Waelhens thought that Merleau-­Ponty had implicitly chosen the first option, ­because he had identified universal eidetic structures like situatedness and freedom.147 De Waelhens also sought to soften Merleau-­Ponty’s criticism of science. While science only discovered an aspect of the real, it still discovered an aspect of the real and thus delivered us “a meaning that belongs truly to ­things.” De Waelhens concluded that ­there was “no rivalry between philosophy and science.”148 The point was that although perception is ambiguous, it does not deny the possibility of ­human knowledge, even knowledge of the absolute. In de Waelhens’s interpretation, Merleau-­Ponty’s ambiguity was more akin to Maritain’s mystery, which nourished and overflowed our understanding, than to Marcel’s, which disrupted it.149 Though Merleau-­Ponty denied that it was pos­si­ble to identify any absolutes that would transcend and reconcile the contradictions of experience, de Waelhens thought that his philosophy contained an implicit reference to an absolute, which provided assurance within experience that ­t hose contradictions could be overcome. B ­ ecause this absolute was only referred to, it did not remove any of t­hose contradictions; instead it provided “the certainty that it is not vain to seek to remove them, which,” de Waelhens concluded, “is not nothing.”150 Merleau-­Ponty vehemently rejected ­these arguments. At the 1951 meeting the Protestant phi­los­o­pher Pierre Thévenaz put it to Merleau-­ Ponty that his philosophy was “secularization” of religious ideas, ­because ambiguity only made sense in its “plenary and profound meaning, which is at the origin of a Christian conception.” Merleau-­Ponty shut down this line of argument abruptly: “For me, that is the height of confusion. You



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speak of ambiguity? And that means that you are Christian! But no, it means that you think ­there is ambiguity.”151 In fact, throughout the 1940s Merleau-­Ponty made it clear that he rejected Thomist metaphysics. The ambiguity of h­ uman perception prevented us from taking the order of the world as the basis for religious belief. He did not think that “­things” w ­ ere 152 “capable of attesting to the glory of God.” In a 1947 essay, “Metaphysics in Man,” Merleau-­Ponty argued that Thomism was “presumptuous” for interpreting an always limited and partial h­ uman experience as a foundation for the absolute.153 While Merleau-­Ponty did not go so far as to accept the Thomists’ proofs for the existence of God, he did embrace their criticism of other religious arguments. By the mid-1940s, Merleau-­Ponty had come to accept what in Chapter 7 I called the Thomist theory of secularization: Christian existentialism, as a form of fideism, was an insufficient basis for religion. In “The B ­ attle over Existentialism,” Merleau-­Ponty echoed de Waelhens in wondering ­whether “the Pascalian conception of being as a blind ­thing and of the spirit as volubility only leaves space for a mystical action without any dogmatic content and for a faith which is faith in no entity, like Kierkegaard’s: perhaps fi­nally the religion of God-­made-­man arrives by an inevitable dialectic at anthropology and not theology.”154 For Merleau-­ Ponty, by focusing single-­mindedly on the believing subject, its doubt and anxiety, the Pascalian / Kierkegaardian tradition had hollowed out the object of belief.155 If we are to believe, we have to believe in something that can be ratified by reason. In a 1959 interview with Georges Charbonnier, Merleau-­Ponty went so far as to state that Marcel’s approach (if not his theistic conclusions) closely resembled Sartre’s.156 That is why Merleau-­ Ponty could argue that the neo-­scholastics provided a more compelling (if nonetheless inadequate) case for religious belief. He mused w ­ hether “Chris­tian­ity can only maintain itself as a theology on a Thomist basis.”157 We can thus understand the differences between Ricoeur and Merleau-­ Ponty by placing them in the force field created by the Thomist / Christian existentialist opposition. Both ­adopted recognizably Marcelian positions, rejecting the idea of a detached transcendental subject and engaging in a careful analy­sis of embodiment. But they developed Marcel’s thought in differing ways. Ricoeur emphasized ­those parts of Marcel’s existentialism that had functioned as a challenge to Thomism: the mystery

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that escaped our grasp and pointed to a fault in our existence, which Thomism obscured. In contrast, Merleau-­Ponty drew on ­those aspects of Marcel’s thought that had facilitated his negotiation with the Thomists—­our intentional relation to existence—­and had elaborated a theory of perception that they thought could be made compatible with their metaphysics. Moreover, he dampened the religious resonances of existentialism by making arguments that Thomists would have found familiar. Which brings us to a rather paradoxical conclusion: Ricoeur was able to develop a religious version of phenomenology b­ ecause of the way he remained focused on the weaknesses of official Catholic philosophy, whereas Merleau-­Ponty came to atheistic conclusions b­ ecause of the way he had recrafted Christian existentialism along Thomistic lines.

Politicizing Phenomenology: Ricoeur and Merleau-­Ponty at Esprit Not only did the Thomist / Christian existentialist opposition guide Ricoeur’s and Merleau-­Ponty’s understandings of religion; it also ­shaped both thinkers’ approaches to politics. Like many of their contemporaries, their politics w ­ ere related to the experience of World War II.158 But their stances also followed from the two men’s formative engagement with Mounier’s Esprit group in the 1930s. Ricoeur had built up contacts with Esprit when he was studying in Paris in 1934–1935, and perhaps again through his friend Chastaing, who wrote for the journal.159 A ­ fter Mounier’s death in 1950, Ricoeur reflected on his relationship to “our friend.” Emphasizing the enormous force and attraction of his po­liti­cal proj­ect in the 1930s, Ricoeur declared Mounier to be the “pedagogue, the educator of a generation.”160 The themes of the Esprit group guided Ricoeur’s first published article, a discussion of the concept of the “person” for the Protestant journal Le Semeur in November 1935.161 At that time Esprit was merely a way station on Ricoeur’s path to a Barth-­inflected personalism propounded by André Philip, which informed his po­liti­cal writings in the 1930s for the short-­l ived review Être and the revolutionary Terre Nouvelle.162 Nevertheless, Ricoeur joined the Esprit team a­ fter the war, and thereafter it was a privileged outlet for his ideas.163



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Ricoeur’s po­liti­cal positions ­were structured by a similar set of aversions to his religious convictions. Ricoeur felt close to Mounier to the extent that the latter kept his distance from Thomism. Though Mounier, Ricoeur argued, had drawn on a tradition of Thomist humanism, he had been able to reach out to the non-­Catholic world by stretching “the notion of ‘nature’ to the extreme in the sense of historical invention, audacity, and risk.” That is, Mounier made space for ­human freedom in a Thomist cosmology that other­w ise limited it.164 Like Mounier, Ricoeur’s re­sis­ tance to Thomism informed his suspicions of Communism. In a telling joke about a friend from Strasbourg, Ricoeur suggested that Rémy Rontchevsky’s Catholicism could explain his attraction to “Marxist totalitarianism.”165 Though oriented ­toward a better social world, Communism, like Thomism, threatened to undermine ­human freedom. As Ricoeur argued, it “carries at once our hopes and our de­cadence; it can institute ‘real’ freedom, the freedom of l­ abor, at the cost for freedom tout court, at the cost perhaps of man.”166 Ricoeur wanted to do for Communism what the Christian existentialists had done for Thomism: open it up to the concrete h­ uman subject. This was not simply a way of curbing Communism’s vices. Ricoeur also thought it was a necessary condition of the proj­ect of liberation. Take his 1951 essay “Chris­tian­ity, and the Meaning [sens] of History,” which addressed a related question. Ricoeur distinguished the idea of pro­g ress from Christian eschatology. The theory of pro­gress functioned at a purely secular level, as the anonymous accumulation of knowledge, techniques, and inventions. B ­ ecause such innovations persisted, pro­gress was irreversible. T ­ here was, Ricoeur argued, no “radical loss.” Christian eschatology, in contrast, functioned at a level of the “concrete drama of suffering and wanting individuals,” a history “of events, of crises, of decisions” that theories of pro­gress had bracketed.167 ­Because the two operated at dif­fer­ent levels, Ricoeur denied that secular pro­gress and Christian eschatology w ­ ere contradictory. But he made it clear that the former relied upon the latter: “A Christian reading of the mystery of history is perhaps called to take up in some way as the underpinning of the other readings that remain true at their level.”168 The Christian sense of history, for Ricoeur, was able to transfigure the “more” of accumulation into the “better” of pro­gress. This was not a merely

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theoretical question, but a practical historical one, for only from an extrinsic perspective could one evaluate ­whether the gains each stage of pro­gress brought ­were not negated by the new evils it introduced.169 And as in his thesis, Ricoeur thought that the only escape from the absurdity of history was through hope: What therefore permits the Christian to surpass the disjointedness of lived history, to surpass the apparent absurdity of this history which often resembles a “tale told by an idiot,” it is that this history is traversed by another history of which the meaning is not inaccessible, that can be understood.170

Absurdity was not the last word for Christians, but rather the penultimate one, pointing to a higher order which one could hope for and have faith in, though not know.171 Merleau-­Ponty had also been involved in Esprit in the 1930s. He was listed as a subscriber to the journal from 1934, when he was its local correspondent at Chartres, and he attended all of Esprit’s annual congresses in 1935–1939, and then its secret reunions during the war.172 In addition, he was director of Esprit’s psy­chol­ogy study group ­until 1937.173 During this time, Merleau-­Ponty signed his first petitions, including one, “For the Basque ­People” from May 1937 ­after the destruction of Guernica, where his name appeared alongside ­those of Marcel, Maritain, and Mounier.174 ­Later, in an article marking Mounier’s death, he remarked, “Emmanuel Mounier deliberately practiced that philosophy of the pres­ent, that ‘engaged thought,’ of which l­ ater we, following his example, recognized the necessity. . . . ​His death has touched us like that of a f­ amily member.”175 Merleau-­Ponty’s first articles appeared in what might be considered a ­sister journal to Esprit, Maydieu’s La Vie Intellectuelle, which was or­ga­ nized in the aftermath of the Action Française condemnation to support the new social teachings of the Church.176 In 1935 Merleau-­Ponty published a long review t­here of the recent French translation of Scheler’s book Ressentiment.177 The review is a full-­throated defense of Scheler’s redefinition of resentment, endorsing the latter’s recuperation of Chris­ tian­ity against Nietz­sche. The argument functioned at two levels. First, Merleau-­Ponty denied that Chris­tian­ity implied the negation of life. The



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love of the weak and the sick was not, in Chris­tian­ity, a love of weakness and sickness, but was driven by a wish to overcome them. Merleau-­Ponty concluded that Jesus ­didn’t come to negate this life, but to promise another. His good news was based on “a fundamental affirmation, that of a love that is the only precept, the raison d’être and the truth of e­ very law.”178 Second, Merleau-­Ponty confronted the more subtle criticism that b­ ecause Chris­tian­ity was oriented ­toward this other life, it was an attenuated form of resentment, privileging the super­natural over the natu­ral, even if it did not deny the latter’s value.179 As he noted, Nietz­sche’s argument ­here was based upon the assumption that natu­ral, vital values ­were the only true ones, and thus that spiritual values ­were illusions. But this assumption had been challenged by Scheler’s phenomenology, which revealed a value hierarchy where spiritual and religious values not only existed alongside vital ones but ­were of a higher degree. From this perspective, Nietz­sche was the victim of resentment himself, b­ ecause he sought to reduce all values to the lowest ones.180 Merleau-­Ponty’s argument aligns with the Scheler reception I discussed in Chapter 8. He emphasized the necessary incarnation of religious values on this earth, arguing that religious life ­wasn’t simply “a veneer” on top of social and po­liti­cal life, an in­de­pen­dent and separable addition; it “impregnated” it. This was where Luther had gone wrong, focusing on personal salvation to the exclusion of every­thing ­else: “­There is nothing that less ­favors the idea of a Church where responsibility would be collective, where salvation is not only private work.”181 In fact, the claim that Chris­ tian­ity urged us to look beyond the natu­ral, to a “Kingdom of God” that would provide “compensation” for our sacrifice on earth, ironically overestimated the continuity between this world and the next: “Precisely ­because it is transcendent, it is not a means to defer justice ­until ­a fter death—­a means to make the poor wait. . . . ​Chris­tian­ity must render ­those who live it more demanding, more conscious in ­matters of social politics.” Merleau-­Ponty wanted an engaged Chris­tian­ity, promoting justice ­here and now. Such was the force of this argument that Merleau-­Ponty had to reject preemptively the charge that he was pulling Scheler’s thought to the left.182 Merleau-­Ponty sought to show that Chris­tian­ity entailed a socialist politics, and he a­ dopted a position very similar to the one Ricoeur would

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embrace ­after the war. But whereas for Ricoeur, socialist politics had to draw its meaning from religious faith, for Merleau-­Ponty it was clear that Chris­t ian­ity was only defensible to the extent that it supported the socialist proj­ect. This is how Merleau-­Ponty narrated his own disillusionment with religion during the 1930s. In his essay “Faith and Good Faith” (a title that played on the term of art of the new existentialist politics) Merleau-­Ponty provides a barely veiled autobiographical account of his early work at La Vie Intellectuelle.183 He tells the story of a “young Catholic” whose faith had led him to embrace socialist politics, and who had joined a protest against the Austrian chancellor’s attack on workers’ districts in Vienna around 1933. Yet he was surprised that several priests ultimately refused to indict Dollfuss’s government b­ ecause Catholics w ­ ere enjoined to support the “established power.” The anecdote came as part of a longer argument against Jean Daniélou’s defense of Catholicism as a force of liberation. The prob­lem was not simply that the Church as a ­human institution had betrayed Catholicism’s liberating ethic. That betrayal was inherent and unavoidable.184 While in 1935 Merleau-­Ponty had argued that Nietz­sche’s critique of resentment only applied to the bourgeois “degradations or distortions” of Chris­tian­ity, by 1945 he had come to the conclusion that t­ hese distortions ­were baked in.185 The argument followed from his developing views on religion. In the essay, he recalled his opposition between the Thomist and Pascalian (read Christian existentialist) positions, but now he translated them into po­ liti­cal terms: while the former was conservative, the latter could be revolutionary, and in this context he referred to José Bergamin.186 But ­because Merleau-­Ponty now believed that the Pascalian tradition was secretly atheist—it was a “philosophy of man, rather than a theology”—he came to the conclusion that religion and revolution ­were incompatible. Or rather, that the Pascalian tradition could only remain religious if it ­were secured by a broader metaphysics for which “speculative philosophy and Thomism remain judges.” This meant that conservative forces placed structural limitations on the more radical strains of Christian politics. The Christian was an “unreliable revolutionary.”187 Merleau-­Ponty’s more pessimistic assessment of a Christian existentialist politics allowed him to adopt an attitude t­ oward Communism that was more optimistic than Ricoeur’s. Like Ricoeur, Merleau-­Ponty often



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drew parallels between Catholicism and Communism: In their official forms (Thomism and Stalinism) both tended to posit an absolute—­God the ­father, or the inevitability of a classless society—­that undercut h­ uman subjectivity.188 But while Merleau-­Ponty thought that this absolute was necessary to Chris­t ian­ity (which is why Christian existentialism was a contradiction in terms), he did not think it was necessary to Communism. As a doctrine demanding engagement in the world, and placing “man as subject of history,” Marxism depended upon contingency. In this way, and often despite itself, Marxism relied on an “ ‘existential’ argument.”189 Thus, whereas the natu­ral tendency of Chris­t ian­ity pushed it ­toward Thomist dogmatism, the natu­ral tendency of Communism pulled it in the other direction: t­ oward engaged action in an ambiguous history. Marxism ­wasn’t only a theory of engagement. It was also a theory that gave that engagement meaning and direction. The question therefore arose as to why Marxist meaning—­t he pro­g ress t­ oward a classless society—­was more worthy of our allegiance than other ones. Merleau-­ Ponty addressed this question in his most famous contribution to postwar French po­liti­cal theory: his 1947 book Humanism and Terror, which sought to clarify the Cold War choice between American liberalism and Soviet Communism. The book takes as its occasion the publication of Arthur Koestler’s 1940 anticommunist novel Darkness at Noon, a fictionalization of Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial from 1938, but it drew on Koestler’s l­ ater opposition of the yogi, whose steadfast adherence to ethical princi­ples leads to his withdrawal from the messy world of politics, and the commissar, who is prepared to pay any price to achieve his po­liti­cal goals. For Koestler, Bukharin ultimately embraced the position of the commissar, willing to sacrifice himself to support the Communist proj­ect. Merleau-­Ponty rejected the position of the yogi, ­because he thought that it led to the ac­cep­tance of vio­lence: “To abstain from vio­lence ­toward the violent is to become their accomplice.”190 But he was equally critical of the commissar. While Merleau-­Ponty recognized that the commissar’s theodicy was a pos­si­ble outcome of Communism, he refused to identify this conclusion with Marx’s theory.191 The difference came down the commissar’s failure to understand the contingency of history. We cannot justify pres­ent sacrifices by their ­f uture consequences, ­because we do not know what the f­uture holds. Po­liti­cal life is, in Merleau-­Ponty’s view,

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“ambiguous,” and the same act can be given very dif­fer­ent meanings depending upon how events pan out. This is how Merleau-­Ponty read Bukharin’s show trial. Bukharin recognized that his actions had had a counterrevolutionary effect, and while taking responsibility for this, he was at pains to show that this had never been his intent. When Bukharin noted that he was “in no way better than a spy,” Merleau-­Ponty argued that the ambiguous phrase was just as much an assertion of “subjective honesty” (he ­hadn’t wanted to impede the revolution) as an admission of “objective treason” (this was nonetheless the effect of his actions).192 While Merleau-­Ponty denied that ­there was an inevitable historical development ­toward a classless society, and indeed was highly critical of the Soviet Union, he did not think that all po­liti­cal proj­ects w ­ ere equal.193 Merleau-­Ponty argued that the vio­lence of Marxism had a par­tic­u ­lar “sense” (both meaning and orientation) b­ ecause it was guided by the goal of bringing that vio­lence to an end. This was not an abstract or detached goal, Merleau-­Ponty insisted. Instead it was an immanent absolute, a consequence of the fact that ­there was nothing beyond the relativity of ­human perspective.194 In promoting the rise of the proletariat as a “universal class,” overcoming exploitation, Marxism was the “­simple statement of ­those conditions without which ­there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history.” B ­ ecause Marxism was a philosophy focused single-­ mindedly on the immanent, Merleau-­Ponty could assert that it was not simply a theory of history. It was “the theory of history.”195 While Ricoeur sought the meaning of history in transcendent faith, Merleau-­Ponty thought he could extract it from an immanent theory of the proletariat. Ricoeur homed in on this difference in his 1948 review of Humanism and Terror for Esprit. He praised Merleau-­Ponty for recovering a sense of humanism from within Marxism, distinguishing the proletarian from the commissar. He noted that for Merleau-­Ponty “the theme of the proletarian arrives to save from anarchism a doctrine whose inner demon is without doubt the gratuitous act.”196 Ricoeur worried, however, that a purely immanent absolute was unfit to play this role. He applied to Communism the very argument Merleau-­Ponty had applied to Chris­tian­ity in “Faith and Good Faith.” Though Merleau-­Ponty had argued that the slippage from the proletarian to the commissar was simply



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an avoidable effect of Communist practice, Ricoeur wondered ­whether it might not be traced back to the “very heart of proletarian humanism,” to the extent that the latter denied all “transhistorical morality.” Ricoeur claimed that the proletariat could assume the status of the universal only if it was attentive to a “prophetic call,” which transcended Marx’s materialism. Ricoeur opted for a m ­ iddle path, a dialogue between the prophet and the proletarian, where the former gave meaning to the latter’s po­liti­cal proj­ect, while the latter checked the former’s tendency to “alienation” and “mystification.”197

Conclusion In the early 1950s, and in response to the Korean War, Merleau-­Ponty came to reconsider his po­liti­cal position. He broke with Sartre over the latter’s embrace of Stalinism in 1952, quitting the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes in December of that year, and cemented the break in a fraught exchange of letters the following July.198 In his criticism, Merleau-­ Ponty followed Ricoeur and extended the line of reasoning he had previously restricted to Christian politics: Marxism erred b­ ecause it sought to master ambiguity by investing total meaning in the proletariat, and thus raised it to the status of an absolute. The attempt to align Marxism with existentialism was bound to failure.199 To Merleau-­Ponty, Communism’s supposedly immanent teleology, which he had praised in Humanism and Terror, was no longer believable.200 Merleau-­Ponty’s changing stance ­toward Marxism encouraged him to reconsider his stance ­toward Chris­tian­ity.201 Only one month ­after he left Les Temps Modernes, in January 1953, he gave his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: “Praise of Philosophy.” As was the convention in such lectures, Merleau-­Ponty interrogated the works of his pre­de­ces­sors, most proximately Louis Lavelle. What drew Merleau-­Ponty to Lavelle was his notion of our participation in being, which meant that we could never grasp the “absolutely absolute.” We only dealt with the absolute in relationship to the finite and suffering self.202 In his lecture Merleau-­Ponty repeated his criticism of all absolutes, ­whether Thomist or atheist: For the phi­los­o­pher “the idea of ‘necessary being’ just as much as that of ‘eternal ­matter’ or the ‘total man’ ” appeared

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“prosaic with re­spect to that surging of phenomena at all levels of the world and of that continuous birth that [the phi­los­o­pher] is busy describing.” But now he denied that philosophy was simply atheistic. Rather, it was attentive to the contradictions of h­ uman experience, without trying to posit their surpassing. Of such a surpassing, Merleau-­Ponty argued, philosophy knows “nothing.”203 From this perspective, Christian existentialism would no longer be atheism in denial, but instead one pos­si­ble response to the ambiguity of the world, one that, in its appeal to faith, had nonetheless overstepped the limits of philosophy. We can attribute Merleau-­Ponty’s stance in part to the conventions of the event: In an inaugural lecture, it was simply not appropriate to insult your pre­de­ces­sor, especially one who, like Lavelle, had only recently died. But in casting his own work as a philosophical analy­sis that permitted but did not compel a religious response, Merleau-­ Ponty was perhaps nodding to the systematic and historical links between his own thought and Christian existentialism. In 1956 Merleau-­Ponty served as the editor for an introductory work titled Famous Phi­los­o­phers. The third chapter provided brief pre­sen­ta­ tions of some of the g­ reat figures of the Christian tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to Duns Scotus, Ockham and Nicolas de Cusa. In his introduction to the chapter, titled “Chris­tian­ity and Philosophy,” Merleau-­ Ponty turned to the Christian philosophy debates from the 1930s, outlining the positions taken by Gilson, Maritain, and Blondel. Of the three, it is clear that Merleau-­Ponty had the greatest sympathy for Blondel, who denied that philosophy had a stable essence, b­ ecause it strug­gled to grasp a real­ity it could never master. Most importantly, Blondel’s argument permitted Merleau-­Ponty to think about the influence of Chris­tian­ity on philosophy. ­Because philosophy was not self-­sufficient but “open,” working on material that preceded it, Christian existence could and did inform secular thought.204 Nonetheless, Blondel’s schema led Merleau-­Ponty to his own version of secularization, one that reads as an intellectual autobiography. He distinguished the recognition that Chris­tian­ity had materially affected the history of philosophy from the lived belief that Christ was the savior. To say yes to Chris­tian­ity as a fact of culture or civilization is to say yes to Saint Thomas, but also to Saint Augustine, and to Ockham,



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and to Nicholas of Cusa, and to Pascal and to Malebranche, and this assent does not cost us one ounce of the trou­ble that each of them had to take to be without weakness. The strug­gles that they sustained, often in solitude and even to death, historical and philosophical consciousness transmute into the benevolent universe of culture. . . . ​ Precisely b­ ecause he understands every­thing, the phi­los­o­pher or the historian is not one of them. . . . ​For him it is only a m ­ atter of knowing what the world is made of and what man is capable of, not to burn for this proposition or be slaughtered for this truth.205

The recognition that religions and po­liti­cal positions ­were expressions of our ambiguous ­human existence was crucially dif­fer­ent from accepting par­tic­u­lar religious or po­liti­cal claims as truth. For the phi­los­o­pher also recognized other contradictory responses, and was not, qua phi­los­o­pher, called to choose between them.206 Thus, while Merleau-­Ponty took Blondel’s side over Gilson’s in the debates over Christian philosophy, he refused the argument’s religious implications.207 Yes, philosophy had been influenced by religion, but it also dispensed with the latter’s fervor. Perhaps the same could be said about the story I have told ­here. Even if the atheistic phenomenology of Merleau-­Ponty and the Protestant phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur drew in impor­t ant ways on the history of the Catholic thought, this is not enough to make them secretly Catholic. In Merleau-­Ponty’s case, we might even suggest that his atheism arose from an excess of religious sources. Drawing on multiple traditions of Catholic thought—­not just Aquinas, but also Saint Augustine, not just the Thomists, but also the Christian existentialists—­traditions that opposed and sought to delegitimize each other, he was not convinced by any.

Epilogue

Continental philosophy ­today is haunted by religion. ­Whether they

consider religion as something that needs to be exorcised, conjured up, or—­a nd this is where my sympathies lie—­m ined as an intellectual resource, phi­los­o­phers across Eu­rope have returned insistently to religious themes and questions. Some, like Jean-­Luc Nancy in his “deconstruction of Chris­tian­ity,” see religion as the key to understanding and undoing modernity.1 ­Others, like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, seek in religious practices and belief the means to overturn the patriarchy of traditional theology and the injustices it has authorized.2 At the same time, Saint Paul has become an unlikely source of inspiration for figures as diverse as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacob Taubes.3 In a parallel development, numerous thinkers have turned to the ­Middle Ages to find a form of alterity that can guide their philosophical and po­liti­cal proj­ ects. Since Georges Bataille riffed on the title of Aquinas’s masterwork for his own magnum opus, the two-­volume La Somme Athéologique (1943– 1945), Giorgio Agamben has turned to Catholic monastic life, Antonio Negri and Michel Hardt have looked to Franciscan mendicancy, while on occasion Michel Foucault would talk nostalgically about medieval sexuality.4 This tendency has generated a small sub-­genre of books identifying the irruption of the medieval into con­temporary theory, including Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory, Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern 343

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Condition, and the collected essays in The Legitimacy of the ­Middle Ages. For ­these scholars, ­t here is an essential analogy between the premodern and the postmodern.5 As is often the case with such phenomena, the religious specters in continental philosophy can be explained by its ­family history. Of course, con­temporary Eu­ro­pean thinkers can claim multiple ancestors, many from within their respective national traditions. But as I have argued in this book, the most proximate common ancestor of phi­los­o­phers in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and elsewhere is a form of phenomenology passed down through Catholic scholars. Few of ­these scholars achieved lasting fame. Nonetheless, they had an im­mense impact on many of the most prominent figures of postwar intellectual life—­not just Merleau-­ Ponty and Ricoeur, but also the g­ reat Franco-­Lithuanian phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, who engaged closely with Marcel, along with the semiotician Umberto Eco and the postmodern philosopher-­cum-­politician Gianni Vattimo, who studied ­under Luigi Pareyson at Turin.6 Most surprisingly, perhaps, Catholics figure in the intellectual genealogy of the postmodern phi­los­o­pher Jacques Derrida. When Derrida first arrived in France from Algeria in 1949, his philosophy teacher at the Pa­ ri­sian Lycée Louis-­le-­Grand was the Christian existentialist Étienne Borne, and in his student essays the young Derrida drew heavi­ly on the work of Marcel and Le Senne. T ­ hese readings informed an embryonic version of deconstruction. Derrida sought out “scandals” in philosophical texts to see where putatively totalizing systems broke down. For Derrida at this early stage of his development, such “scandals” challenged ­human claims to knowledge and opened up the possibility of religious faith.7 In his 1954 thesis, written at the École normale supérieure ­under the supervision of Merleau-­Ponty’s Catholic friend Maurice de Gandillac, Derrida applied t­ hese ideas to his reading of Husserl, showing how Husserl’s attempts to produce a definitive version of phenomenology continually failed b­ ecause they depended upon an infinite idea that escaped its grasp. In the early 1960s, when he was an assistant to Paul Ricoeur at the Sorbonne, he made a similar argument drawing on Heidegger. Like many Catholic thinkers at the time, Derrida thought that Heidegger’s ontological difference, a precursor to his own “différance,” made pos­si­ble a nonmetaphysical understanding of God.8 As I have shown elsewhere,

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Derrida did not reassess the religious implications of his work ­until the mid-1960s, when he engaged with the structuralists at the ENS, like Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and their students. He came to believe that the idea of God, rather than being what motivated the transgression of limits, as Le Senne had thought, was instead its product. In the 1967 Of Grammatology, Derrida concluded that the theological was but a “determined moment in the total movement of the trace.”9 Along such lines of intellectual filiation, a wide range of phi­los­o­phers have inherited the defining traits of the early Catholic reading of phenomenology: a challenge to Descartes, a rejection of naturalism and totalizing forms of reason, a fascination with the transgression of limits, a concern with embodiment, existence, transcendence, and the Other. This provenance does not imply that t­ hese traits are inherently religious, such that their appearance in secular thought would prima facie be incoherent. Secularization can be read just as easily as the pro­cess of self-­f ulfillment as that of de­cadence and decline, and we should not excuse ourselves from the work of evaluating philosophical ideas on their own terms. And yet, it is as if the religious reading of phenomenology is dependent upon a recessive gene: though it might skip generations of continental phi­los­o­ phers, its return always looms as a promise or a threat. This history explains why so many Christian thinkers have been able to see secular va­ri­e­ties of phenomenology as a useful resource. Despite Derrida’s (admittedly ambiguous) declaration that he “rightly pass[ed] as an atheist,” since the early 1990s his work has fascinated phi­los­o­phers of religion in Amer­i­ca (Jack Caputo), Holland (Hent de Vries), and Ireland (Richard Kearney).10 Though he bound his thought most closely to the Jewish tradition, Levinas has continually found interested readers among Catholic scholars.11 Most proximate to the substance of this book, the past few de­cades have seen a constant effort in both the United States (Anthony Steinbock) and France (Jean-­Luc Marion and Michel Henry, among ­others) to rejig Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler’s phenomenologies in order to authenticate religious experience. Radicalizing the phenomenological understanding of transcendence, ­these thinkers have argued for more expansive forms of givenness: Steinbock talks of a “vertical givenness,” Marion of a “saturated phenomenon,” and Henry of an “affectivity” or “life” beyond “intentionality.” In all ­these cases, they describe an

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experience of abundance or excess, which overflows and thus escapes our rational grasp.12 When religious thinkers have laid claim to the phenomenological heritage, secular phi­los­o­phers have often sought to disown them. We have seen how Sartre sought to banish Christians from the existentialist f­ amily in his 1945 paper Existentialism Is a Humanism. Dominique Janicaud performed a similar task when he attempted to deny figures like Marion and Henry the name phenomenologist in his 1991 Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn,” as did Martin Hägglund when he combatted the religious readings of Derrida in his 2008 Radical Atheism.13 Quentin Meillassoux, leading figure of the “speculative realists” and one of the most hotly debated continental phi­los­o­phers ­today, goes one step further, arguing that we can save philosophy from religious appropriation only by abandoning phenomenology altogether. In his book A ­ fter Finitude (2005), Meillassoux argues that phenomenology undermines the natu­ral sciences and legitimates a form of fideism. What­ever the avowed religious stances of its proponents, phenomenology is complicit with the “return of the religious.”14 Notwithstanding their differing attitudes ­toward a theological turn in phenomenology, ­these Catholic and secular thinkers all understand theology in a similar way. For them phenomenology resonates most clearly with a form of religious thinking that examines how the ­human self grasps what transcends it, in order to challenge scientific and objectivist forms of thinking and make room for faith. In short, they are almost always thinking of something that looks more like Christian existentialism than Thomism. Such an orientation makes sense. Talking about faith, love, and God, Christian existentialists placed religious themes more prominently in their thought than did the Thomists, who at one time denied that their philosophy could be qualified as Christian. More importantly, the privileging of the Christian existentialist reading in postwar debates follows from the mechanics of the reception. As we saw, phenomenology was able to travel around Eu­rope ­because it could tap into neo-­scholastic networks. But except in certain cases like Poland, where the predilections of mainstream phi­los­o­phers encouraged them to engage with Thomists directly, the neo-­scholastic reading of phenomenology could break into the academic establishment only when it was mediated by the Christian

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existentialists, who alone had sufficient institutional clout to influence secular thought. Levinas was friends with Marcel, not Maritain; Vattimo studied with Pareyson, not Olgiati; Derrida engaged with Le Senne, not Noël. In the more recent debates over continental philosophy and religion, Thomism has not simply been relegated to the status of poor cousin. Intellectual genealogies differ from biological ones in that they also allow forms of negative inheritance. Thanks to their common history, neo-­ Thomist arguments have lingered as some of the most power­ful retorts to Christian existentialism and its intellectual descendants. For this reason, while a few recent thinkers have followed Merleau-­Ponty in taking the Kierkegaardian / Pascalian version of Christian philosophy to be inherently secular, the majority have come to consider the quasi-­official philosophy of the Catholic Church as ironically atheistic. Umberto Eco would blame his doctoral work on Thomas Aquinas for his own crisis of faith, and Levinas shared with his friend Marcel the conviction that scholasticism was incompatible with true religion.15 In a 1937 review, Levinas directly related the religious readings of Heidegger to the scholastic attempts to Christianize Aristotle in the ­Middle Ages, dismissing both as misguided. The ontological drive Heidegger and scholasticism shared made their thought inhospitable to true religiosity.16 A similar line of argument is at work in Marion’s most famous book, God beyond Being, first published in 1980. Marion took Aquinas and the Thomist tradition (represented by Gilson) as a foil, criticizing them for asserting the primacy of being over the good, a prioritization that aligned them with Heidegger and for Marion blocked a true understanding of God.17 Marion’s initial hostility was so uncompromising that l­ ater he felt compelled to moderate his stance. In the second edition, he added an essay on “Onto-­theo-­logy and Thomas Aquinas,” in which he attempted to defend Aquinas (if not the neo-­Thomists) from the criticism that he had inscribed God within the horizon of being.18 Given the complex relations between ­these ideas, it should not be surprising that the secular challenge to phenomenology’s religious progeny should echo the Thomist attack on its Christian-­existentialist forebears. Take Meillassoux. His ­After Finitude is the uncanny double of Maritain’s first published challenge to Marcel, the Seven Lessons on Being from

348

converts to the real

1934.19 Like Maritain, Meillassoux is highly skeptical of the realist claims of his interlocutors, arguing that the noetic-­noematic correlation condemns phenomenology to a radically subjective idealism ­because it forecloses access to the mind-­independent real.20 Like Maritain, he argues that we require a princi­ple ensuring the passage from the real-­as-­thought to the real-­in-­itself. Like Maritain, he thinks that this princi­ple opens up an “intellectual intuition of the absolute.”21 Then, like Maritain, Meillassoux uses this princi­ple as the basis of a “speculative” account of the real, demonstrating in turn the princi­ple of noncontradiction, the existence of the thing-­in-­itself, and mathe­matics.22 In this way, like the Thomists before him, Meillassoux pres­ents himself as a rationalist ally to the natu­ral sciences, seeking to reinvigorate realism ­a fter a period of idealist hegemony.23 Meillassoux is aware of his proximity to Thomism, which he defines as “the progressive rationalization of Judeo-­Christianity ­under the influence of Greek philosophy.”24 He distinguishes himself by his choice of foundational princi­ple. While Maritain based his metaphysics on the princi­ple of identity (being is being), closely tied to the princi­ple of sufficient reason, Meillassoux takes the princi­ple of unreason—­that ­there is no necessary entity and that it could always have been other­wise.25 In his unpublished thesis from 1997, Meillassoux developed this theme by elaborating on an “advent ex nihilo.” All we can know about the world is that it is entirely contingent, and so it is always pos­si­ble that a new world could appear “from nothing.”26 But ­here too, Meillassoux’s ideas recall ­t hose of other midcentury Thomists. He argued that the princi­ple of unreason was a consequence of the correlation, which undermined the idea that t­ here was a necessary entity.27 In d ­ oing so, Meillassoux situates himself in the history of philosophy using the hallmark gesture of the progressive neo-­scholastics: working through post-­K antian philosophy (the correlation) to arrive at a nondogmatic realism. Even Meillassoux’s foundational concept of the “advent ex nihilo” reads as a secular variation on what Gilson had taken to be the defining characteristic of Christian philosophy: “creation ex nihilo.”28 The atheist scourge of much con­temporary continental philosophy appears as the inverted image of ­those Catholic thinkers who helped make philosophy continental in the first place.

Epilogue 349

Thomism is not the power­house it once was. Still taught in Catholic universities and seminaries around the world, it rarely enjoys philosophical attention outside the Church. Yet when assessing its influence, we should not restrict our attention to t­ hose few who continue to bear its name. ­W hether passed on as a positive inheritance, or persisting as a negative imprint on other forms of philosophy, neo-­scholasticism’s greatest legacy is the international debate between non-­Catholic phi­los­o­phers over phenomenology. And though this would be cold comfort to a Mercier, a Gemelli, a Przywara, or a Maritain, Thomism continues to deserve the title philosophia perennis, thanks to its contradictory afterlives in secular thought.

Notes

Introduction 1. For a good account of the term and its history, see Simon Glendinning, The Idea of a Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 4. 2. As Bernard Williams has argued, it is equivalent to dividing cars “into front-­wheel drive and Japa­nese.” Williams, “Con­temporary Philosophy: A Second Look,” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Bunnin (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 25. 3. The classic work is Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1975). 4. Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 5. Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenology,” in The Cambridge History of Modern Eu­ro­pean Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 6. The case of the neo-­K antians is telling. Despite parallel turns to Kant in Germany, France, and Italy, t­ here was remarkably ­l ittle cross-­fertilization. See, for instance, the almost complete separation between discussions of the two in Sebastian Luft and Fabien Capeillères, “Neo-­K antianism in Germany and France,” in The History of Continental Philosophy, vol.  3, ed. Alan Schrift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 7. See Camille Lacau St.  Guily, Henri Bergson en Espagne: Une histoire contrariée: 1875–1930 (Paris: Harmattan, 2015)  ; Caterina Zanfi, Bergson e la filosofia tedesca: 1907–1932 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2013). The receptions of other figures like Nietz­ sche, Kierkegaard, and Hegel ­were so tied up with the international fate of phenomenology that it is difficult to separate them.

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NOTES TO PAGES 3–7

8. This occurred, ironically, at the time when the German model of the research university gained ground across the continent. For a helpful overview, see Willis Rudy, The Universities of Eu­rope, 1100–1914 (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 1984), chap. 5; Christophe Charle, “Grundlagen,” in Geschichte der Universität in Europa, vol. 3, Vom 19. Jahrhundert zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993–); and Charle, La République des universitaires, 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), esp. 213–217, 343–398. 9. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “L’Agrégation de philosophie,” in Parcours I: 1935–1951 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), 55–59. 10. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), 485; Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 323. 11. Michael Gubser’s excellent book is the only truly multinational treatment so far, examining Germany, Austria, Czecho­slo­va­k ia, and Poland. Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology and Social Renewal in Central Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Rocco Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), also pays attention to the importance of French readings in the Italian reception of Heidegger. 12. For a thoughtful discussion of transnational intellectual history, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). For excellent examples of transnational intellectual history, see Angus Burgin, The G ­ reat Persuasion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Daniel Rod­gers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 13. For instance, in his excellent book on Freud in Mexico, Ruben Gallo frames his discussion by asking, “What does the history of psychoanalysis tell us about Mexico?” alongside the question “What does the Mexican reception of Freud tell us about the history of psychoanalysis?” Gallo, Freud’s Mexico (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 5–6. On the tendency to identify context with places, especially nations, see Baring, “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 4 (October 2016). 14. The thesis was translated into German for Wojtyła’s volume Primat des Geistes: Philosophische Schriften (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1979), 37–197. 15. George Williams, The Mind of John Paul II (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 115. 16. For the relationship between Wojtyła’s reading of Scheler and his ­later po­liti­cal and philosophical engagement see Gubser, The Far Reaches, 200–210. 17. Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, trans. Paolo Guietti (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 30–31. 18. The biographer George Weigel attributes Wojtyła’s choice of Scheler to his ­house­mate ­Father Rózycki. See Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), 126. Wojtyła draws attention to the Dominican Jacek Woroniecki’s interest in Scheler. See Karol Wojtyła, Person and Community (New York: P. Lang, 1993), 73. An alternative possibility suggested by Buttiglione is the in-



NOTES TO PAGES 7–9 353

fluence of Roman Ingarden. But as Gubser notes, though he examined Wojtyła’s thesis, Ingarden became an impor­tant influence on Wojtyła only ­after it was complete. See Gubser, The Far Reaches, 191–192. 19. See Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, 34–35. The Christian Worker Youth movement (JOC) was one of the most impor­tant French groups in Catholic Action, the Church-­organized lay movement. See Chapter 8. 20. Samuel Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Making of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Piotr Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 21. Scholars have generally treated only l­ater Thomists, like Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Joseph Maréchal. Exceptions include Gerald McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism (New York: Fordham University Press: 1989); McCool, From Unity to Pluralism (New York: Fordham University Press: 1989); Maurizio Mangiagalli’s La “Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica” (1909–1959), 2 vols. (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991); and David Berger’s In der Schule des Hl. Thomas von Aquin (Bonn: Nova et Vetera, 2005). 22. I discuss de Waelhens and Vanni Rovighi in depth in this book, and briefly discuss Boelaars. For Xirau, see Alain Guy, Histoire de la philosophie espagnole (Toulouse: Le Mirail, 1983), 276–281. 23. See Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 16–20. 24. This is necessarily a provisional number. I gained it by collating the major biblio­ graphies of secondary lit­er­a­ture on Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler, counting the essays and books (but not book reviews or encyclopedia entries) that appeared in Catholic journals or w ­ ere written by scholars for whom Catholicism was an impor­tant aspect of their thinking. B ­ ecause inevitably I ­w ill have missed certain Catholic phi­ los­o­phers, my estimate should be read as a lower bound. The number also excludes Protestant thinkers who participated in a related reception, and phi­los­o­phers who had encountered phenomenology as Catholics but left the faith. The English-­language reception is more complicated, in large part due to the waves of refugees fleeing Hitler’s Eu­rope, and in this story the New School for Social Research plays a crucial role. 25. To list just the Catholic translators of phenomenology into French: Roger Munier SJ, Quentin Lauer SJ, Joseph Rovan, Maurice de Gandillac, Edmond Gerrer, and Jean Ladrière. For the importance of Christian phi­los­o­phers to the French reception of Heidegger in the two de­cades a­ fter World War II, see Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. 1 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 40–46; and Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42–46. 26. See Marie-­A nne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 183–195; Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 22–39. 27. See the bibliography at http://­w ww​.­husserlpage​.­com​/ ­hus ​_­r 2pa​.­html. And Marci Shore, “Out of the Desert,” Times Literary Supplement (London), August 2, 2013.

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NOTES TO PAGES 9–12

28. Herbert Spiegelberg, “Der Begriff der Intentionalität in der Hochscholastik, bei Brentano und bei Husserl,” Philosophische Hefte 5 (1936). 29. See Jan Wolenski, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-­Warsaw School (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 14–17. 30. John Caputo, “Continental Philosophy of Religion Then, Now, and Tomorrow,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2012): 358n11. 31. See, for instance, Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 32. See letters, L. Beauduc to A. Spaier, November 25, 1931, and A. Spaier to L. Beauduc, December 28, 1931, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Fonds Koyré, AP c17 d3. 33. See Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 199. 34. See Marius Perrin, Avec Sartre au Stalag 12D (Paris: Opéra Mundi, 1980), 52–53. 35. See, for instance, “Exposé de M. Sartre, 25 juin 1938” in “Entretiens du Mardi, puis du vendredi a partir du 18 janvier 1938–28 Avril 1939” and “Exposé de Sartre sur le serment, 10 et 23 juin 1939,” in “Notes prises aux vendredis de la rue de Tournon (mai 1939–­juin 1939),” Fonds Gabriel Marcel, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, NAF 28349 (hereafter Fonds Marcel). For de Beauvoir, see “Entretiens du vendredi (janvier 1945–­juin 1947).” 36. Letter, Marcel to Sartre, September 18, 1943, in Correspondance 22, Fonds Marcel. Marcel’s most extensive discussion of “having” comes in his essay “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de l’avoir,” Recherches Philosophiques 3 (1933–1934). 37. Letter, Sartre to Marcel, 1943, in Correspondance 22, Fonds Marcel. Sartre argued that though the concept of the situation appeared in Heidegger and Jaspers, Marcel gave the fullest and most satisfactory account of it. Sartre continued, saying that his notion of the world without God followed that of Marcel, except that, of course, Sartre did not draw the conclusion that God must exist. Sartre’s letter has been published as “Lettre de Jean-­Paul Sartre à Gabriel Marcel,” Revue de la BNF 3, no.  48 (2014): 62–63. 38. For a brief overview, see Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 653–666. For Scandinavia, see Jan Bengtsson, Den Fenomenologiska rörelsen i Sverige: Mottagande och inflytande, 1900–1968 (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 1991). 39. It was the subject of the second conference of the Société Thomiste in 1933, immediately following the first journée on phenomenology in 1932. The most impor­t ant of the French contributions to the debate have been collected in Gregory Sadler’s extremely helpful volume Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2011). 40. Maurice Blondel, “Le Problème de la philosophie Catholique,” Études Philosophiques 7 (1933): 17. 41. Peter Wust, “Zum Begriff einer christlichen Philosophie,” Catholica 1 (1932): 38. All translations from French, Italian, and German are my own ­unless other­w ise stated. 42. Etienne Gilson in Sadler, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation, 130. 43. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. Downes (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940), chaps. 1 and 2. Gilson denies t­hese modern thinkers the



NOTES TO PAGES 13–24 355

title “Christian phi­los­o­pher” b­ ecause they simply inherited ­these concepts, rather than being directly inspired by revelation. The prob­lems opened by Gilson’s distinction ­were, however, raised at the time—­see V. Romanelli, “Intorno al signifcato del concetto di filosofia cristiana,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 25 (1933): 142. 44. Sadler, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation, 278. 45. See especially Chapters 4 and 8. 46. Christian Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 47. Scheler had converted in 1899, but only around 1912, ­a fter his work with Husserl, did he fully embrace the faith. See Johannes Schaber, “Phänomenologie und Mönchtum,” in Leben, Tod und Entscheidung, ed. Stephan Loos and Holger Zaborowski (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2003), 74. 48. For an argument about the relationship between phenomenology and conversion, see Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, Briefe an Hedwig Conrad-­Martius (Munich: Kösel, 1960), 40; and Jacques Vidal, “Phénoménologie et conversions,” Archives de Philosophie 35 (1972): 209–243. In his historical overview, Spiegelberg denied that phenomenology tended naturally t­ oward Catholicism. See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 1st ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 172n. The note was removed for the third edition. 49. Letter to Rudolf Otto, 1918, quoted in Holger Zaborowski, “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 153. In the letter, Husserl denied that he was personally involved in Heidegger’s “conversion.” 50. The canonical figure for this approach is Quentin Skinner. 51. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 52. For recent arguments against such “reductive contextualism,” see Peter E. Gordon, “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas,” in Rethinking Modern Eu­ro­ pean Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

1. The Strug­gle for Legitimacy 1. See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (1909–1959),” 2 vols. (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991), 1:37. And Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 225. Louvain was one of the few remaining Catholic Universities in Eu­rope, surviving thanks to the generally cooperative relationship between liberals and Catholics in Belgium. 2. Marcel Launay, La Papauté à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1997), 33. 3. For an account of the Vatican’s travails in this period, see Chadwick, History of the Popes, chaps. 6–7. 4. Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris,” (http://­w ww​.­vatican​.­va​/­holy​_­father​/­leo​_x­ iii​/­encyclicals​ /­documents​/ ­hf​_­l​-­x iii​_­enc​_­04081879​_ ­aeterni​-­patris​_­en​.­html). For the relatively uneven decline of early modern scholastic theology, see Ulrich Leinsle, Introduction to

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NOTES TO PAGES 24–28

Scholastic Theology, trans. Michael Miller (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2010), 354–360. 5. For an account of mid-­n ineteenth-­century Catholic theology and philosophy, see Gerald A. McCool, Nineteenth- ­Century Scholasticism (New York: Fordham University Press: 1989), 17–128. 6. For a history of the Roman Acad­emy, see Berger, In der Schule des Hl. Thomas von Aquin (Bonn: Nova et Vetera, 2005), 123–181. 7. Joseph-­Louis Perrier, The Revival of Scholastic Philosophy in the 19th ­Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1909), 184. 8. The journals ­were Bölcseleti Folyóirat (Budapest, 1886), the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie (Paderborn and Münster, 1886), the Philosophisches Jahrbuch (Fulda, 1888), Revue Thomiste (Paris, 1893), Revue Néo- ­Scolastique (Louvain, 1894), Revue de Philosophie (Paris, 1900), Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (Milan, 1909), Cienca tomista (Salamanca, 1910). 9. See Gallus M. Manser, “Zum Geleite,” Divus Thomas 1 (1923): 4. 10. Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 1:77–78. 11. John Zybura, ed., Present-­Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism (New York: Herder, 1926), 174–175. For the history of ­these artificial languages, see Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel (London: Profile Books, 2015), chaps. 3–4. 12. See Cte. Domet de Vorges, “En quelle langue doit être enseignée la philosophie scolastique?,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 10 (1903): 257–258. 13. For an account of this “tempest,” see Léon Noël, Histoire de l’ISP, Archives de l’Institut Supérieure de Philosophie, Louvain-­la-­neuve (hereafter cited as ISP Archives), 117–249. See also Désiré Mercier, “Le Bilan philosophique du XIXe siècle,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 7 (1900): 327 ; and David Boileau’s Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir (Belgium: Peeters, 1996), xxi. 14. Mercier “Le Bilan philosophique,” 327. 15. For a discussion of language politics at this time in Belgium, see Boileau, Cardinal Mercier, 30–32. Ghent became the first Flemish-­language university in 1930. 16. N. Kaufmann, “Cours de philosophie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 16 (1903): 310. 17. Perrier, Revival of Scholastic Philosophy, 221. For a list of translations of Mercier’s work, see appendix 11.14 of Boileau’s Cardinal Mercier, 402–406. In addition, Msgr Beysons’s Criteriologie of de leer over waarheid en zekerheid and P. Jeannière’s Criteriologia vel critica cognitionis certai ­were based on Mercier’s textbook. See Georges van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste: Recherches sur le problème de la connaissance dans l’école thomiste contemporaine (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1946), 188. 18. See Jan Wolenski, “Józef M. Bochenski and the Cracow Circle,” Studies in East Eu­ro­ pean Thought 65 (September 2013). 19. See Berger, In der Schule, 134. 20. F. Picavet, “Le Mouvement thomiste,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 33 (1892): 284. 21. “Statistiques des inscriptions depuis 1893,” ISP Archives, 74. 22. Ibid.



NOTES TO PAGES 28–31 357

23. “Préparation du cinquantenaire de l’ISP, 1939,” Fonds Léon Noël, Louvain-­la-­Neuve (hereafter cited as Fonds Noël), file 157. 24. “Correspondance 1938,” Fonds Noël. Compare the ISP to Milan. Of t­ hose studying philosophy at the Sacred Heart University, only about 10 ­percent in the 1920s ­were non-­ Italian, a percentage that dropped even further in the 1930s, prob­a bly as a result of Fascist rule. “Statistiche 1925–26 / 1941–42,” Achivio generale per la storia dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (hereafter cited as AGSUCSC), Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 282, Prat. Varie 18. 25. The Freiburg chair for Catholic philosophy was transferred from Theology to Philosophy in 1901. See “Brief vom Minsterium 7. Jan 1901,” Freiburg Universitätsarchiv, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 26. Leo Gambetta, quoted in Launay, La Papauté, 17. 27. See Aquinas, De Unitate intellectus and De Aeternitate mundi. 28. On this, see Jan Aertsen, “Aquinas’s Philosophy in Its Historical Setting,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzman and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12–37. 29. For a good account of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, see Martin Pickavé, “­Human Knowledge,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. For an account more proximate to the story I tell ­here, see Georges Van Riet, Problèmes de l’épistémologie (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1960), chap.  1. Van Riet pres­ents Thomism as a “moderate realism.” 30. Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris.” 31. See Maurice de Wulf, “La Décadence de la scolastique à la fin du Moyen âge,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 10 (1903): 359–371. See also Mercier, “Le Bilan philosophique,” 325. 32. See, for example, C. Gutberlet, “Der Streit um die Relativitätstheorie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 26 (1913): 328–335; J. Gredt, “Die Lehre von Materie und Form und die Elektronen Theorie,” Divus Thomas 1 (1923): 257–288; F. Renoirte, “La Theorie physique: Introduction à l’étude d’Einstein,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 25 (1923); F. Renoirte, “La Critique einsteinienne,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 26 (1924); L. Urbano, “Einstein y Santo Tomás: Las Teorías relativistas acerca del tiempo y las doctrinas del Angélico Doctor,” Divus Thomas 3 (1925): 26–64. Urbano also wrote articles for Ciencia tomista—­see esp. his two-­part “Einstein y san Tomàs,” 1926. Heidegger, in his neo-­scholastic phase, also made reference to Einstein; see Heidegger, “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 366. 33. See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 1:55. 34. See Robert Kugelmann, Psy­chol­ogy and Catholicism: Contested Bound­aries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39. 35. Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers, 219. See also Noël, Histoire de l’ISP, 17. 36. Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 141. The experimental psy­chol­ogy laboratory would ­later be run by Albert Michotte. For Michotte, see Sigrid Leysson, “La Phénoménologie expérimentale d’Albert Michotte,” Philosophia Scientiae 19 (2015). 37. Noël, Histoire de l’ISP, 61. 38. Mercier, quoted in ibid., 109.

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NOTES TO PAGES 31–34

39. Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers, 129–131. 40. The term “neo-­T homism,” as opposed to “paleo-­T homism,” was canonized by Clément Besse in his Deux centres du mouvement thomiste: Rome et Louvain (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1902). Besse’s distinction is problematic in many ways, and so I have instead chosen the opposition between “progressive” and “strict” Thomism, which also had currency at the time. For the strict Thomists, see Chapter 2. 41. Boileau, Cardinal Mercier, 4–8. 42. Ibid., 11–14. 43. See Perrier, Revival of Scholastic Philosophy, 218–219. See the letters sent by Leo XIII published in the first issue of the Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 1 (1894): 79. 44. Mercier, “Le Bilan philosophique,” 327. 45. As we ­shall see, the question of a Thomistic epistemology remained controversial. In 1946 Georges Van Riet could write that despite the successes in other realms of philosophy—­logic, metaphysics, cosmology, psy­chol­ogy, and morality—­epistemology remained “a discipline of which the status is not established.” Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, v. 46. McCool, Nineteenth- ­Century Scholasticism, 140. 47. See Désiré Mercier, Cours de philosophie, vol. 4: Critériologie générale ou théorie générale de la certitude, 4th ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900), pts. 1–4. 48. Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 137. 49. As Van Riet has shown, Mercier’s thinking on this question underwent considerable development between 1880 and the First World War, and he only reached his mature position with the 1906 edition. For an analy­sis of Mercier’s development, see Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 152–173. 50. Of the Critériologie, Mercier dedicated pp. 123–283 to the first question and pp. 285– 360 to the second one. 51. Ibid., 230. 52. Mercier has often been criticized for his reductive understanding of Kant. Though in the final edition of the Critériologie Mercier did pay some attention to the transcendental aspects of Kant’s thesis, and thus to the ways in which it could found an objective science, this seems to have had ­l ittle impact on his reading. In the 1906 edition of the Critériologie, he summed up: “The true name of criticism is therefore subjectivism, what­ever Kant says. We ­w ill also call it relativism to signify that a judgment, conditioned exclusively by the structure of the subject, has value only for this subject, relative to him.” Mercier quoted in Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 177. 53. Mercier, Critériologie, 53. 54. This was Mercier’s argument against the Platonists and ontologists: that we have access to essences only through our experience of the world. 55. See ibid., 85–88. 56. As Gerald McCool has explained, this De Veritate text became a “locus classicus” in Thomistic epistemology. McCool, From Unity to Pluralism (New York: Fordham University Press: 1989), 28. 57. See Mercier, Critériologie, 35–36, 43–44n. 58. Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 143.



NOTES TO PAGES 34–37 359

59. Mercier, Critériologie, 181. 60. See ibid., 35, where he makes the distinction. See also his criticism of “the theories which propose an exclusively psychological criterion of certainty,” ibid., 160–172. 61. Ibid., 33. 62. The nature of the correspondence theory of truth has been much debated since, and many argue that Aquinas’s theory does involve a transcendental dimension. See Jan Aertsen, “Truth as Transcendental in Thomas Aquinas,” Topoi 11 (1992). I’m grateful to Andrea Robiglio for pointing this out to me. 63. See Mercier, Critériologie, 21. 64. Ibid., 27. 65. ­Here Mercier made a distinction between the “­thing” (chose) in the world and the “object” that was the “­thing” as pres­ent to the mind. Mercier, “La Notion de la vérité,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 6 (1899): 380. 66. Mercier, Critériologie, 21–22. 67. Ibid., 24. 68. Mercier, “La Notion de la vérité,” 388. See Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 173–174. 69. Mercier, Critériologie, 367. 70. Ibid., 39. See also Mercier, “La Notion de la vérité.” 71. Mercier, Critériologie, 286. 72. Ibid., 364. 73. Mercier’s student Léon Noël tried to downplay the importance of the causality argument, arguing that it took on a central position only briefly in the 1906 version of the Critériologie. In the first versions it was intended only as an argument for skeptics, who refused the truth of Thomist realism. All along, Noël argued, Mercier also embraced a form of “immediate realism.” See Léon Noël, “Les Progrès de l’épistémologie thomiste,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 35 (1932): 432–438. 74. See Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth ­Century (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1995), 110. 75. Kugelmann, Psy­chol­ogy and Catholicism, 78. 76. “Accord entre L’ISP de l’Université de Louvain and La Faculté libre de Philosophie et Lettres de Sâo Paulo (Brésil),” ISP Archives, 172. 77. See “Czech Catholicism and Philosophy,” in Czech Philosophy in the XXth ­Century, ed. Lubomir Novy (­Grand Rapids, MI: Paideia Press, 1999), 80–81 and n. 78. Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 1:40, 47. 79. According to Mangiagalli, Mercier’s influence led Gemelli to embrace experimental psy­chol­ogy (ibid., 1:67–69). The Franciscan influence inclined the Milanese to place even more emphasis on science than did the neo-­scholastics in Louvain. “In contrast to Mercier . . . ​Gemelli interpreted the role of philosophy as ‘postscientific’ ” (ibid., 2:50; see also 2:81–82). 80. AGSUCSC, Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, folder 131. As we ­shall see, however, from the beginning the Milan school was pulling in both directions. See Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 235–237. 81. “Il nostro programma,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 1 (1909): 17.

360

NOTES TO PAGES 37–42

82. For Canella’s Mercier-­inspired criteriology, see Giulio Canella, “Gli elementi di fatto per la soluzione del problema criteriologico fondamentale,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 1 (1909): 97–119. 83. Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:65. 84. Switalski quoted in Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers, 184. 85. See Noël, Histoire de l’ISP, 38. 86. Constantin Gutberlet, “Die Aufgabe der christlichen Philosophie in der Gegenwart,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 1 (1888): 1–23. For Gutberlet, see Emerich Coreth, ed., Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Graz: Styria, 1987–), 184. 87. “Il nostro programma,” 6. 88. Christian Schreiber, review of the Critériologie générale, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 14 (1901): 326; N. N. Kaufmann, “Cours de philosophie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 16 (1903): 310. 89. “Il nostro programma,” 11. 90. See Léon Noël, “Note sur le ‘problème’ de la connaissance,” Annales de l’ISP (1913): 665. 91. Emilio Chiocchetti, “Il ‘Philosophisches Jahrbuch,’ ” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 2 (1910): 351. 92. See Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers, 198, 277, 518, 530. And Léon Noël, Notes d’épistémologie thomiste (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1926), 3–4. 93. See René Kremer, Le Néo-­réalisme américain (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920). 94. The neo-­scholastics embraced the first edition of the Logical Investigations. ­Later Husserl revised it extensively, aligning it in part with his Ideas. See Chapter 2. 95. See Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 16. 96. Husserl manuscripts, Husserl Archives, E 3:10.14. For Husserl’s own account of his religious beliefs, see Dorian Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 46–47. For a historical account of Husserl’s grappling with ­these questions, see Emmanuel Housset, Husserl et l’idée de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010). 97. Franz Brentano, Psy­chol­ogy from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos. C. Rancurello et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 88. 98. Ibid., 194–200. 99. Ibid., 208–216, 222. On this, see Robin Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 33–42. For an analy­sis of Brentano’s conception of intentionality and its relationship to his broader proj­ect, see Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology and Social Renewal in Central Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), chap. 1. 100. For a discussion of Brentano’s school, see Rollinger, Husserl’s Position, and Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). On Brentano’s influence on the reception of phenomenology in Eastern Eu­ rope, see Gubser, The Far Reaches, pt. 2. 101. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, vol.  10: Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 18–22.



NOTES TO PAGES 42–46 361

102. Ibid., 191–203. 103. Gottlob Frege, “Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic,” trans. E. W. Kluge, Mind 81, no. 323 (1972): 323, 336–337. 104. John Stuart Mill, Collected Works, vol. 7: A System of Logic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 27–28. 105. See Moran, Edmund Husserl, 59–93. 106. ­There is some debate about the influence of Frege’s review on Husserl’s development, with most Husserl scholars thinking that it merely confirmed for Husserl the path on which he had already embarked. 107. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 3. In citing the major works by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-­Ponty, and Ricoeur, I have quoted standard translations so that my argument can have the widest pos­si­ble reach. 108. Ibid., 1:11. 109. Ibid., 1:46–47. 110. Ibid., 1:13, 77. Husserl said that this would stand even if the laws ­were considered “constitutive laws of man as species,” what Husserl labeled “anthropologism” (78). 111. See ibid., 2:94–100. On this, see Ryan Hickerson, The History of Intentionality (London: Continuum, 2007), 65–81. Husserl’s reformulation also involved a criticism of Twardowksi, in the sense that Twardowski had identified the immanent content as the intentional object, which he opposed to the real object. 112. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2:98–99. 113. Ibid., 1:150–151. See esp. 224–227. 114. Ibid., 1:226. 115. Ibid., 1:159. 116. Ibid., 1:86–87. 117. Ibid., 1:237. ­Here we have some impor­tant shifts between the first edition and the second. See Moran’s introduction in ibid., 1:liii. David Bell has noted that Husserl does not give a full account of this ideational abstraction in the Logical Investigations. “We know, of course, that the procedure begins with a sensory awareness of individual moments, and that it terminates in the direct, non-­sensory awareness of an ideal species; but exactly how this is to be done, or exactly what techniques and procedures one is to employ, remain largely a mystery.” David Bell, Husserl (London: Routledge, 1989), 110. 118. On “categorial” intuition, see Taylor Carman, “Phenomenology as Rigorous Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 14–15. 119. For a very clear account of this, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 22–27. 1 20. Husserl, Logical Investigations 1:231. 121. Ibid., 2:79, 158–165. 1 22. Ibid., 2:97. 1 23. Ibid., 2:119–122, 146–149. 1 24. Ibid., 1:192.

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NOTES TO PAGES 46–49

1 25. Or more precisely, the expressions had objects, but ­those objects did not exist. See Hickerson, The History of Intentionality, 107. 1 26. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:46–55, 113–115, 160–161. 127. Ibid., 1:86. 1 28. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 39–42. 1 29. On this point it is impor­t ant to recognize that Husserl declares the ideal object to be just as real as the external object. The ideal / real distinction corresponds, not to ­mental / extra-­mental opposition but instead to the atemporal / temporal opposition. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:249. 130. Ibid., 1:146. 131. Ibid., 2:220–222. 132. Ibid., 1:117, 120. 133. Quoted in Bell, Husserl, 148. According to Bell, the prob­lems caused by this led Husserl to embrace a transcendental point of view. 134. Compare Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:160–161. 135. Ibid., 1:83, 258–260. 136. See ibid., 1:170. 137. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 32. 138. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:33. 139. Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish ­Family, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS, 1986), 250; Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein, quoted in Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. B. Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 39. See also the judgment of Traugott Oesterreich, in Freidrich Ueberweg and Traugott Oesterreich, Die Deutsche Philosophie des XIX. Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart, 13th ed. (Basel: 1951), 631. 1 40. Gutberlet had briefly referred to Husserl in an 1908 article, naming him the “most significant opponent” of psychologism. Constantin Gutberlet, “Der gegenwärtige Stand der psychologischen Forschung,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 21 (1908): 3. 141. See Bernulf Kanitscheider, “Messer, August,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 17 (1994): 216. Messer left the Church in response to the modernism controversy. See his remarks in August Messer and Max Pribilla, Katholisches und modernes Denken (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1924), esp. 1–16, where he contended that rational modern thought was given no place in the Catholic world, due to its emphasis on “suprarational” belief and “infallible” authority. 1 42. For the affinities between the Würzburg school and neo-­scholasticism, see Martin Kusch, Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), 194–231. 1 43. August Messer, Empfindung und Denken (Leipzig. Quelle und Meyer, 1908), 163–182. 1 44. See Coreth, Christliche Philosophie, 2:631. 1 45. See ibid., 2:630. 146. See “Bericht der philosophischen Fakultät über die Besetzung der 2ten Philosophischen Professur,” Freiburg Universitätsarchiv, BO 038 / 131 II.3.



NOTES TO PAGES 49–51 363

147. Bernhard Braun, “Joseph Geyser,” in Coreth, Christliche Philosophie, 2:630; Max Ettlinger, “J. Geyser als Psychologe,” in Philosophia Perennis II, ed. Fritz-­Joachim von Rintelen (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1930), 1133. 1 48. Braun, “Joseph Geyser,” 630. 1 49. Joseph Geyser, Grundlegung der empirischen Psychologie (Bonn: Hanstein, 1902), 47. Husserl moved away from the ­t heses that connected him to this position. See the note added in the second edition of the Logical Investigations at 2:93. 150. The impetus seems to have come from Messer, who in his Empfindung und Denken had explic­itly distanced Husserl’s thought from “actualism.” Messer, Empfindung und Denken, 34–73. Geyser cites Messer’s book alongside Husserl. Joseph Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre (Münster: Schnöningh, 1909), 274. 151. See Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 15–17. 152. Ibid., 17. 153. Ibid., v. For Geyser’s reading of the Logical Investigations, see “Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen,” Joseph Geyser Nachlass, NL21  /  112, University of Freiburg. 154. Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 7, 274. ­Here Geyser explic­itly aligned Husserl’s thought with scholasticism. Geyser focused his reading on the first volume, and the fifth investigation on objectifying acts. 155. Gruss in his analy­sis suggests that this is what separates Geyser from the scholastics, but he fails to recognize the equal importance of the ideal object in the epistemology of the Louvain school. Heribert Gruss, Transzendenzerkenntnis im phänomenologischen Ansatz (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980), 53. 156. Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 47. Geyser argued that “thought, if considered in its pure meaning, has nothing to do with the concept of existence.” 157. Ibid., 51. 158. Ibid., 49. See also Gruss, Transzendenzerkenntnis, 56. 159. Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 47. 160. Ibid., 17. Geyser did think that the proof of the outside world was prepared in logic, but that it was not achieved ­t here. 161. Ibid., 51, 250–252. 162. Ibid., 411. Geyser discussed existential judgments only at 410–411, the last two pages of his book. Even ­here he comes close to the Mercier position. “The difficulty is that relations can only exist between two ele­ments, and thus can only be understood, when both ele­ments can be understood.” 163. Ibid., 23. 164. Ibid. 165. See his remarks in Léon Noël, “Le Mouvement néo-­scolastique,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 19 (1912). Noël first mentioned Husserl’s work in a 1909 article, in which he discussed Messer. Léon Noël, “Chronique philosophique,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 16 (1909). 166. For Noël, see Christian Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 104–105, 107–109; Andrea Robiglio “Alle Cose

364

NOTES TO PAGES 51–54

stesse: Léon Noël (1878–1953) e il tomismo creativo della Scuola di Lovanio,” in Tomismo Creativo, ed. M. Salvioli (Bologna: ESD, 2015). For Noël’s development, see Van Riet, Problèmes de l’épistémologie, 121–139. 167. Léon Noël, “Les Frontières de la logique,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 17 (1910): 228–229. 168. Ibid., 231. 169. Ibid., 232. 170. Ibid., 226. 171. “Procès-­verbaux des déliberations des examens,” ISP historique, 76, ISP Archives. Sadly, it appears that his doctoral thesis no longer exists. 172. Konstanty Michalski, “La Réaction contre le psychologisme en Allemagne: Husserl, ses prédécesseurs et ses partisans,” in Historia Philosophiae (Kraków: Institute Theologici Congregationis Missionis, 1999), 558. See also the discussion at 564. 173. Wolenski, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-­Warsaw School (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 16. 174. Agostino Gemelli, “Revue néo-­scolastique,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 2 (1910): 353–355; Gemelli, “Lo Studio sperimentale del pensiero e della volontà, I,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 3 (1911). 175. Gemelli, “Lo Studio sperimentale,” 331n. 176. Emilio Chiocchetti, review, “Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 3 (1911): 706–709. 177. Armato Masnovo, “Log­os,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 3 (1911): 473. 178. See, for instance, Agostino Gemelli, “Il Problema della realizzazione secondo O. Külpe,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 5 (1913): 406–407. 179. Teresa Vilariño Picos, “Influencia de la fenomenología en el pensamiento de Amado Alonso,” Cauce: Revista di filogía y su didáctica (1995): 653. 180. Marcelino Arnáiz, Psicología fundada en la experiencia (Madrid: Sáenz de Jubera, 1914), xxii–­x xvii, 233n. For Arnáiz’s place within Spanish psy­chol­ogy, see Jorge Castro, Enrique Lafuente, and Belén Jiménez, “The Soul of Spain: Spanish Scholastic Psy­chol­ogy and the Making of Modern Subjectivity (1875–1931),” History of Psy­ chol­ogy 12 (2009). 181. Martin Grabmann, Der Gegenwartswert der geschichtlichen Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Philosophie (Vienna: Herder, 1913), 11. 182. Ibid., 42. 183. Ibid., 46–47. 184. Ibid., 48. H ­ ere Grabmann refers both to Noël’s article and to Geyser’s Grundlagen der Logik. 185. Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers, 181–182. 186. See, among many o­ thers, Grabmann, Der Gegenwartswert, 51–53. 187. Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 5 (1913): 242. When the Catholic University was founded, the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung formed part of its core philosophy collection. See Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Annuario 1922–1923, 80, AGSUCSC.



NOTES TO PAGES 55–59 365

2. Betrayal 1. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Log­os 1 (1911). 2. Husserl first discussed the epoché in the Seefelder manuscripts from 1905. I thank Dan Zahavi for pointing this out to me. 3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. W. Boyce Gibson (London: Routledge, 2010), 56. 4. Ibid., 112. 5. Ibid., 180–181. 6. Ibid., 123–125. 7. See esp. ibid., 175–177. 8. Ibid., 153. 9. Ibid., 154. 10. Husserl did not use the term “idealism” in Ideen, but had used it in earlier lecture courses and would in ­later publications. Dan Zahavi explains this shift as a move from metaphysical neutrality to an idealism that rejects metaphysical realism. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 68. 11. Husserl managed only a partial revision of the texts, focusing predominantly on the fifth and sixth investigations (the latter of which appeared only a­ fter the War), and leaving the Prolegomena virtually unchanged. For the revisions, see Dermot Moran, introduction, in Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 1:xxxiv–­x xxix. 12. Husserl, Ideas, 138. See also 130–132, 143–145. 13. See ibid., 246–251, 411–415. 14. Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), 197. Husserl’s concept of “constitution” is difficult to grasp, and much rests on its interpretation. For a clear account, see Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 72–77. 15. Husserl, Ideas, 168–170. 16. Letter, Husserl to Baudin, 8. vi. 1934 in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 16. 17. Elisabeth Ströker, Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 59–69. 18. See, for instance, Husserl, Ideas, 112, 369. 19. Ibid., 154–155. 20. For this development, see Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, pt. 3. 21. See Ströker, Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, 95–103. 22. For an account of this ambiguity in Ideas, see Rudolf Bernet, “Husserls Bregriff des Noema,” in Husserl-­Ausgabe und Husserl-­Forschung, ed. S.  Ijsselling (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 61–80. For a recent account of the debate, coming down strongly against the Fregean view, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 82–94. 23. Husserl, Ideas, 258–261. 24. Ibid., 361.

366

NOTES TO PAGES 59–64

25. Passages such as t­ hese have inspired l­ ater interpreters like Dagfinn Follesdal and Hubert Dreyfus to argue that the noema should be seen as a generalization of Fregean Sinn or sense. See Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 681–682. For a more recent defense of the same argument, see Føllesdal, “Noema and Meaning in Husserl,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990): 263–271. 26. Husserl, Ideas, 258. 27. Ibid., 263. 28. Ibid., 136. 29. Ibid., 263. 30. Ibid., 363–368. 31. The classic pre­sen­t a­t ion of this argument comes in Sokolowski, Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, chap. 4. 32. See Husserl, Ideas, 157, 411. 33. This brings us to the temporal aspects of constitution, which, although intimated in Ideas, ­were rarely discussed in the early reception, and so I have left them to one side ­here. 34. Discussed in Moran’s introduction to Husserl, Logical Investigations, viii. 35. Husserl, Ideas, 183. 36. Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie, New Theologie (London: Continuum, 2010), 24. One perhaps s­ houldn’t overstate the opposition between the two Popes. In his book La Papauté à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1997), Launay argues that despite differences in style and approach, both Popes had similar aspirations for an “integral Catholicism.” 37. Quoted in Stephen Schloesser, Jazz-­Age Catholicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 54. 38. The modernist oath was not enforced in Germany. See Thomas O’Meara, Erich Przywara: His Theology, His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 21. 39. Alfred Loisy, ­Simples réflexions sur le Décret du Saint-­Office (1908), quoted in Léon Noël, “­Simples réflexions,” Revue Néo- ­Scolastique 15 (1908). 40. According to Mettepenningen, Mercier also helped protect some Belgian “modernists” from papal censure. See Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie, 22. 41. See also Désiré Mercier, Le Modernisme: Sa Position vis-­à-­vis la science et sa condemnation par le pape Pie X (Brussels: L’Action Catholique, 1908). 42. Désiré Mercier, “Un Discours de Cardinal Mercier,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique 15 (1908): 6. 43. Noël, “­Simples réflexions,” 130–134. 44. For ­t hese thinkers, see Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste: Recherches sur le problème de la connaissance dans l’école thomiste contemporaine (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1946), 213–234. 45. Agostino Gemelli, La lotta contro Lourdes (1911). See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica” (1909–1959), 2 vols. (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991), 1:56f. 46. On Gemelli’s position with re­spect to modernism and Catholic integralism, see Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 1:104–118.



NOTES TO PAGES 64–67 367

47. See Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 240. 48. For the movement from Villari’s positivism to Gentile’s Hegelianism in Italy, see Rubini, The Other Re­n ais­sance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 84–89. 49. Giovanni Gentile, I Problemi della scolastica e il pensiero italiano, 2nd ed. (Bari: G. Laterza, 1922), 57. 50. See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:39. 51. Agostino Gemelli, “Une orientation nouvelle de la scolastique,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 19 (1912); Gemelli, “Eine neue Richtung in der scholastischen Philosophie?,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 26 (1913). Gemelli explic­itly proposed the new orientation as applicable across the neo-­scholastic movement: “­Isn’t it the contact and exchange of views between thinkers belonging to dif­fer­ent countries that must ensure the development of scholastic philosophy?” “Une orientation nouvelle,” 549. 52. Gemelli, “Une orientation nouvelle,” 552n. 53. Ibid., 553–554. In his response to Gemelli’s article, the Louvain neo-­scholastic Maurice de Wulf suggested that the Louvain program was subtler than Gemelli had suggested. In fact Gemelli suggested merely “new applications” of neo-­scholastic thought rather than a “new orientation.” Maurice de Wulf, “Faut-il changer l’orientation de la néo-­scolastique?,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 19 (1912): 557. 54. See Emerich Coreth ed., Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Graz: Styria, 1987–), 678–679. 55. Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,”1:86–87. We ­shouldn’t, however, lose sight of the differences between the three thinkers. On this, see Italo Mancini, “La neoscolastica durante gli anni del fascismo,” in La Filosofia italiana di fronte al fascismo, ed. A. Vigorelli (Milan: Unicopli, 2000), 195–220. 56. Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 236. For Olgiati’s treatment of modern philosophy and the way in which he distanced himself from the paleo-­T homists, see Francesco Olgiati, “La storia della filosofia moderna e la neoscolastica Italiana” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 17 (1925). 57. Quoted in Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:33. 58. For a near-­contemporaneous account of the shift in orientation of the Milan school, see Vincenzo la Via, “La più recente attività neo-­scolastica in Italia” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (1925): 237–270. For Gemelli’s reassertion of a “third tendency” between the “ripetitori” and the “carnefici” of St. Thomas, see his pre­sen­t a­t ion to the 1924 International Thomistic Congress in Naples. Agostino Gemelli, Il Mio contributo alla filosofia neo-­scolastica (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1932), 8–9. 59. Christian Schreiber, “Die Erkenntnislehre des hl. Thomas und die moderne Erkenntniskritik,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 27 (1914): 518. 60. Ibid., 520. 61. Charles Sentroul, L’Objet de la métaphysique (1905), quoted in Van Riet, L’Épistémologie thomiste, 183. 62. For Noël, see Van Riet, Problèmes d’épistémologie (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1960), 84–143; and Robiglio, “ ‘Alle Cose stessa: Léon Noël (1878–1953) e il tomismo

368

NOTES TO PAGES 67–70

creativo della Scuola di Lovanio,” in Tomismo creativo, ed. M. Salvioli (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 2015), which draws attention to the phenomenological resonances of this argument. 63. Noël had first remarked on the transcendental objectivist reading of Kant in Léon Noël, “Les Frontières de la logique,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 17 (1910): 224 and n. Heidegger about this time also participated in a similar rereading of Kant. See Chapter 3. 64. Zybura, Present-­Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism (New York: Herder, 1926), 224. 65. Léon Noël, “Note sur le ‘problème’ de la connaissance,” in Annales de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain 2 (1913): 675. 66. Ibid., 677. According to Van Riet, at this stage Noël gave no positive proof of the real­ity of the object. See Van Riet, Problèmes de l’epistemologie, 121–123, 127–128. 67. Noël, “ ‘Problème’ de la connaissance,” 680. 68. Martin Grabmann, “Die Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Sprachlogik,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 35 (1922): 122, 213; Martin Grabmann, “The Influence of Mediaeval Philosophy on the Intellectual Life of ­Today,” New Scholasticism 2 (1928): 53. 69. Giacomo Maritain, “Lo Stato attuale della filosofia tedesca,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 13 (1921): 316. 70. Caspar Nink, “Die Wesenheiten und ihre Bedeutung für Grundfragen der Philosophie,” Scholastik 3 (1928):72. 71. See, in addition to the p ­ eople I have mentioned, Matthias Thiel, “Die Phänomenologische Lehre der Anschauung im Lichte der thomistischen Philosophie,” Divus Thomas 1 (1923); Helmut Burgert, “Zur Kritik der Phänomenologie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 38 (1925); Siegfried Behn, “Über Phänomenologie und Abstraktion,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 38 (1925); A. Boehm, “Phénoménologie et thomisme,” Revue Thomiste (1927). 72. Noël, “ ‘Problème’ de la connaissance,” 664n. 73. We see a similar argument in the essay by Michele Losacco, “I Fondamenti dell’oggettivismo,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 22 (1930): 464–465. Husserl and ­others had secured the objectivity of knowledge, but “the most difficult prob­lem remained to be studied, the gnoseological-­metaphysical prob­lem, which was that of the relations of consciousness with Being and of objective thought (or of essence) with real existence.” 74. Léon Noël, “The Neo-­Scholastic Approach to the Prob­lems of Epistemology,” New Scholasticism 1 (1926): 138. We see a similar ambivalence with Gemelli. See Agostino Gemelli, review of F. De Sarlo’s “Lineamenti di una fenomenologia dello spirito,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 17 (1925): 368n. 75. See René Kremer, Le Néo-­réalisme américain (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920), 289, 294; Kremer, La Théorie de la connaissance chez les néo-­réalistes anglais (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1928), 6. See also his numerous “Bulletins d’épistémologie” for the Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie in the mid-1920s. 76. See Jordi Corominas, Xavier Zubiri: La Solitude sonore, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 22.



NOTES TO PAGES 70–72 369

77. Ibid., 26, 30, 34. Conill argues against the received idea that Zubiri encountered Husserl first through Ortega y Gasset. He draws attention to Zubiri’s focus on the Logical Investigations in contrast to Ortega’s engagement with Ideas. Jesús Conill, “La Fenomenologia en Zubiri,” Philosophia 4 (1997). See also A. Pintor-­R amos, “Zubiri y la fenomenología,” Realidad, nos. 3–4 (1979): 399–400. 78. Quoted in Corominas, Xavier Zubiri, 67n. 79. See his analy­sis of Louvain neo-­scholasticism in his 1925 “La Crisis de la consciencia moderna,” in Primeros escritos, 1921–1926 (Madrid: Alianza Ediorial Fundacion Xavier Zubiri, 1995), 335–358. 80. Published in Zubiri, Primeros escritos, 393–451. Corominas suggests that one of the driving forces for Zubiri’s topic was Ortega. Corominas, Xavier Zubiri, 85n. 81. See Corominas, Xavier Zubiri, 113. See also Pio Colonnello, The Philosophy of José Gaos, trans. Peter Cocozello (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 19–20. 82. See Diego Gracia, “Xavier Zubiri” in Introduction à la pensée de Xavier Zubiri (1898– 1983), ed. Philibert Secretan (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 11. 83. Zubiri promotes a version of truth that remains unmistakably marked by Mercier’s. See Xavier Zubiri, “Le Problème de l’objectivité d’après Edmund Husserl I: La Logique pure,” in Primeros escritos, 398. 84. Ibid., 447. 85. Ibid., 416. 86. Ibid., 417. 87. Ibid., 450–451. 88. Zubiri, Primeros escritos, 1921–1926, 109–110. I am very grateful to Candela Potente for guiding me through this text. 89. Ibid., 113n88. Zubiri concluded by referring to neo-­scholastic work on Husserl in Germany. 90. Quoted in Corominas, Xavier Zubiri, 110. 91. Xavier Zubiri, “Recensión de Brentano,” in Primeros escritos, 391. 92. Xavier Zubiri, prologue to the En­glish translation of Naturaleza, historia, Dios, quoted in Diego Gracia, “Xavier Zubiri,” 11–12. 93. Gracia, “Xavier Zubiri,” 13–16. ­W hether this quite aligned him with the neo-­ scholastics has been fiercely debated. See, for instance, Manuel Mejido Costoya, “Beyond Nomological, Hermeneutic, and Dialectical Knowledge: Zubiri’s Radicalization of Scholastic Realism and the Hidden Ground of the Human-­Social Sciences,” Xavier Zubiri Review 6 (2004): 61–71; Ignacia Ellacuria, “Une Approche de la philosophie de Zubiri,” in Introductions à la pensée de Xavier Zubiri, ed. Philibert Secretan (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 35–37. Even at this stage, Zubiri focused his attention on real­ity as it was seized by the subject, and criticized medieval philosophy for its restrictive account of real­ity. 94. Joseph Geyser, Neue und Alte Wege der Philosophie (Münster: Schöningh, 1916), iii–­v. 95. Fritz-­Joachim von Rintelen, ed., Philosophia Perennis, vol. 2 (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1930), 1148. 96. Geyser, Neue und Alte Wege, 27.

370

NOTES TO PAGES 73–76

97. Ibid., 38. 98. Temporality, as we have seen, was for Husserl the marker of real­ity. 99. Ibid., 44. 100. Ibid., 45–46. 101. Ibid., 43. Geyser’s other criticism of Husserl’s Wesensschau and Husserl’s methodology followed this pattern. Although Husserl tried to separate them from purely psychological pro­cesses, his distinctions broke down. 102. Ibid., 200. 103. Ibid., 194–200. Geyser put aside what Husserl labeled “perceptibility,” b­ ecause “the becoming-­perceived evidently adds to existence as a third and detachable relation.” The argument is not fully convincing—it seems to misconstrue “pos­si­ble” perceptions as factually pos­si­ble perceptions. 104. Ibid., 270. 105. Ibid., 273–274. 106. Ibid., 300. 107. See ibid., 53n. 108. Ibid., 291. 109. Letter, Alexander Pfänder to Edmund Husserl, May  21, 1916, Alexander Pfänder Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (hereafter cited as Pfänderiana), K  I.1. Munich Staatsbibliothek. 110. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue (London: Continuum, 2006), 14. 111. For the classic account of this period, see Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. B. Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 33–75. 112. Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Beings (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2005), 12. 113. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 73. 114. Ibid., 82. 115. Quoted in Joachim Feldes, “Das Phänomenologenheim: Der Bergzaberner Kreis im Kontext der frühen phänomenologischen Bewegung” (PhD diss., Charles University Prague, 2013), 123. 116. Peter Wust, Briefe an Freunde (Münster: Verlag Regensberg, 1956), 97, quoted in Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 85. 117. See Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish ­Family, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS, 1986), 250. For a good account, see Francesco Tommasi, L’Analogia della persona in Edith Stein (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2012), 34–61. 118. For an account of Stein’s thesis, see MacIntyre, Edith Stein, 75–87. 119. Letter quoted in ibid., 103. 1 20. The two versions are printed side-­by-­side in Edith Stein, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Redmond (Washington, DC: ICS, 2000). 121. Ibid., 8. 1 22. Edith Stein, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1929): 317–318.



NOTES TO PAGES 77–79 371

1 23. Stein, Faith and Knowledge, 30–32. For a more extensive analy­sis of the place of God in Stein’s phenomenology and her criticism of Husserl, see Reuben Guilead, De la Phénoménologie à la science de la croix (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1974), 103–123. 1 24. Stein, Faith and Knowledge, 39. 1 25. See Angela Ales Bello, Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, Gerda Walther (Bari: G. Laterza, 2011), 19. 1 26. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:171. 127. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl- ­Chronik (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 72. 1 28. See “Aus dem Münchener Kreis,” Daubertiana CII. 1, Munich Staatsbibliothek. For reports on their meetings, see “Notizen zu Vorträgen verschiedener Teilnehmer und Diskussionen im ‘psychologischen Verein, 1905–1908,’ ” A. Pfänder A, II 5; and for around 1910, see Beck Ana 354 DII 1, Munich Staatsbibliothek. 1 29. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), 166–170. 130. See Feldes, “Das Phänomenologenheim,” 32. For a brief overview, see the account given by Eberhard Avé-­Lallemant, “Die Phänomenologische Bewegung: Ursprung, Anfänge, und Ausblick,” in Husserl und die phänomenologische Bewegung, ed. Hans Rainer Sepp (Munich: Alber, 1988). See also Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology and Social Renewal in Central Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), chaps. 3 and 5. 131. “Phänomenologenlied,” Ana 378. C I 3, Munich Staatsbibliothek. 132. See Feldes, “Das Phänomenologenheim,” 45–46. 133. See ibid., 50. 134. Eberhard Avé-­Lallemant, “Die Antithese Freiburg-­München in der Geschichte der Phänomenologie,” in Die Münchener Phänomenologie, ed. Helmut Kuhn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 24. Avé-­Lallemant argued, however, that ­t hese ­weren’t essentially in opposition—­ t he “antithesis” derived instead from how they ­ were interpreted. 135. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 191. See also Feldes, “Das Phenomenologenheim,” 43–64. For a brief overview of the Munich phenomenologists, see Helmut Kuhn “Phänomenologie und wirkliche Wirklichkkeit,” in Kuhn, Die Münchener Phänomenologie, 1–7. For an accessible and clear discussion of Reinach’s phenomenology, see James Dubois, Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995). 136. Stein, Life in a Jewish F ­ amily, 250, 258. 137. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 192. See also Beate Beckmann, Phänomenologie des religiösen Erlebnisses: Religionsphilosophische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Adolf Reinach und Edith Stein (Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2003). 138. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 189. 139. According to Gérard Jorland, Koyré tried to convince himself of the existence of God through his studies of medieval philosophy. See Jorland, “Koyré Phénoménologue,” in Alexandre Koyré: L’Avventura intellettuale, ed. Carlo Vinti (Naples: Edizione scientifiche Italiane, 1994), 114.

372

NOTES TO PAGES 79–81

1 40. They used the term “Phänomenologenheim” instead; see Feldes, “Das Phänomenologenheim,” 9. 141. Feldes, however, doubts the historical veracity of the conversion story. Ibid. 1 42. For an overview of Conrad-­Martius’s work, see Alexandra Pfeiffer, “Ontological Phenomenology: The Philosophical Proj­ect of Hedwig Conrad-­Martius,” Axiomathes 18 (2008). 1 43. See, for instance, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, “Thomistische Perspectiven,” Catholica (January 1937), and her extensive reading notes on both medieval and contemporaneous scholastic works in her archives: notes on Kleutgen, Gloßner, Gilson, Gredt, de Wulf, Przywara, and ­others, Conrad-­Martiusiana, B  III, Munich Staatsbibliothek (hereafter cited as Conrad-­Martiusiana). See also Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 212; and Feldes, “Das Phenomenologenheim,” 106–111. L ­ ater Conrad-­ Martius would engage with Catholic institutions. In 1937 she accepted an invitation from Romano Guardini to give lectures at a Catholic retreat at Burg Rothenfels. Letters, Guardini to Conrad-­Martius, 1.7.1936 and 6.7.1936, Conrad-­Martiusiana, C II. 1 44. Hering thought that the piece by “Clemens Ritters” was written by Scheler, and suggested that another piece was prob­a bly written by the Göttingen Circle member Rudolf Clemens. See letter, Hering to Neumann, September 16, 1917, Cod. Ms. Friedrich Neumann, Staats-­u nd Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 1:1,170. The journal was edited by Franz Blei and Jakob Hegner, who w ­ ere Jewish but published numerous religious pieces by Carl Schmitt and o­ thers and intended to publish u­ nder their imprint predominantly books by Catholic authors such as Maine de Biran, Gratry, Miguel de Unamuno, Malebranche, Nicolas von Cusa, and Paul Claudel. 1 45. See Gérard Jorland, La Science dans la philosophie: Les Recherches épistémologiques d’Alexandre Koyré (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 126–127. 1 46. Letter, Koyré to Spiegelberg, December 14, 1953, cited in Jorland, La Science dans la philosophie, 28. 147. See “L’Enseignement d’Alexandre Koyré: Résumés de cours 1921–39,” Fonds Koyré, AP c.4 d.2. Koyré stated his conclusions from the 1924–1925 course: “The dif­ fer­ent philosophical positions of the post-­K antian systems are determined above all by religious positions; t­ hese systems reproduce and continue the currents of religious thought; their philosophical ­theses translate theological positions and inspirations, which is why they are all irreducibly opposed to Kantianism, and all animated by the desire to reconquer for man that central place that mystical theology had assigned him.” 1 48. Jean Héring, review of the French version, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 4 (1924): 574–577. 1 49. See Bello, Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, Gerda Walther, 43–56. 150. See Gubser, The Far Reaches, 74. 151. Theodor Celms, Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls (Riga: Walters und Rapa, 1928). See Sepp, Husserl und die phänomenologische Bewegung, 435; Gubser, The Far Reaches, 66. 152. Roman Ingarden, “Bemerkungen zum Prob­lem ‘Idealismus-­R ealismus,’ ” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1929). See also Ingarden’s account



NOTES TO PAGES 81–83 373

in his On The Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. A. Hannibalsson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). 153. See “Philosophie in München: Die Geschichte der Münchener Universität,” Information Philosophie 2 (2013): 66–74. 154. The Catholic phi­los­o­phers Max Ettlinger and Wladislaus Switalski, for instance, ­were both members of the Akademischen Verein für Psychologie. See “Mitglieder-­ Verzeichnis der akademischen Verein für Psychologie, 1902,” Pfänderiana L III.1. 155. Thiel, “Die Phänomenologische Lehre,” 165. 156. Burgert, “Zur Kritik der Phänomenologie,” 230. 157. R. Kremer, “Bulletin d’épistémologie,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 27 (1925): 94. 158. Wilhelm Wundt, Kleine Schriften, vol. 1 (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1910), 598–614. 159. Nikolai Berdyaev, “The End of the Re­nais­sance II,” Slavic Review (December 1925): 351. Berdyaev, however, detached medieval scholasticism from his criticism. See, for instance, his remarks about Aquinas, in Berdyaev, “The End of the Re­nais­sance I,” Slavic Review (June 1925): 6. As we s­ hall see in Chapter 5, Berdyaev would take scholasticism as an exemplary opponent. 160. Léon Chestov, “Momento mori,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 101 (1926): 17. See also Shestov’s reference to “scholastic realism” at 23, 29–30, and the comparison to Aquinas at 58–62. 161. Armando Carlini, Orientamenti della filosofia contemporanea (Rome: Critica Fascista, 1931), 88. Henry Lanz, “Genus and Species,” Philosophical Review 33 (1924): 470. For Lanz’s relationship to Nabokov, see Brian Boyd, Nabokov: The American Years (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2016), 33. 162. Giulio Grasselli, “La Fenomenologia di Husserl e l’ontologia di Martin Heidegger,” Rivista di filosofia 23 (1928): 330. 163. Ibid., 333. 164. Ibid., 344. 165. See Julius Bixler, “Men and Tendencies in German Religious Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 23 (1930): 5–7. 166. Julius Bixler, “German Phenomenology and Its Implications for Religion,” Journal of Religion 9 (1929): 593. 596. See also Sidney Hook’s discussion of the Thomist reception of Husserl, in Hook, “A Personal Impression of Con­temporary German Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 27 (1930): 153. 167. Charles Serrus, “Le Conflit du logicisme et du psychologisme,” Études Philosophiques 1 (1928): 15. 168. Antonio Banfi, “La Tendenza logistica: Nella filosofia tedesca contemporanea e le ‘Ricerche logiche’ di Edmund Husserl,” Rivista di filosofia (1923): 130–131. See also Antonio Banfi, Principi di una teoria della ragione (Turin: G. B. Paravia, 1926), 438. 169. Antonio Banfi, “La Fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl,” Rivista di filosofia (1923): 220. 170. See, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Annuario, 1930–1, 171–180, AGSUCSC. 171. Agostino Gemelli, “Lettera al. Prof Banfi,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 23 (1931): 154–156. Interestingly, this was also the edition in which Carlo Mazzantini’s first review of phenomenology appeared.

374

NOTES TO PAGES 83–88

172. Antonio Banfi, “Filosofia neoscolastica e filosofia contemporanea,” Civiltà moderna 3 (1931): 366. Nevertheless, Banfi seems to have had a favorable view of the scholastic-­ leaning work of Hedwig Conrad-­Martius. See letter, Banfi to Conrad-­Martius, 18.1.25, Conrad-­Martiusiana, C II.

3. An Ecumenical Atheism 1. See Hugo Ott, “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger und das von Schaezler’sche Stipendium,” Freiburger Dioezesan-­Archiv 108 (1986): 146. 2. See Alfred Denker, “Heideggers Lebens-­und Denkweg, 1909–1919,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 110–111. 3. See Letter from Ministerium, January  7, 1901, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 4. Letter, Philosophical Faculty to Akademische Direktorium, July  27, 1911, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 5. Letter from Philosophical Faculty, June 27, 1911, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 6. Quoted in Ott, “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger,” 144. Ott shows how hostile Finke was at this point to Geyser, 146. 7. Philosophical Faculty, Freiburg, November  10, 1913, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. For Heidegger’s relationship to Krebs, see Christoph von Volzogen, “Gottes Geheimnisse verkosten, bevor sie geschaut werden,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 201–213. 8. Letter, March 5, 1915, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 9. Letter, July 25, 1913, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 10. Reference letter from Bäumker, July  27, 1913, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 11. In a ­later letter to Heidegger, Rickert stated that he had been “rather surprised” by the decision. Letter, Rickert to Heidegger, February 3, 1917, in Heidegger Rickert Briefe, 1912–33 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 23. 12. Report, June 22, 1916, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. At this time Husserl seems to have had a relatively low estimation of Heidegger’s work too. See Husserl, letter to Paul Natorp, 1917, quoted in Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 41–42. 13. Report, June 22, 1916, Freiburg University Archives, BO 038 / 131 II.3. 14. Quoted in John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 133. 15. Quoted in ibid., 134. 16. In this way my argument broadly follows that in Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), when he writes, “for the early Heidegger . . . ​phenomenology provided a way to raise the ancient metaphysical question of being without ignoring the claims of modern critical or transcendental philosophy” (205). This, ­a fter all, is a concise summary of the progressive neo-­scholastic proj­ect.



NOTES TO PAGES 88–90 375

17. See especially the account by Alfred Denker, “Heideggers Lebens-­und Denkweg,” 100. 18. See Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Lehrjahre,” in The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, ed. John Sallis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 88–89. 19. For a full account of the Schaezler foundation and its relationship to Heidegger, see Ott, “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger.” 20. Quoted in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 54. 21. For a painstaking pre­ sen­ ta­ t ion of Heidegger’s courses during this period, see Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Lehrjahre.” 22. “Heidegger CV-1915,” in Sallis, The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, 80. 23. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 16, 3. See Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger zum achtzigsten Geburtstage,” Merkur 10 (1969): 893. 24. Kisiel, The Genesis, 17. Kisiel does, however, recognize the arbitrary nature of this beginning and leaves an opening to the earlier work. He suggests that an auxiliary thesis to “It all began in KNS 1919” is “It all began in the Habilitation of 1915.” H ­ ere we can see the precursor to Heidegger’s crucial idea of “formal indication” in the scholastic analogy of Being (ibid., 19). 25. John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 17; Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 53. 26. Bernhard Caspar, “Das Theologische-­Scholastische Umfeld,” Quaestio (2001): 12. 27. For a brief discussion of this debate, see Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 19–27. 28. For a similar argument that emphasizes the “fractious atmosphere of Catholic neo-­ scholasticism,” see Robert Vigliotti, “The Young Heidegger’s Ambitions for the Chair of Catholic Philosophy and Hugo Ott’s Charge of Opportunism,” Studia Phaenomenologica 1 (2003): 3–4, 326. Vigliotti emphasizes the work of Schell and Braig, who have also been foregrounded by other scholars. 29. See Caspar’s summary, “Das Theologisch-­S cholastische Umfeld,” 17–18. Even McGrath, who emphasizes the impact of scholasticism, considers neo-­scholasticism to be “rigid, formulaic, and usually ignorant of modern philosophy,” and pays no attention to the progressive school. S. J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­c a Press, 2006), 14. 30. See, for instance, Kisiel, The Genesis, who mentions Geyser but once in a footnote, 553n. John Caputo does briefly bring out some parallels, and compares Heidegger to Geyser, but crucially only takes the latter’s Neue und Alte Wege into account. See Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, 26, 28, 33. 31. Letter quoted in Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Lehrjahre,” 96. 32. Martin Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics” (1911), in Martin Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker, 1910–1913,” translated by John Protevi in Gradu­ate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14, no. 2 (1991): 501, see also 505. And Martin Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland 38 (1912): 522–523, 668–670. 33. Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” 467, 522, 568. See Joseph Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre (Münster: Schnöningh, 1909), 48.

376

NOTES TO PAGES 90–91

34. Heidegger, review of Charles Sentroul, Kant und Aristoteles, in Literarische Rundschau für das katholische Deutschland 40 (1914): 331. See also the introduction to his Promotionsschrift, in Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 5. At this time, other neo-­scholastics w ­ ere revising their reading of Kant to recognize the transcendental logical interpretation. See Chapter 2. 35. Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” 522–524; see also 568–569, where he criticizes Geyser’s attempt to derive the identity princi­ple from the fulfillment of intentions. And Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” in Frühe Schriften, 212n6. Heidegger’s interpretation of Geyser allows us to align my claim with that of Kisiel, who famously asserted the importance of Emil Lask. As Heidegger wrote in 1912, “what Lask strives to achieve in terms of transcendental philosophy, Geyser tries to achieve on an Aristotelian foundation.” Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” 522. 36. Heidegger, review of Joseph Gredt, Ele­ments of Aristotelian-­T homistic Philosophy (1912), in Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker,” 517. 37. For positive remarks about Geyser’s proj­ect, see Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation,” 501n; Heidegger, “Psy­chol­ogy of Religion and the Subconscious” (1912), in Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker,” 505; Martin Heidegger, “Das Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 25 (1912): 357–358, 361. They persist even up ­until the Scotus Habilitation, 352n. One should also take into account Heidegger’s probable concern not to alienate Geyser. See letter, Laslowski to Heidegger, October  1912, where his friend advised that Heidegger should look for a Habilitation advisor and thus “should keep Geyser, or someone ­else, warm.” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 35. 38. Heidegger, review of Jos. Gredt (1912), in Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker,” 519, quoting Maurice de Wulf, Introduction à la Philosophie néo-­scolastique (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1904), 331. Heidegger’s emphasis. 39. See, for example, Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation,” 501n. 40. Thomas Sheehan, “Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 75. See also Holger Zaborowski’s judgment in “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” in Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 147. 41. See Heidegger, “Per Mortem ad Viam” (1910); Heidegger, review of Förster, Authority and Freedom (1910); and Heidegger, “Psy­chol­ogy of Religion and the Subconscious” (1912), all in Heidegger, “Contributions to Der Akademiker,” 489, 493, 505, 515. 42. Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation,” 497. 43. Heidegger, review of Förster, Authority and Freedom, 493. 44. This orientation was also encouraged by Heidegger’s reading of Carl Braig’s Vom Sein: Abriß der Ontologie, which diverges from Aquinas on this point too. See McGrath, The Early Heidegger, 31. 45. Judith Wolfe in her account addresses this inconsistency by detailing a change in Heidegger’s position; see Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 12–27. ­T here is undoubtedly a change in tone in this period, but the chronology is not as clear as Wolfe suggests—­see especially Heidegger’s reading of Husserl before 1910.



NOTES TO PAGES 91–95 377

46. For a good account of t­hese antimodernist articles, see Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 12–15. We see similar criticisms of modernism even as late as 1915. See Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 25. 47. Letter to Krebs, Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 62. See also Zaborwoski’s account of this letter and re­sis­tance to the antimodernism oath, “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” 153–154. 48. Thus, as Crowell argues, but for dif­fer­ent reasons, Heidegger is best read as an “anti-­ anti-­modernist.” Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, 158. 49. See Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation,” 501. 50. Ott, “Der Habilitand Martin Heidegger,” 144n12. 51. Heidegger, “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” in Frühe Schriften, 5–6. 52. Ibid., 84. Heidegger placed considerable emphasis on the ways in which Lipps’s thought had developed following Husserl’s initial criticism in 1900. 53. Ibid., 85. 54. Ibid., 92–93. 55. Ibid., 94–97, 101. 56. Ibid., 102–104. 57. Ibid., 106. 58. Ibid., 109. 59. Ibid., 110. 60. Ibid., 116. 61. Ibid., 112. 62. For the argument that Heidegger is close to Lask h­ ere, see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, chap.  4; Theodore Kisiel, “Why Students of Heidegger W ­ ill Have to Read Emil Lask,” in Heidegger’s Way of Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Theodore Kisiel (London: Continuum, 2002). 63. Heidegger, “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” 6. Compare Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 7, 274. See also Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” 467. 64. Heidegger, “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” 107, 110. See Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 47. 65. Heidegger, “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” 120. 66. See ibid., 114–118. 67. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 198–199. 68. Heidegger, “Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,” 117–119. 69. Ibid., 127–128. See also 117. 70. See, for instance, Denker, “Heideggers Lebens-­und Denkweg,” 112; Steven Galt Crowell, “Making Logic Philosophical Again,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 58–59. 71. Heidegger, review of Sentroul, 331. 72. Heidegger, “Das Realitätsproblem,” 353, citing Brunetière. 73. Heidegger, “Das Realitätsproblem,” 355.

378

NOTES TO PAGES 96–99

74. See Heidegger’s refutation of Klimke’s three arguments against a thought-­independent real­ity, ibid., 357–359. 75. Ibid., 357. Heidegger argued that this distinction was necessary in order to explain the “constant flow of psychological events.” 76. Ibid., 358. It is ­here that Heidegger refers to Husserl’s Logical Investigations. 77. Ibid., 359. Moreover, Heidegger declared that such a justification was “impossible,” ­because it would require the ability to think “pure concepts” detached from their object. 78. Ibid., 360–361. 79. Ibid., 362. 80. Heidegger based his analy­sis on a text, De Modis significandi sive grammatica speculativa, which was subsequently reattributed, by Grabmann, to Thomas of Erfurt rather than Duns Scotus. See Grabmann, “Die Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Sprachlogik,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 35 (1922): reference to both Heidegger and Husserl, 132, 213. For simplicity’s sake ­here, I have followed Heidegger in the identification of the author. 81. We should recall also that the first major criticism of Husserl’s idealism, Geyser’s, was not published ­until 1916, ­a fter Heidegger had completed his Habilitation. 82. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 146. 83. It is instructive that in the neo-­scholastic reviews of this work, Heidegger’s “principally new means of dealing with medieval scholasticism” was widely praised. See Switalski, review of Heidegger in Kant-­Studien, reprinted in Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 90–91. 84. See Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 135–137; see also 139n4 for his criticism of Grabmann’s engagement with modern thought. 85. Ibid., 140. This d ­ oesn’t mean that scholasticism did not have a method, but that it was method in a deeper sense. See 143. 86. Ibid., 141. 87. Ibid., 143. 88. Ibid., 137–138. 89. Heidegger quoting Trendelenburg, ibid., 139. 90. Ibid., 144–145. 91. Ibid., 211. In contrast, Verum was convertible with Ens: “Insofar as the object is an object of knowledge, it can be called a true object” (208). But such a true object could not be opposed to a false one. Heidegger also discussed mathematical being in the first chapter. 92. Ibid., 215. 93. Ibid., 217–219. 94. Ibid., 220. 95. Ibid., 210–211. 96. See ibid., 221. 97. This is also the point at which Heidegger moves beyond Lask. See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, 54. 98. For the relationship between Bedeutung and logical Sinn, see Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 278–279.



NOTES TO PAGES 100–104 379

99. Ibid., 248–249. 100. Ibid., 240–241. This act was not, of course, the act of judgment (Urteilsakt). As we saw, Heidegger was still very concerned to separate the act and sense of judgment. The former merely allowed the grasping of the latter (unaltered) by the subject. See also 343. Only the theory of meaning, and not the theory of the categories, opens up a path to subjectivity. 101. Ibid., 251. 102. Ibid., 252, quoting Husserl, Ideen, 257. The parentheses indicate Heidegger’s additions. 103. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 253, 258. 104. Ibid., 344. 105. Ibid., 260. Though the modus essendi covered all forms of Being, including the nonsensible logical objects, Heidegger argued that for Scotus, “real natu­ral real­ity” had priority (ibid., 256). See also 344. See Kisiel’s summary in The Genesis, 35. 106. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 259. 107. Ibid., 263. 108. Ibid., 283–340. 109. Ibid., 348–349. 110. Heidegger sent the “newly written conclusion” to Rickert with a letter dated November 28, 1916. Heidegger Rickert Briefe, 1912–1933, 18. 111. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 345–347. 112. Ibid., 348. Heidegger’s main opponent h­ ere is a purely biological and thus “blind” understanding of subjectivity. For an enlightening discussion of Heidegger’s use of “metaphysics,” see Crowell, “Making Logic Philosophical Again,” 70–71. 113. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 263. Heidegger was clear that the modi activi and passivi ­were formally identical. 114. See McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, 105. 115. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 350–352. 116. Ibid., 349–350. Wolfe suggests that in this turn to history, Heidegger was following the example of Braig. See Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology (New York: Bloomsburg, 2014), 20. 117. Martin Heidegger, “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Frühe Schriften, 355–375. 118. See Denker, “Heideggers Lebens-­und Denkweg,” 120. For a full account of this criticism, see Hans-­Helmuth Gander, “Phänomenologie im Übergang,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 294–307. 119. To see how Geyser read Heidegger’s Habilitation, see Geyser, Grundlegung der Logik und Erkenntnistheorie (Bonn: Hanstein, 1919), 307. He seems to have been particularly critical to Heidegger in person. See Heidegger Rickert Briefe, 1912–33, 43. 1 20. In a letter to Rickert, Heidegger suggested that the local reception of his book in Freiburg was unfavorable. Letter, Heidegger to Rickert, January 27, 1917, in Heidegger Rickert Briefe, 1912–33, 38. 121. The only exceptions ­were Bruno Jordan in Literarisches Zentralblatt für Deutschland 68 (1917): 847; and Reinhold Seeberg in Theologische Literaturzeitung 43 (1918): 270.

380

NOTES TO PAGES 104–107

1 22. Reprinted in Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 84. 1 23. M. Laros, “Rundschau,” Hochland 15, no. 1 (1917–1918): 370. 1 24. Erich Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt: Drei Vorträge über die geistige Krisis der Gegenwart (Munich: Theatiner, 1923), 9–10. 1 25. Ibid., 14. 1 26. “Heidegger (Martin),” in Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-­ americana: Gub–­Hn (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1925), 926. Heidegger’s book had been reviewed in French in the Italian Archivum Franciscanum historicum 14 (1921): 371. 127. J. Klein, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” Theologische Revue 17 (1918): 218. 1 28. J. Feldman, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” Theologie und Glaube, 11 (1919): 455. Referring to Geyser, Grundlegung der Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, 304ff. 1 29. Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 88. 130. P. Minges, “Die Skotische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Franziscanische Studien 4 (1917): 177; Klein, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 215. All the reviews have been helpfully collected in the Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 79–91. 131. See, in contrast, the reviews of Geyser’s work, such as Alois Rauchenberger SJ, review of Geyser, Grundlegung der Logic, in Stimmen der Zeit 94 (1917–1918): 96–99. 132. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 352. 133. See Heidegger, letter to Rickert, January 27, 1917. 134. Quoted in Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie: Heidegger, Bultmann, und die Folgen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 70–71. 135. See Theodore Kisiel, “The Genesis of Being and Time,” Man and World: A Philosophical Review (1992): 22. 136. Heidegger KNS 1919, quoted in Kisiel, The Genesis, 17. 137. Kisiel, The Genesis, 55. The tension between theoretical science and life led Heidegger to develop his strategy of “formal indication.” 138. Quoted in ibid., 75. 139. Heidegger, 1919–1920, quoted in Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 48. 1 40. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 100–108. See also Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 69–73. 141. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 114. For Heidegger’s reading of Augustine within the context of his entire c­ areer, see Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 1 42. See Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers Luther-­Lektüre im Freiburger Theologenkonvikt,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 185–196. 1 43. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 69–115. 144. See also Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 39–65; Rudolf Makkreel, “Dilthey, Heidegger und der Vollzugssinn der Geschichte,” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 307–321. 145. Heidegger never actually converted to Protestantism. For his own account of his changing convictions in this period, see the letters to his parents written on December 9 and 21, 1918, in Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 2010), 35–37, 38–40.



NOTES TO PAGES 107–111 381

1 46. Letter quoted in Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie, 33. 147. See ibid., 95–105; and McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, chap. 6. 1 48. Kisiel, The Genesis, 23–25. Kisiel writes that “the ontological predilections that dominated Heidegger’s student years . . . ​lie just beneath the surface of his conceptual innovations of 1919–21. . . . ​Formal indication is a thoroughly ontological method, it is of the very essence of ontology” (223–224). 1 49. See ibid., 223–275. For an excellent pre­sen­ta­t ion of Heidegger’s Aristotle lectures in Freiburg and Marburg in the context of his career-­long engagement with the Greek phi­los­o­pher, see Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), chaps. 2 and 3. 150. First explic­itly in the summer semester of 1924. 151. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 250. 152. See Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie, 77. 153. Quoted in ibid., 101. 154. See Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 84. 155. Ibid., 50, 69–63, 88–89. McGrath also sees a similar structure in Heidegger’s reading of Scotus. Scotus’s Being is deprived of its infinite aspect. McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, chap. 4. 156. I w ­ ill examine some of the early interpretations of Heidegger’s atheism in Chapter 7. 157. See, for example, McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, 9. 158. See Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology 92–115. 159. See ibid., 66–89. And Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions, chap. 3. Coyne argues that by casting religious categories in ontological terms, Heidegger blunted their critical force, especially with re­spect to the possibility of grasping Dasein as a totality (ibid., 126). 160. As McGrath notes, the appeal to God in the final pages of the Habilitation is an outlier in Heidegger’s writing. McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, 125. 161. Heidegger, “Die Kategorien-­und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” 351. 162. Van Buren labels this an “Ontologia Crucis” in The Young Heidegger, 157. 163. Heidegger quoted in Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 79. 164. McGrath, Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, 168; see also 181–184. 165. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 480–483. See also Chapter 9. 166. Heidegger, Being and Time, 19, quoting Plato, The Sophist, 244a. 167. The dual aspect of ­t hese ontologies—­t heir rooting in this primordial experience but betrayal of it through a pro­cess of “hardening”—­meant that destruction would never be entirely negative. Ibid., 43–44. 168. Ibid., 64. 169. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), 360. The proj­ect of a general ontology, however, structured all of Heidegger’s analyses. See, inter alia, Heidegger, Being and Time, 424, 486. 170. Heidegger, Being and Time, 24. 171. Heidegger distinguished ­here between an “understanding of Being” and knowing the “meaning of Being.” See ibid., 25. 172. Ibid., 27.

382

NOTES TO PAGES 111–114

173. Ibid., 32. 174. Ibid., 34. Quite how this analytic of Dasein related to the fundamental ontology is highly complex. In Making Sense of Heidegger, Sheehan has argued for what he calls a “paradigm shift” in Heidegger scholarship. He claims that despite much terminological confusion, Heidegger’s true topic was not being but rather the meaning of being as grasped by h­ umans, or more properly what accounts for such meaning, which for Heidegger was Dasein and the clearing. 175. Heidegger, Being and Time, 25, 32. 176. Ibid., 95–107. 177. Ibid., 241. 178. Ibid., 83–90. For a very clear exposition of this idea and a criticism of the priority Heidegger gave to the ready-­to-­hand, see Peter Gordon, Continental Divide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 217–234. 179. See Kisiel, The Genesis, 397, 421–451. 180. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 32–34, 67–71. In 1920 Heidegger started to name “life” “concrete ­actual Dasein.” Kisiel, The Genesis, 117. As Heidegger made clear, the term “existence” “formally indicates” Dasein’s being. Heidegger, Being and Time, 274. 181. Heidegger, Being and Time, 257–273. The classic texts on Heidegger’s understanding of truth in Being and Time are Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967). 182. Heidegger, Being and Time, 258–259. 183. Ibid., 261. 184. Ibid., 267. 185. Ibid., 246–252. 186. Heidegger was clear, though, that they w ­ ere not “impaired” in any way, and w ­ ere not “left to the subject’s discretion.” 187. Ibid., 269–270. 188. Ibid., 272. 189. Ibid., 276. 190. Ibid., 280. 191. Ibid., 303. 192. Heidegger argued that, although inauthentic, this was still a being-­towards-­Death. Ibid., 303. 193. Ibid., 311. 194. See ibid., 276; and Thomas Sheehan’s reconstruction of the argument in Making Sense of Heidegger, 170–177. 195. Heidegger, Being and Time, 375. Sheehan has argued that temporality in this sense is simply another way of designating openness or the clearing. Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 97. 196. Quoted in Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie, 103. 197. Husserl to Otto, quoted in ibid., 64. See also Pöggeler, “Martin Heidegger und die Religionsphänomenologie” in Heidegger in seiner Zeit (Munich: Fink, 1999). And Husserl to Natorp, November 1917, quoted in Kisiel, The Genesis, 75.



NOTES TO PAGES 116–122 383

4. The Vital Faith of Max Scheler 1. See Alois Mager, “Eindrücke von der Herbsttagung des Verbandes katholischer Akademiker in Ulm,” Benediktinische Monatsschrift 5, nos. 11–12 (1923): 396. 2. Ibid., 397–398. 3. Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Tagung der katholischen Akademiker,” Frank­f urter Zeitung, September 6, 1923, eve­n ing ed., 3–4. 4. See Heinrich Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht (Munich: Kösel-­Verlag, 1963), 93–94. 5. Erich Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt: Drei Vorträge über die geistige Krisis der Gegenwart (Munich: Theatiner, 1923), 7–8. 6. See Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology and Social Renewal in Central Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 47–48. 7. Adolf Grimme, “Die Frohe Botschaft der husserlschen Philosophie,” Der Falke: Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Literatur und Leben 1 (1917): 224–227. 8. Ibid., 227. 9. Ibid., 231. 10. Grimme had referred to Scheler only in passing. Ibid., 230. 11. See “Notizen zu Vorträgen verschiedener Teilnehmer und Diskussionen im ‘psychologischen Verein . . . ​1905–1908,’ ” A Pfänder A, II 5, Munich Staatsbibliothek. Scheler seems to have given his first pre­sen­ta­tion in July 1907 on “Phänomenologie des Raumes.” See also Stephen Schneck, Person and Polis: Scheler’s Personalism as Po­liti­cal Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 9. 12. For a full reconstruction of Scheler’s ethics and engagement with Kant, see Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), esp. chaps. 2–5. 13. See Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-­Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred  S. Frings and Roger  L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 104–110; Manfred Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1997), 26–33. 14. See Frings, Mind of Max Scheler, 58–80. 15. Gubser, The Far Reaches, 81. 16. See Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 383. 17. See Frings, Mind of Max Scheler, 21–22. 18. Gubser, The Far Reaches, 84. 19. See Schneck, Person and Polis, 77–84. 20. Gubser, The Far Reaches, 88. 21. See ibid., 91. 22. Schneck, Person and Polis, 90–94. 23. See ibid., 7. 24. See Gubser, The Far Reaches, 82; Schneck, Person and Polis, 8. 25. See Max Scheler, In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten dargestellt (Hamburg: Reinbeck, 1980), 92. 26. Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen: Erster Band, Vom Religiösen Erneuerung, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Der Neue Geist-­Verlag, 1933), 9, 12.

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NOTES TO PAGES 122–125

27. Ibid., 29. 28. Ibid., 44–46. 29. Ibid., 50–53. 30. Scheler assigned to Protestantism the responsibility for the decline of this idea of community. See ibid., 252. 31. Ibid., 149–154. 32. Ibid., 159–160. 33. Ibid., 191–193. 34. Scheler nonetheless thought that the type of estates and their relationship to the state would be determined historically. Ibid., 199. 35. Ibid., 169–175. 36. See ibid., 235. 37. See, for instance, ibid., 256. 38. Ibid., 279. 39. Ibid., 364. Scheler thus argued that the real­ity of God was given only in faith, and thus was inaccessible to t­ hose who did not have faith (ibid., 372). 40. Ibid., 328, 339. 41. Ibid., 336. 42. Ibid., 320–322. 43. Ibid., 327. 44. Ibid., 338. 45. See Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht, 20. 46. Carl Muth, “Ein Vorwort zu ‘Hochland,’ ” Hochland 1, no.  1 (1903–1904): 2. Muth  was, however, concerned to distinguish this idealism from philosophical idealism. 47. Ibid., 8. 48. It nevertheless had an uneasy relationship to the Görres-­Gesellschaft. Heinrich Finke was a regular contributor to Hochland, and when he became president of the Görresgesellschaft, he wrote to complain that Hochland did not cover the society’s annual meeting. Letter, Finke to Muth, June  29, 1927, in Munich Staatsbilbliothek, Carl Muth Nachlass, Ana 390 (hereafter cited as Ana 390), II A. It also had a profile outside Germany. See the letters, Gemelli to Muth, January 19, 1937, and Maritain to Muth, January 27, 1937, Ana 390, II A. 49. As early as 1918, Scheler had put forward Heidegger’s name as one “of the best young Catholic phi­los­o­phers,” and in 1920 Muth suggested that he would invite Heidegger along with Getzeny to pres­ent comments on Scheler’s work. See letters, Scheler to Muth, February 24, 1918, Ana 390, II A, and Muth to Scheler, March 6, 1920, Ana 390, II B. See also Heidegger to Muth, March 10, 1920, Ana 390, II A. 50. See Richard S. Gehr, The Aesthetics of Horror: The Life and Thought of Richard Von Kralik (Boston: Brill, 2003), chap. 2. 51. See Robert Krieg, Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican  II (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 95–97. 52. Carl Muth, “ ‘Hochland’ Ein Rück-­und Ausblick zum 20. Jahrgang,” Hochland 20, no. 1 (1922–1923): 8.



NOTES TO PAGES 125–127 385

53. See Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht, 49. Though it is impor­tant to note that Engelbert Krebs wrote an article in Hochland defending Mercier. Engelbert Krebs, “Kardinal Merciers öffentliches Wirken: Ein Psychologischer Versuch,” Hochland 15, no.  1 (1917–1918): 189–205, 332–348. 54. Muth had written to Scheler in August 1915, urging him to contribute. Correspondence, Muth to Scheler, August 1, 1915, Ana 390, II B. 55. See Max Scheler, forward to “Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg,” in Politisch- ­pädagogische Schriften, ed. Manfred Frings (Bern: Francke, 1982), 9. 56. See, for instance, the final chapter, “Los von E ­ ngland.” 57. Stephen Aschheim, The Nietz­sche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 135. 58. See Marvin Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism (Springfield, IL: C.  C. Thomas, 1959); and V. S. McGill, “Scheler’s Theory of Sympathy and Love,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (1942), where he uses the Genius book to suggest where Scheler might have ended up had he been of “pure Aryan stock” and lived to see Hitler’s rise to power (ibid., 273). 59. E., “Händler und Helden,” Hochland 12, no. 2 (1914): 227–228. 60. Ibid., 228–229. See Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht, 23. Scheler was first called the “Black Nietz­sche” by Ernst Troeltsch in his Der Historicismus und seine Probleme (1922). Der Genius des Krieges is perhaps an odd book on which to base a “Black Nietz­sche” reading. Neither Catholicism nor Nietz­sche per se play significant roles in Scheler’s analy­sis. Nietz­sche, for instance, is mostly cited for his lack of enthusiasm during the 1870–1871 Franco-­Prussian War. See Scheler, Politisch- ­pädagogische Schriften, 44, 91. And while the book is clearly stamped with religious ideas stemming from Scheler’s prewar work, only rarely does Catholicism as such make an appearance. 61. A.  J. Rosenberg, “Totenklage um die Kathedrale von Reims,” Hochland 12, no.  2 (1914): 730–732. Compare Scheler, Politisch- ­pädagogische Schriften, 49. 62. For Scheler’s understanding of Nietz­sche, see Schneck, Person and Polis, 16–17. 63. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Über Max Schelers Abhandlungen und Aufsätze,” Hochland 13, no. 1 (1915–1916): 478. Von Hildebrand used Scheler’s ideas h­ ere to sue for peace, and distanced his ideas from the stoical ideal of self-­mastery. 64. Max Ettlinger, “Der Genius des Krieges,” Hochland 13no. 1 (1915–1916): 102. Ettlinger nevertheless criticized the book in the end for straying into “relativism,” a criticism to which Scheler responded with ­g reat indignation. See correspondence, Scheler to Muth, November 13, 1915, Ana 390, II A. See also von Hildebrand, “Schelers Abhandlungen und Aufsätze,” 476. 65. This attitude was in part a reaction to Scheler’s first publication in Hochland, “Soziologische Neuorientierung und die Aufgabe der deutschen Katholiken nach dem Krieg,” Hochland 14, no.  1 (1915–1916). For Scheler’s trajectory in this period, see Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht, 22–42. Scheler’s change in position was treated by ­others as typical. Hering wrote to Neumann, “It seems to me that he swims rather too much with the current.” Hering to Neumann, December 9, 1917, Cod. Ms. Friedrich Neumann, Staats-­und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 1: 1,170.

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66. In this, Bahr followed Scheler’s directions. In his preface to the 1916 “Der Krieg als Gesamterlebnis,” Scheler presented the text as a response and a supplement to the earlier book to avoid the misunderstandings that had arisen from it. Scheler, Politisch-­ pädagogische Schriften, 269–271. 67. Hermann Bahr, “Max Scheler,” Hochland 14, no. 2 (1917): 36–37. 68. Ibid., 39. 69. Ibid., 37. Scheler would make a similar argument about the role of Catholicism in saving Germany in his 1918 piece “Deutschlands Sendung,” reprinted in Scheler, Politisch- ­pädagogische Schriften, 515–540. 70. Bahr, “Max Scheler,” 37. 71. See Carl Muth, “Zum vierten Kriegsjahrgang,” Hochland 15, no. 1 (1917–1918): 1–6. Muth distinguished this from cosmopolitanism, which sought to level all national differences. For this development in the broader German Catholic world, see Lutz, Demokratie im Zwielicht, 43–66. 72. “The right to rule is not necessarily . . . ​bound up with any special mode of government. It may take this or that form, provided only that it be of a nature of the government, rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world, and must set Him before themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State.” Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 1885, http://­w ww​.­papalencyclicals​.­net​/­Leo13​/ ­l13sta​ .­htm. 73. Carl Muth, “Die neuen ‘Barbaren’ und das Christentum,” Hochland 16, no. 1 (1918– 1919): 588. See also Otto Gründler, “Prinzipien der christlichen Politik,” Hochland 18, no. 1 (1920–1921): 233. Most commentators, emphasizing Muth’s Catholicism and opposition to liberalism, have seen his “Christian Socialism” as fundamentally conservative. See Werner Veauthier, Kulturkritik als Aufgabe der Kulturphilosophie: Peter Wusts Bedeutung als Kultur-­und Zivilisationskritiker (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1998), 200–201. But this is to oversimplify the meaning of conservatism. For a concise pre­sen­ta­tion of his own conservatism, see Carl Muth, “Zum Neunzehnten Jahrgang,” Hochland 19, no. 1 (1921–1912): 5. 74. Muth, “ ‘Hochland’ Ein Rück-­und Ausblick,” 12. 75. See James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Making of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 32. 76. Otto Künze, “Aurruf!,” Abendland 1 (1925): 3, quoted in Reinhard Richter, Nationales Denken im Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik (Münster: Lit. Verlag, 2000), 155. 77. Otto Gründler, “Preußen-­Deutschland oder deutsches Deutschland?,” Hochland 18, no. 2 (1921): 121. See also Gründler, “Die Zukunft Europas,” Hochland 19, no. 1 (1921– 1922): 232–234. 78. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 12. 79. Muth, “Die neuen ‘Barbaren,’ ” 586–587. 80. Ibid., 590–592. 81. Ibid., 593. For the turn to Christian socialism in this period, see Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” 110–114. It lost traction in the mid-1920s as it became clear that the



NOTES TO PAGES 131–133 387

Center had no space for socialism in their program, and the socialists showed themselves unwilling to make space for religion. 82. See Konrad Ackermann, Der Widerstand der Monatsschrift Hochland gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1965); Veauthier, Kulturkritik, 205. 83. Bahr, “Max Scheler,” 43. 84. Krieg, Romano Guardini, 50. For the Catholic youth movement, see Johannes Binkowski, Jugend als Wegbereiter (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 1981); and Franz Heinrich, Die Bünde katholischer Jugend-­B ewegung (Munich: Kösel, 1968). 85. Muth, “Zum neunzehnten Jahrgang,” 1. 86. Hermann Hoffmann, “Quickborn,” Hochland 17, no. 2 (1920): 250. 87. Wilhelm Damberg, “Jugendbewegung, Liturgie und Kirchenbegriff,” in Kirchenrecht und Theologie im Leben der Kirche, ed. Rüdiger Althaus (Essen: Ludgerus, 2007), 481. 88. Richter, Nationales Denken, 178. See, for instance, Waldemar Gurian, Die Deutsche Jugendbewegung (Habelschwerdt: Franke, 1924), 32. 89. The Quickborn movement was divided by gender, though the men’s and w ­ omen’s groups often worked together. T ­ here was also a workers’ Quickborn movement, as well as dif­fer­ent levels for schoolchildren and young adults. For the founding and development of Quickborn in this period, see Binkowski, Jugend als Wegbereiter, 51–78. 90. Hoffmann, “Quickborn,” 247. 91. Ibid., 249. 92. Gurian, Die Deutsche Jugendbewegung, 69. 93. Otto Gründler, “Die Seelischen Triebkräfte der Jugendbewegung,” Hochland 20, no. 1 (1922–1923): 14. 94. The classic English-­language work on the youth movement is Walter Laqueur, Young Germany (London: Transaction, 1962). 95. Quoted in Binkowski, Jugend als Wegbereiter, 44. 96. Damberg, “Jugendbewegung, Liturgie und Kirchenbegriff,” 487. 97. Catholic commentators tended to focus on bourgeois youth movements instead of the “proletarian” organ­izations, which ­were governed by dif­fer­ent dynamics. 98. Max Isserlin, “Die Planmäßige Pervertierung unserer Jugend,” Hochland 18. 1 (1920– 1921): 174–175; Hermann Platz, “Der Wille der neuen Jugend: Der Quickborn,” Hochland 18, no. 2 (1921): 214. 99. See Ty, “Von der freideutschen Jugend,” Hochland 18, no. 1 (1920–1921): 117. 100. This was the major topic of the Second Quickborn Day. For an analy­sis of this question in Quickborn, see Binkowski, Jugend als Wegbereiter, 78–78, 94–98. 101. Gurian, Die Deutsche Jugendbewegung, 73. 102. Ibid., 79. 103. Ty, “Von der freideutschen Jugend,” 120. See also Hoffmann, “Quickborn,” 248. This did not mean that the youth movement allied with Hochland on po­l iti­cal issues. Rather, it was po­liti­cally divided, and leaned ­toward the antiliberal and antiparliamentarian, which is why Schmitt was read with such interest ­t here and why many in

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Quickborn came to embrace Hitler. Other members, however, resisted and w ­ ere executed by the Nazis. Lutz is quite damning in his Demokratie im Zwielicht, 110–120. Binkowski paints a more differentiated picture: see Binkowski, Jugend als Wegbereiter, 146–150, 214–229. 104. For the general enthusiasm about the liturgical movement, see Otto Gründler, Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie auf phänomenologische Grundlage (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1922), 12, 66, 98; Platz, “Der Wille der neuen Jugend,” 355–356. For Scheler’s view on the liturgical movement and its role in “forming” Germany, see Max Scheler, “Deutsche Sendung,” in Politisch- ­pädagogische Schriften, 534. 105. See Hanna-­ Barbara Gerl, Romano Guardini, 1885–1968 (Mainz: Matthias-­ Grünewald-­Verlag, 1985), 113. During his studies at Freiburg, Guardini had also become close to Martin Heidegger; see Krieg, Romano Guardini, 6. 106. For Guardini’s relation to Quickborn, especially his response to the “Kantian” and “Nietz­schean” tendencies of the Meissner formula, see Gerl, Romano Guardini, 125– 127, 153–249. 107. Ibid., 154. 108. Richter, Nationales Denken, 188. See also Gurian, Die Deutsche Jugendbewegung, 14. 109. See especially Romano Guardini, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” in Romano Guardini, The Church and the Catholic, and the Spirit of the Liturgy (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935), 162–170, which talks about the necessity of expressing the spiritual in material and emotional terms. 110. Ibid., 128. See also Richter, Nationales Denken, 165; Marc Breuer, Religiöser Wandel als Säkularisierungsfolge (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012), 381. 111. See Heinrich, Die Bünde katholischer Jugend-­Bewegung, 80–82. 112. Breuer, Religiöser Wandel, 357; Damberg, “Jugendbewegung, Liturgie und Kirchenbegriff,” 484. 113. Guardini, “Spirit of the Liturgy,” 124–126. 114. Ibid., 199–211. Guardini associated the primacy of ethos with Nietz­sche (ibid., 202). See also Gerl, Romano Guardini, 108–110, 142–148, 264–266. 115. John Betz, introduction to Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis, trans. John Betz (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 9. 116. The Protestant Gründler had studied in Freiburg ­under Husserl, and was close to Edith Stein, who knew him by the nickname “­l ittle bear [Bärchen].” See Edith Stein, Selbstbildnis in Briefe III: Briefe an Roman Ingarden (Freiburg: Herder, 2000–), 10n12. Nevertheless, his experiences brought him close to Catholicism. L ­ ater he would say that at this time he “had for many years . . . ​sat confessionally very comfortably between two stools.” See Gründler to Muth, July 7, 1924, Ana 390, II A. Scheler wrote the highly laudatory preface for Gründler’s Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1922). 117. Otto Gründler, “Die Bedeutung der Phänomenologie für das Geistesleben,” Hochland 19, no. 2 (1921): 73, 83. 118. Ibid., 74. 119. Gründler, Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie, 76. 1 20. Ibid., 109–110.



NOTES TO PAGES 135–137 389

121. Otto Gründler, “Prinzipien der christlichen Politik,” Hochland 18, no. 1 (1920–1921): 227. 1 22. See, in par­tic­u ­lar, Max Scheler, “Deutschlands Sendung und der katholische Gedanke” (1918) in Scheler, Politisch-­Pädagogische Schriften. 1 23. See, for instance, Karl Eschweiler, “Religion und Metaphysik: Zu Max Scheler’s ‘Vom Ewigen im Menschen,’ ” Hochland 19, no.  1 (1921–1922): 304; Gründler, “Die Bedeutung der Phänomenologie,” 83; Heinrich Getzeny, “Um die Religionsphilosophie Max Schelers,” Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923–1924): 583; Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Max Scheler als Ethiker,” Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923–1924): 627. 1 24. Peter Wust, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 (Münster: Regensberg Verlag, 1965), 418. For Wust’s engagement with Hochland, see Veauthier, Kulturkritik, 199–210. Wust also engaged in an extended correspondence with Muth and Gründler over phenomenology. See Peter Wust, Gesammelte Werke, vol.  10 (Münster: Regensberg Verlag, 1965). 1 25. See Scheler, “Jugendbewegung,” in Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1963), 394. For Scheler’s relationship to the youth movement, see John Staude, Max Scheler, 1874–1928: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: ­Free Press, 1967), 118–120; and especially Olivier Agard, “Max Scheler et la Jugendbewegung,” Recherches Germaniques 39 (2009). 126. Waldemar Gurian to Scheler, September  15, 1921, in Munich Staatsbibliothek, Scheler Nachlass, Ana 315, E II. 127. Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1929), 350. See also the judgment by Przywara in Gottgeheimnis der Welt, 41. 1 28. Scheler, “Jugendbewegung,” 391–397. He also criticized its splintering, lack of an overarching ideology, and flight from real­ity. Nevertheless, Scheler praised their new attentiveness to religion, especially one that was again filled with its “living content.” 129. Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 312–316; see also the discussion of Eu­ro­pean youth at 274–278, which importantly is the concluding section of the essay “Vom Kulturellen Wiederaufbau Europas.” 130. Heinrich Getzeny, “Die Moderne Religionswissenschaft und die Philosophie der Werte,” Hochland 17, no. 2 (1920): 192. So too Gründler argued that Scheler had much to offer and was warmly embraced by nonacademics. Gründler, “Die Bedeutung der Phänomenologie,” 73. 131. Bahr, “Max Scheler,” 44. Such was their agreement on this question that in 1922 Muth asked Scheler to write an essay on the topic. Muth to Scheler, January 24, 1922, Ana 390, II B. 132. For Landsberg’s relationship to Catholicism, see Pierre Klossowski, introduction to Landsberg, “Les Sens spirituels chez Saint Augustin,” Dieu Vivant 11 (1948): 83–86. Klossowski claims that Landsberg died a Christian in the Orianenburg Camp, and would have received “last rites [viatique] . . . ​if it had been pos­si­ble.” According to Gianfranco Cavarero, Agostino e Pascal nel pensiero di Paul Ludwig Landsberg (Milan: Alboversorio, 2013), Landsberg openly professed himself a Catholic (ibid., 12). ­A fter his death, his wife Madeleine Landsberg wrote to Gabriel Marcel, recounting a conversation she had had with Paul-­Ludwig in the summer of 1942. Landsberg

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NOTES TO PAGES 137–141

claimed that he had “searched for Christ his w ­ hole conscious life” and that “now he has been revealed to me, vis­i­ble to me . . . ​now I know that I can become Catholic.” Letter, Madeleine Landsberg to Gabriel Marcel, October 5, 1949, in Correspondance 19, Fonds Gabriel Marcel, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 133. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” see 157. See also the biographical details in the apol­o­getic account by John M. Oesterreicher, Five in Search of Wisdom (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 164–166. 134. Mager, “Eindrücke von der Herbsttagung,” 399. 135. On Landsberg’s use of the “Conservative Revolution” and its distance from the claims made by Schmitt, Jünger, and ­others, see Matthias Schloßberger, “La rivoluzione dell’eterno: Landsberg e la ‘rivoluzione conservatrice,” in Da Che parte dobbiamo stare: Il Personalismo di Paul Ludwig Landsberg, ed. Michele Nicoletti et al. (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007), 91–103. Schloßberger argues that although t­ hese ­others held that order had to be imposed, for Landsberg order is discovered as existing in­de­ pen­dently of ­human ­w ill. 136. Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Die Welt des Mittelalters und Wir, 3rd ed. (Bonn: F, Cohen, 1923), 8. 137. Ibid., 10, 100. Landsberg nonetheless distinguished modern socialism from a “positive socialism, that at the same time is a sharper anticapitalism.” 138. Ibid., 12–13. 139. Ibid., 22–24. 1 40. Ibid., 91. 141. Ibid., 14. 1 42. Ibid., 12. 1 43. Ibid., 7. 1 44. See ibid., 114. 1 45. Ibid., 25, 112. 1 46. Ibid., 30. 147. Ibid., 16; see also 59. He also placed “hymns” in the column labeled “order” (121). 1 48. Letter, Scheler to Ildefons, August 8, 1921, quoted in Johannes Schaber, “Phänomenologie und Mönchtum,” in Leben, Tod und Entscheidung, ed. Stephan Loos and Holger Zaborowski (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2003), 81. 1 49. Landsberg, Die Welt des Mittelalters und Wir, 118–119. 150. Ibid., 116. 151. Ibid., 121. 152. See ibid., 106–109. 153. Ibid., 110–111. 154. Ibid., 114. 155. Ibid., 107–108. 156. Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg, “Kirche und Heidentum,” Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923–1924): 53–55. 157. Ibid., 56–59. Nevertheless, Landsberg argued that by neglecting life, desanctifying it, in some of its forms Chris­t ian­ity had allowed the exploitation and destruction of the world by capitalism, colonialism, and the World War.



NOTES TO PAGES 141–144 391

158. Ibid., 59. 159. Ibid., 54. 160. Ibid., 62–63. 161. Ibid., 62. 162. Ibid., 53. 163. Ibid., 63. 164. Ibid., 62–63. 165. Ibid., 99. 166. Ibid., 9, 50, 53–55, 65–66. 167. Ibid., 65. 168. Ibid., 39–42. 169. See Muth to Scheler, January 24, 1922, Ana 390, II B. 170. For his analy­sis of corporatism but critique of the Schelerian version, see Erich Przywara, “La Situation spirituelle et religieuse d’Allemagne,” in La Pensée catholique dans le monde contemporain: Conférences de la deuxième semaine catholique internationale de Genève, 15–21 septembre 1920 (Paris: Édition Spes, 1931), 168–169, 179–180. 171. See Joseph Geyser, Max Schelers Phänomenologie der Religion (Freiburg: Herder, 1924), 6. Heinrich Getzeny was highly critical of Geyser’s argument, stating that it was “shameful, that something like this can go out u­ nder the name of Albertus Magnus into the world.” Heinrich Geßeny, “Um die Religionsphilosophie Max Schelers,” Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923–1924): 590. Przywara also attacked Geyser. See Erich Przywara, “Zum Kampf um Max Scheler,” Germania 135 (1924): 13. 172. See especially the four-­part essay by Anton Maria Rohner, “Thomas von Aquin und Max Scheler,” Divus Thomas (Freiburg / Schweiz) 1–3 (1923–1925). See also Wladislaus Switalski, Probleme der Erkenntnis, 2 vols. (Münster: Aschendorffsche, 1923). 173. For Scheler’s reaction to Przywara, see Scheler Archive, B I 205, where he favorably compares Przywara’s reading to Switalski’s. Hermann Bahr was also taken by Przywara’s reading of Scheler, especially to the extent that he refused to oppose simply Aquinas and Augustine. See Hermann Bahr, “Fragen der neuesten Philosophie (Scheler, Przywara),” Das Neue Reich 6 (1924): 559–560. 174. For Przywara’s life, see Thomas O’Meara, Erich Przywara: His Theology, His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); and Betz, introduction to Przywara’s Analogia Entis. 175. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, pt. I, vol. 1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: Clark, 1975), xiii. 176. Przywara had been engaged with the youth movement earlier, and in 1921 wrote a rousing article in one of its journals about the importance of love: Erich Przywara, “Christlicher Geist und christliche Jugend: Ostergedanken,” Leuchtturm für Studierende: Illustrierte Halbmonatsschrift: Organ des Verbandes “Neudeutschland” 14, no. 13 (April 1921). See “Christliche Jugend,” in Przywara Archives, call no. 47-182-1414. 177. Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, 40–41, 50–52. 178. Ibid., 54. 179. Ibid., 32.

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180. Ibid., 37–38. Nonetheless, Przywara argued that the liturgical movement and the youth movement both recognized the importance of life and form. The “Catholic sense for balance . . . ​does not allow an absolute either-or” (ibid., 38). 181. Ibid., 10–12. 182. Ibid., 14. 183. See ibid., 19–20. 184. See Erich Przywara, Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler—­J. H. Newman (Freiburg: Herder, 1923), 12; Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, 15. 185. Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, 26. 186. Ibid., 24. See also Erich Przywara, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (Breslau: Millinsky, 1928), 8. 187. Przywara, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, 54–55. See also his discussion of the relationship between the youth movement and Scheler, ibid., 41, 178–179n22. 188. Ibid., 20–21. 189. Ibid., 20–1. See also 16, 27–29. 190. Erich Przywara, “Zu Max Schelers Religionsauffassung,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, 47 (1923): 30–31. 191. Erich Przywara, “La Situation spirituelle et religieuse d’Allemagne,” 164, 178. Przywara suggested that Scheler’s work was like the crucifixion on Good Friday, requiring for its fulfillment the resurrection on Easter Sunday (ibid., 194). Przywara returned multiple times in the interwar period to his analyses of the “three movements.” See, for instance, Erich Przywara, “Finis Europae,” Jong Dietschland 25, no.  3 (1929): 803–804. 192. See Gubser, The Far Reaches, 269. 193. For an in­ter­est­ing account of this development, based upon the inadequacy of the Judeo-­Christian all-­powerful God to account for evil in the world, see Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism, chap. 8. 194. See Max Scheler, The H ­ uman Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred Frings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 26–28, 45. 195. Ibid., 51. 196. Ibid., 59–60. 197. See, for instance, Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Max Scheler’s Stellung zur katholischen Gedankenwelt,” Katholische Gedanken 1 (1928): 445–447, where he explic­itly argues against the idea that Scheler’s pantheism was a result of the “fundamental orientation” of his philosophy; and Heinrich Getzeny, “Max Schelers Erbe,” Die Schildgenossen 8 (1928): 554. 198. See Przywara’s references to his earlier work, in Erich Przywara, “Zum Prob­lem Max Schelers,” Hochland 23, no. 2 (1926): 79. Similar arguments have been taken up by ­later commentators, who see the weak foundation of Scheler’s value perception as a clue to his l­ ater development. See Schneck, Person and Polis, 136–139. 199. Erich Przywara, “Drei Richtungen in der Phänomenologie,” Stimmen der Zeit 115 (1928): 256–258.



NOTES TO PAGES 153–154 393

5. Christian Existentialism across Eu­rope 1. Letter, Gabriel Marcel to Jacques Maritain, April 30, 1932, Fonds Jacques Maritain, Kolbsheim, France (hereafter cited as Fonds Maritain); letter, Gabriel Marcel to Louis Lavelle, May 3, 1932, Correspondence 19, Fonds Gabriel Marcel, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (hereafter cited as Fonds Marcel). 2. We do have notes from Marcel on the concept of the situation in Jaspers’s work dated May  23, 1932. See “Notes Philosophiques, 1932 et 1936,” 1–20, Gabriel Marcel Archives, Henry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as Marcel Archives). 3. See correspondence, Gabriel Marcel to Jacques Maritain, June 10, 1932, Fonds Maritain. Jaspers also appears in Marcel’s journal for the first time in the entry for November 9, 1932. 4. ­T here are very few accounts of the study group. See Ricoeur’s reflections, “Friday Eve­n ings,” in Paul Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1995), 23; and Dosse’s reconstruction in François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 28–30. For the fullest and most helpful discussion, see Anne Verdure-­Mary, “Un Salon philosophique au XXe siècle: Les Vendredis de Gabriel Marcel 21 rue de Tournon dans le VIe arrondissement,” Bulletin de la Société historique du VIe arrondissment de Paris, new ser., no. 27 (2014): 91–107. 5. For an analy­sis of the friendships, see Piero Viotto, Grandi amicizie: I Maritain e i loro contemporanei (Rome: Città nuova, 2008), 45–47, 82–87. 6. The most complete account of Christian existentialism can be found in George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 7. Nicolai Berdiaev, Essai d’autobiographie spirituelle (Paris: Buchet-­Chastel, 1979), 347. See also Henry Corbin, “Post-­scriptum biographique à un entretien philosophique,” in Henry Corbin, ed. Christine Jambet (Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 1981), 44. An examination of the detailed notes of the meetings, contained in Marcel’s archive, confirms Berdyaev’s claim. See, for example, “Vendredi 6 mars 1936, ‘Vérité et réalité,’ ” in “Soirées: Entretiens de vendredi (mars–­juin 1936),” Fonds Marcel. 8. For the most part in this book I use the terms “philosophy of existence,” “existential philosophy,” “existentialism,” and their correlates in dif­fer­ent languages interchangeably. The differences between the terms are impor­t ant, but the history of the debates over the most appropriate name is very complicated. For this history, see Edward Baring, “Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before Sartre,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 41 (2015), which provides a story complementary to the one I am recounting ­here. 9. As Marcel described it in his letter to Maritain, the new group was formed by him, Berdyaev, Wahl, Le Senne, and Georges Gurvitch. The latter was to host the meeting on June 18. 10. See Jacques Maritain, Notebooks, trans. Joseph Evans (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1984), 160, regarding meetings at Berdyaev’s in March 1929.

394

NOTES TO PAGES 154–156

11. For the emergence of Maritain’s study group, see Ralph McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 68–80; Marina Zito, Gli Anni di Meudon: Jacques e Raïssa Maritain tra il 1923 e il 1939 (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1990). 12. Maritain, Notebooks, 134. 13. Berdyaev, Maritain, and Marcel ­were all close friends of Charles du Bos, whose journals give a sense of the period and their friendship. See Charles du Bos, Journal, 1930–1939 (Paris: Buchet-­Chastel, 2005). 14. See Maritain, Notebooks, appendix to chap. 5, 290–297. 15. Raïssa Maritain, Raïssa’s Journal, ed. Jacques Maritain (New York: Magi Books, 1974), 221. For Marcel’s views on the princi­ple of identity, see Gabriel Marcel, Être et avoir (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1991), 27–31. Marcel l­ater declared that Raïssa Maritain showed “the defects that one notes too often with converts: she was a fanatic.” Gabriel Marcel, En chemin vers quel éveil? (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 156. 16. Berdiaev, Essai d’autobiographie spirituelle, 332. 17. See correspondence, Marcel to Maritain, June 25, 1937, and February 25, 1938, and Maritain’s reply, February 27, 1938, Fonds Maritain. Marcel thought that only figures like Salazar could stop Hitler’s forward march. See also the letters Marcel to Maritain March 22, 1938, and Maritain to Marcel, March 24 1938, Correspondence 20, Fonds Marcel. 18. Maritain’s work was a recurrent interest at Marcel’s soirées. See, for instance, “Vendredi, 15 mai, 1936,” in “Soirées: Entretiens de vendredi (mars–­juin 1936),” and “Lundi 7, and lundi 14  décember, 1936: ‘L’Intuition de l’être,’ ” in “Entretiens du lundi, puis du mardi (novembre 1935–­janvier 1938),” Fonds Marcel. 19. For Marcel’s early Bergsonianism, see Giuseppe Bianco, Après Bergson: Portrait de groupe avec philosophe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015), 31–33. 20. See Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), xi; Gabriel Marcel, “Existence et objectivité,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1925), reprinted in Marcel, Journal métaphysique. 21. Marcel, “Existence et objectivité,” 175–177. 22. Ibid., 179–183. Feeling ­here should be taken as both sentiment and sensation. Marcel argued that we ­were assured, not of “existence in general” nor of the existence of a par­t ic­u ­lar object, but instead of the “existence of the universe.” 23. The chronology of Marcel’s work is complicated. He is most famous for his two metaphysical journals, the first published in 1927, containing his diary from 1914 to 1923. In 1935 he published the second installment, Être et avoir. The latter journal did not take up where the other left off; its first entry is for November 10, 1928. 24. For a clear discussion of secondary reflection, see Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Rodopi, 2008), 59. 25. Marcel, Être et avoir, 13–14. 26. See ibid., 28–29. See also Sweetman, Vision of Gabriel Marcel, chap. 1. 27. The existentialist opposition to idealism, especially its institutionalized form in France and elsewhere, has been noted by many scholars. See, for instance, Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 5.



NOTES TO PAGES 156–157 395

28. See Marcel, Être et avoir, for his transformative experience of grace (18) and then baptism (24). According to Sweetman, Vision of Gabriel Marcel, 53, Marcel recognized the closeness of his thought to Catholicism ­a fter writing a review by a novel written by François Mauriac. 29. See the collected remarks about the relation between Marcel’s conversion and his engagement with Thomism in Henri de Lubac, ed., Gabriel Marcel–­Gaston Fessard, correspondance (1934–1971) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985), 71n. 30. Letter, Marcel to Maritain, September 6, 1929, Fonds Maritain. See also letters, Maritain to Marcel, March 11, 1929, July 20, 1930, and first semester 1931, Correspondence 20, Fonds Marcel. 31. See Marcel, En chemin vers quel éveil?, 142–143. L ­ ater he would describe his own philosophy as situated “on a median line between believers and nonbelievers, in such a way that I was in some way able to incline ­toward believers, to the Christian religion, to the Catholic religion, while being able to speak to nonbelievers.” Paul Ricoeur, Entretiens Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Aubier-­Montaigne, 1968), 82. 32. Marcel, Journal métaphysique, xi. 33. Ricoeur, Entretiens Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel, 30. See also Marcel, Être et avoir, 28. 34. Marcel, Être et avoir, 17; see also 30–33. 35. Ibid., 25. ­Here Marcel was also criticizing the Thomist idea that the soul is the form of the body, asserting that such a conceptualization was incompatible with the idea of salvation. A ­ fter the Second World War, Marcel became more explicit and direct in his criticism of Thomism. See the set of quotes in Andrea Serra, Esistenzo e dialogo: Marcel e l’Italia (Torino: M. Valerio, 2005), 41–46. 36. In this way Marcel’s ideas and the tradition following from him can be seen as the religious counterpart of the “antifoundational realism” that Geroulanos identifies among the Recherches Philosophiques group. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), chap. 1. The difference is that Marcel and other Catholics thought that transcendence into the world was pos­si­ble only ­because h­ umans participated in the transcendent. 37. Marcel, letter to Maritain, September 24, 1929. Fonds Maritain. See also Marcel, Être et avoir, 66–67. 38. See, for instance, the passages that w ­ ere removed for the final publication: from September 29, October 5, October 22, October 31, November 8, and November 19, 1932. In “Notes philosophiques 1932 et 1936,” Marcel Archives. 39. Letter, Marcel to Maritain, May 3, 1932, Fonds Maritain. 40. Marcel, En chemin vers quel éveil?, 140–142. 41. Ibid., 152. 42. Marcel presented his ontological concern as a break with modern Kantian and Bergsonian philosophy. See Marcel, Être et avoir, 71–72. The ontological aspects of Marcel’s thought ­were also forefront in his correspondence with Maritain. See, for instance, letters Maritain to Marcel, first semester 1931 and October  14, 1933, Correspondence 20, Fonds Marcel.

396

NOTES TO PAGES 158–159

43. See Marcel, Être et avoir, 70–71, 82–87. For further references to scholasticism and Maritain vis-­à-­v is the mystery, see Gabriel Marcel, “Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique,” in Gabriel Marcel, Le Monde cassé (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933), 255, 277. 44. Marcel, Être et avoir, 71. The reference to Maritain was, however, only added for the published version. See “Notes philosophiques 1932 et 1936,” 55, Marcel Archives. 45. Marcel, Être et avoir, 100. 46. See ibid., 40–45, 51–52, and esp. 82–87. For hope in relation to Thomism, see 66–67. 47. Marcel seems to have first read the three volumes of Jaspers’s Philosophie in January and February  1932. On February  28 he wrote to Alexandre Koyré at Recherches Philosophiques offering to write an article on Jaspers’s work, initially imagining an essay of fifty pages to introduce this “unknown” phi­los­o­pher to France. By the time he submitted the paper in October, he had come to focus his argument as the title of his paper suggests: “Situation fondamentale et situations limites chez Karl Jaspers.” See letters, Gabriel Marcel to Alexandre Koyré, February 28 and March 3, 1932, Fonds Koyré, AP c17 d3. 48. Letter, Marcel to Maritain, June 10, 1932, Fonds Maritain. 49. Marcel, Être et avoir, 59. Wahl also noted the similarities in Marcel’s and Jaspers’s proj­ects. See Jean Wahl, “Le Problème du choix, l’existence, et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 41 (1934): 406. Marcel ­later wrote, “If properly speaking [Jaspers’s Philosophie] d ­ idn’t influence me,” it “nonetheless contributed in a notable way to reinforce certain accents.” Marcel, En chemin vers quel éveil?, 145. 50. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophie, 3 vols., 4th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1973). Existenz, along with the World and Transcendence, was what Jaspers ­later called “the encompassing” (das Umgreifende). See Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1956), 15. Charles  F. Wallraff’s Karl Jaspers: An Introduction to His Philosophy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1970) remains a helpful and readable account of Jaspers’s ideas. 51. See Jaspers, Philosophie, 2:201–254, 3:4–5, 68. 52. See Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie, 72–78. 53. Jaspers, Philosophie, 3:160. 54. See Marcel, Être et avoir, 30–31. Marcel did not think this was an argument against Catholicism. It instead suggested the importance of revelation. Philosophy that did not assume that one could adopt the position of a spectator was, for Marcel, related to “sacred knowledge,” 21–23. 55. This is also vis­i ­ble in his May 1932 notes on Jaspers. See “Notes philosophiques 1932 et 1936,” Marcel Archives. 56. On the ontological exigence, see Kenneth Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), chap. 4. 57. Marcel, Être et avoir, 73. 58. It counts as the first article outside of Germany dedicated to Jaspers’s work. It was prob­a bly completed at the same time as Marcel first developed his arguments about the mystery of being. Generally, the articles for each “annuaire” of Recherches Philosophiques needed to be delivered by the end of October for inclusion in the volume the



NOTES TO PAGES 160–162 397

following spring. See “Conditions faites aux collaborateurs des R. P.,” Fonds Koyré, AP c.17 d.1. 59. Gabriel Marcel, “Situation fondamentale et situations limites chez Karl Jaspers,” Recherches Philosophiques 2 (1932–1933): 318–320. See also Miklos Vetö, Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Harmattan, 2014), 39–47. 60. As we have seen, the ontological focus of Marcel’s argument also implicates the Thomists rather than the idealists. 61. Marcel, “Situation fondamentale,” 320. See, for instance, Maritain’s chapter on subsistence at the end of his Distinguer pour unir; ou, les dégrés du savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932). 62. Marcel, “Situation fondamentale,” 326, 328. 63. Ibid., 332. 64. Ibid., 320–326. 65. Ibid., 344. See also Gallagher, Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, esp. chap. 1. 66. Marcel, “Situation fondamentale,” 321. 67. Ibid., 347–348. See also 338. 68. Ibid., 348. In submitting the article, Marcel noted that he h­ adn’t fully treated the question of transcendence in Jaspers’s work ­because he found it “full of obscurities and ambiguities in the details.” Letter, Gabriel Marcel to Alexandre Koyré, October 4, 1932, Fonds Koyré, AP c.17 d.3. 69. Despite the scholarship on Maritain, t­here has been very l­ittle written on this form of “Thomistic existentialism” and its relationship to other existentialist philosophies. In an early essay, John Wild argues against the identification of existentialism and Thomism, marking out a number of differences—­not least, divergent concepts of “existence” and “time.” He argued that Aquinas’s “major writings lack any vital flavor of concrete existence.” Wild, “Christian Rationalism,” in William  A. Earle, James  M. Edie, and John Wild, Chris­tian­ity and Existentialism: Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963). Eugene B. Borowitz, in his 1965 Layman’s Introduction to Religious Existentialism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), denies Maritain the title “existentialist” for similar reasons; see 94–97. Borowitz takes Marcel as the paradigmatic Catholic existentialist. In contrast, see the discussion of the relationship between existentialism and Thomism in Gustave Thibon’s “L’Existentialisme de Gabriel Marcel,” La Revue Philosophique (1946): 161–164. In both, Thibon saw an “openness and submission to what is” and a rejection of “rationalism and idealism.” Further, he suggested that Thomism “never stops proclaiming the existence of the mystery down ­here and the mystery on high, and underlining the irreducible, ineffable, and inexhaustible character of concrete Being.” 70. See especially Jacques Maritain, Antimoderne (Paris: Éditions de la Revue des jeunes, 1922), though h­ ere Maritain wanted to argue that antimodern was also ultramodern. See the 1922 preface. For Maritain’s intertwining of modernist and antimodernist ele­ments, see Schloesser, Jazz-­Age Catholicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 71. See the accounts in McInerny, Very Rich Hours, and André Laudouze, Les Dominicains et l’Action française (Paris: Ouvrières, 1989). 72. See Chapter 8.

398

NOTES TO PAGES 162–165

73. Maritain, “L’Existentialisme de Saint Thomas,” in Esistentizalismo, ed. Carlo Boyer (Rome: Casa editrice Marietti, 1947), 40. 74. Jacques Maritain, Sept leçons sur l’être (Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1934), 1–2. 75. Ibid., 18. 76. Ibid., 29; see also 45. 77. Ibid., 24–27. 78. Ibid., 30. 79. Ibid., 27–31. 80. Ibid., 9–10. 81. Ibid., 11. 82. Ibid., 56–57. Maritain retreated somewhat from this formulation, suggesting that it was too “brutal.” 83. Ibid., 57–59. 84. Maritain also compared it to Bergsonian intuition. Ibid., 60. 85. Ibid., 60. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid., 65; see also 72, where Maritain denies that Being is ineffable. For an analy­sis of the place of the princi­ple of identity in Maritain’s work, see McCool, From Unity to Pluralism (New York: Fordham University Press: 1989), 117–121. 88. Maritain, Sept leçons sur l’être, 24–26; see also 73. 89. Ibid., 66; see also 97. The resemblance of this language to Husserl’s is no coincidence, and we must remember that Maritain wrote ­t hese lines just a­ fter publishing The Degrees of Knowledge, which I discuss in Chapter 6. 90. Ibid., 9. 91. Ibid., 75. 92. See lessons 5, 6, and 7. 93. Ibid., 70. 94. See Jacques Maritain, “L’Humanisme de Saint Thomas d’Aquin,” in Medieval Studies 3 (1941): 174–175; and Maritain, “L’Existentialisme de Saint Thomas,” 40. See also Maritain, “From Existential Existentialism to Academic Existentialism,” Swanee Review (1948). 95. Entry from September 29, 1932, in “Notes philosophiques 1932 et 1936,” Marcel Archives. This is prob­a bly a reference to The Degrees of Knowledge, which was published at about that time, and whose appendix first broached the question of existence. 96. For an analy­sis of the similarities and differences between Marcel’s and Maritain’s thought, with an emphasis on the former, see Sweetman, Vision of Gabriel Marcel, 121–134; and Gallagher, Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 138–147. 97. See the notes for December 26, 1932, in “Notes philosophiques 1932 et 1936,” Marcel Archives. 98. Letter, Marcel to Fessard, August 1, 1934, collected in Gabriel Marcel–­Gaston Fessard, correspondance, 68–69. Though both Maritain and Marcel claimed the term “Christian existentialist,” I ­w ill reserve it purely for the non-­T homists in this book, referring to Maritain and similar thinkers as “existential Thomists.”



NOTES TO PAGES 165–166 399

99. For Maritain’s friendship with Gilson, which began in 1931, see McInerny, Very Rich Hours, 125–128. 100. See especially Étienne Gilson, “Vade mecum du débutant réaliste,” in Le Réalisme méthodique (Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1935). 101. See letter, Gilson to Maritain, August 10, 1934, in Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Correspondance, 1923–1971 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1991), 118; Étienne Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris: J. Vrin, 1939). 102. Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme, 4th ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1942), 41n. This is not, however, to downplay the differences. Gilson, for instance, criticized Maritain in the fourth edition of Le Thomisme by suggesting that Maritain had placed too much emphasis on the analogous concept of existence, which explained the g­ reat heterogeneity of real­ity. Gilson, in contrast, foregrounded the concrete singular grasped in sensation, which Maritain’s intuition of being sought to move beyond. See 153 and 66. See also the account given by Francesca Murphy of the relationship and divergences between the two men, in her Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (London: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 159–172. 103. Gilson, Le Thomisme, 5th  ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 511. ­Here Gilson separated Aquinas from Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers. He criticized t­ hese phi­los­o­phers for considering existence only “as the object of a pos­si­ble phenomenology of ­human existence” (510). 104. Berdyaev, “The End of the Re­nais­sance I,” Slavic Review (June 1925): 3–4. See Berdiaev, Essai d’autobiographie spirituelle, 175. For Berdyaev’s attitude t­ oward Catholicism and hostility t­oward Thomism, and his relationship to Maritain in par­tic­u ­lar, see Antoine Arjakovsky, The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Rus­sian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925 / 1940, trans. Jerry Ryan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 144–149; Olivier Clément, Berdiaev: Un Philosophe russe en France (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991), 86–89. 105. See, for instance, his preface to Nicolai Berdiaev, Esprit et liberté (Paris: Aubier, 1943), 9–10. Clément makes a similar argument. Berdyaev a­ dopted the title “philosophe existentiel” as “a commodity, a concession to fashion, a way of proving that he ­wasn’t an émigré enclosed in his emigration and using jargon that was barely intelligible to the French.” Clément, Berdiaev, 106–107. 106. Berdieav, Esprit et liberté, 10. See Berdyaev’s critical remarks about Thomism at 30– 31. See Pattison, “Nicolas Berdyaev: Kierkegaard amongst the Artists, Mystics, and Solitary Thinkers,” in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 107. See the list in Nicolai Berdiaev, Cinq méditations sur l’existence (Paris: Aubier, 1936), 30. 108. Ibid., 12. Berdyaev had first posed the opposition in a letter to Maritain, three years earlier. Letter, Berdyaev to Maritain, December 18, 1933, Fonds Maritain. 109. Berdiaev, Cinq méditations sur l’existence, 19. For this point, Berdyaev referred to Maritain, Les Degrés du savoir. 110. Berdiaev, Cinq méditations sur l’existence, 19. 111. Berdyaev quoted in Arjakovsky, The Way, 355.

400

NOTES TO PAGES 167–169

112. Maritain to Berdyaev, draft, December 23, 1933, Fonds Maritain. 113. For a brief and clear pre­sen­t a­t ion of Shestov’s position and its relationship to Berdyaev’s, see Arjakovsky, The Way, 282–285, 296–303. They broke over Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard, on the question of w ­ hether God could be understood in personalist terms (ibid., 458–470). 114. Léon Chestov, Kierkegaard et la pensée existentielle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), 13. For Shestov, see George Pattison, “Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard in the Ox of Phalaris,” in Stewart, Kierkegaard and Existentialism. 115. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 317. 116. Ibid., 328. 117. See especially his polite but no less forceful criticism of Maritain’s Songe de Descartes, letter, Le Senne to Maritain, May 29, 1932, Fonds Maritain. For his criticism of the Sept leçons, see the letter of September 3, 1934. And see René Le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1923), 146. Le Senne directed his attacks particularly at “the customary scholasticism of our time” (148). For Lavelle, see his conciliatory references to Thomism in Louis Lavelle, La Philosophie française entre les deux guerres (Paris: Aubier, 1942). 118. For Le Senne’s relationship to Berdyaev, see Arjakovsky, The Way, 333–335. 119. Gabriel Marcel, review of Obstacle et valeur, in La Vie Intellectuelle, November 25, 1935, 107. Marcel nevertheless criticized Le Senne for presenting value as an absolute, suggesting instead that it was always “contaminated” with determination (ibid., 125). Furthermore, he worried that it implied God’s dependence on us, which he related to Le Senne’s “phenomenologism” (128). 1 20. See René Le Senne, Obstacle et valeur (Paris: Aubiers, 1934), 12–31. 121. Ibid., 146–148. 149; see also 156. 1 22. Ibid., 157. 1 23. Ibid., 149–152. 1 24. Ibid., 105. 1 25. Ibid., 157. The way existentialism allowed Le Senne to forge an alliance with Maritain’s Thomism was only implicit in the 1934 Obstacle and Value, but he was more direct in his ­later work. In the 1939 edition of his Introduction to Philosophy, where Le Senne first embraced the label “existentialism,” he referred to both Maritain and the heterodox Thomist Aimé Forest. The latter could be understood as an existentialist, whereas the former was concerned to “grasp existence as it is given concretely” and for this reason had “touches recalling existentialism.” René Le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1939), 229, 235, 236n. 1 26. See Jean École, Les Grandes notions de la métaphysique lavellienne et son vocabulaire (Genoa: L’arcipelago, 2002), 20, referring to Louis Lavelle, De l’acte (Paris: Aubiers, 1937), 95–96. 127. See École, Les Grandes notions, 30. 1 28. See Lavelle, De l’acte, 365. 1 29. See ibid., 95. 130. Letter, Lavelle to Marcel, January 28, 1934, Correspondence 19, Fonds Marcel.



NOTES TO PAGES 169–171 401

131. Lavelle and Le Senne, “Une Nouvelle collection d’ouvrages philosophiques,” Les Études Philosophiques 7 (1934): 21–23. 132. For Jean Wahl, see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Bianco, Après Bergson, 29–31. 133. For the relationship between Wahl and Marcel, see Emmanuel Levinas et al., Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976). Jeanne Hersch, in her introduction to the volume, draws attention to the religious differences between the two men but suggests that they w ­ ere not decisive (ibid., 10). In contrast, Ricoeur in his essay emphasizes their differences, to such an extent that it appeared to him “almost impossible to place their work in the same genus of the philosophy of existence” (ibid., 58). Nevertheless, Ricoeur did spend several pages enumerating their similarities (ibid., 58–63). 134. Jean Wahl, “Vers le concret,” Recherches Philosophiques 1 (1931–1932): 6. See also Wahl, “Notes sur l’existence,” Tijdschrift voor philosophie 2 (1940): 589. 135. Wahl, “Le Problème du choix.” 136. Ibid., 405–408. 137. Ibid., 411. 138. Ibid., 420. 139. See also Emmanuel Levinas, “Jean Wahl sans avoir ni être,” in Levinas et al., Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, 29. 1 40. See Jean Wahl, “Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 37 (1937): 161–162. In a letter from 1943, Sartre used Wahl’s distinction in order to separate his thought from Marcel’s. Letter, Sartre to Marcel, 1943, Correspondence 22, Fonds Marcel. 141. Wahl, “Vers le concret,” 12. 1 42. Paul Ricoeur, “Entre Gabriel Marcel et Jean Wahl,” in Levinas et al., Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, 72. 1 43. Except for Shestov, who had died in 1938. 1 44. For Maritain, see the se­lection of translations at https://­w ww3​.­nd​.­edu​/­Departments​ /­Maritain​/ ­by​-­jm​.­htm. See also Bernard Hubert et al., ed., Jacques Maritain en Eu­ rope: La Réception de sa pensée (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), which gives full accounts of Maritain’s reception in Western and Eastern Eu­rope. For Poland, see Piotr Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 38, 43–50. 1 45. Gubser, The Far Reaches, 190. 1 46. H. Robbers, “De Beteekenis van het Neo-­T homisme voor het hedendaagsche katholieke denkleven,” Synthese (1936): 380. 147. Th. Droege, “Die Existenz-­Philosophie Martin Heideggers,” Divus Thomas 16 (1938): 374. 1 48. See Giuseppe D’Acunto, Tomismo esistenziale: Fabro, Gilson, Maritain (Morolo: IF Press, 2011). 1 49. Michele Fatta, “Il Realismo, filosofia umana,” Divus Thomas (1943): 284.

402

NOTES TO PAGES 172–173

150. Aimé Forest, “L’Exigence idéaliste de la pensée contemporaine,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 42 (1934): 31; Forest, “La Méthode idéaliste,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 43 (1934); and above all, Forest, “Thomisme et idealisme,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 44 (1934). 151. J. Delhomme, “La Philosophie de M. Gabriel Marcel,” Revue Thomiste (1938): 138. See also Marcel de Corte, “L’Ontologie existentielle de Gabriel Marcel,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 39 (1936): 470–471. And see De Corte, La Philosophie de Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Chez P. Téquis, 1938), where he tried to develop a “valid existentialism” out of Marcel’s thought (viii). 152. Alphonse de Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1942), vi. See Chapter 7. 153. Luigi Pelloux, “La Philosophie de l’esprit,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 33 (1941): 203–204. 154. See Serra, Esistenzo e dialogo, 25–46. 155. Carlo Giacon, “Esistenzialismo e Tomismo,” in Esistenzialismo, ed. Luigi Pelloux (Rome: Studium, 1943), 37. 156. Cornelio Fabro, Introduzione all’esistenzialismo (Segni: Edivi, 2009), 14; see also 100. Fabro nevertheless rejected Le Senne’s version of existentialism for failing to break out of idealism (ibid., 126). Fabro’s early articles on existentialism are collected in Elvio C. Fontano, ed., Fabro e l’esistenzialismo (Rome: EDIVI, 2010), which contains a valuable discussion of Fabro’s itinerary in this period. For other accounts of Fabro, see Giuseppe Mario Pizzuti, Il Filosofo dell’actus essendi (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2011); and the collected essays in Ariberto Acerbi, ed., Crisi e destino della filosofia: Studi su Cornelio Fabro (Rome: EDUSC, 2012). 157. Fabro, Introduzione all’esistenzialismo, 106. 158. A similar approach can be seen in B. L. Pasquetto, “L’Esistenzialismo di Marcel e il realismo classico,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (1944). The question of Marcel’s “irrationality” also provoked criticism from some corners of the neo-­scholastic world; see, e.g., M. A. Zoccoletti, La Filosofia dell’esistenza secondo Gabriel Marcel (Padua: CEDAM, 1942). See also Andrea Serra, Esistenza e dialogo: Gabriel Marcel e l’Italia (Torino: M. Valerio, 2005), 36–41. 159. Peter Wust had met Marcel and Maritain on his trip to France in 1928 and kept up a correspondence with both afterward. See Peter Wust, “Ein deutsch-­französiches Gespräch,” in Briefe und Aufsätze (Münster: Regensberg Verlag, 1959). See also Marcel’s “La Piété selon Peter Wust,” in Être et avoir, 159–176; Käte Nadler, “Die französische Existenzphilosophie der Gegenwart,” Die Tatwelt (1936): 162–166. Nadler also wrote on Berdyaev. Nadler “Das Religiöse in der Philosophie Berdiajews,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 18 (1937). 160. Nadler, “Die französische Existenzphilosophie der Gegenwart,” 166. 161. See Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, esp. chaps. 2–3. In addition to t­ hose existentialists mentioned in Rubini’s masterly account, I argue ­here for the importance of the scholastics and the Christian spiritualists, which adds greater weight to the connections between Italy and France described in Rubini’s study.



NOTES TO PAGES 174–176 403

162. For Gentile, see Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 84–111. Brian Copenhaver, From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 118–146; Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 2012), 171–186; Michele Sciacca, La Philosophie italienne contemporaine (Paris: E. Vitte, 1951), 125–139. 163. See Gentile, I Problemi; Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 96–99. 164. Eugenio Garin denies that ­t here was a close and necessary relationship between Fascism and Italian idealism. Garin, “La Filosofia italiana di fronte al fascismo,” in La Filosofia italiana di fronte al fascismo, ed. A. Vigorelli (Milan: Unicopli, 2000), 19. 165. Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 13. 166. See Sciacca, La Philosophie Italienne contemporaine, 165–167, 253–290; Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 152. This did not necessarily mean that they ­were anti-­Fascist themselves. For Guzzo, see Amalia de Maria, Augusto Guzzo: La Vita e le opere (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). For Carlini, see Leonardo Messinese, Armando Carlini (Vatican City: Lateran University Press, 2012). For Stefanini, see Flavia Silli, La Genesi del personalismo in Luigi Stefanini (Rome: Aracne, 2006), 52–65. Castelli took a slightly dif­fer­ent path, criticizing idealism immediately from a realist standpoint by rejecting the priority of the cogito. In this he was closer to Marcel. 167. Augusto Guzzo, Giudizio e azione (Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1928). 168. Augusto Guzzo, “Neoscolastica e idealismo,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 21 (1929): 52. 169. See Pietro Prini, La Filosofia cattolica italiana del novecento (Roma: Laterza, 1996), 131. 170. Augusto Guzzo, Apologia dell’idealismo, 155, quoted in Maria, Augusto Guzzo, 21. 171. For Carlini’s fascism, which he ­later describes as “fleeting, contingent,” see Armando Carlini, Filosofia e religione nel pensiero di Mussolini (Rome: Istituto, 1934). Eugenio Garin analyzes this work in his “La Filosofia italiana di fronte al fascismo,” 16–18. 172. Armando Carlini, Orientamenti della filosofia contemporanea (Rome: Critica Fascista, 1931), 20. For Carlini, see Prini, La Filosofia cattolica, 117–127; and Messinese, Armando Carlini. Guzzo and Carlini differed on multiple points, and Guzzo generally preferred the title “Christian idealist” to “spiritualist,” though t­ hese differences ­aren’t crucial to my argument, and I use the latter term for both. For Guzzo’s critique of Carlini, see his Sguardi su la filosofia contemporanea (Rome: Perrella, 1940). 173. Carlini, Orientamenti, 33–35. 174. Ibid., 107. For Carlini’s relationship to actualism, see Messinese, Armando Carlini, 177–190. 175. Carlini, Orientamenti, 111. ­Here he declares Fascism to be Christian spiritualism’s po­l iti­cal counterpart. And see ibid., 76. 176. Francesco Olgiati and Armando Carlini, Neo-­scolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1933), 176. 177. See Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 117. Mancini argues that the neo-­scholastic attempt to replace actualism as a quasi-­hegemonic Italian philosophy led to Gemelli’s embrace of anti-­Semitic and racist ideas. See Italo Mancini, “La Neoscolastica durante

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NOTES TO PAGES 176–178

gli anni del fascism,” in Vigorelli, ed., La Filosofia italiana di fronte al fascismo, 195–220. On the relationship of Italian neo-­scholasticism to Mussolini’s Fascism, see Chapter 8. 178. See Carlini, Orientamenti, 78, 101. 179. Ibid., 26. 180. See Armando Carlini, “Una Breve presentazione del mio pensiero,” in Messinese, Armando Carlini, 224–231; see 191–199 for an account of his relationship to scholasticism. 181. See, in par­t ic­u ­lar, Guzzo’s first book, Verità e realtà: Apologia dell’idealismo (Turin: Paravia, 1925). 182. For an account of the debate, see Mangiagalli, La “Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica” (1909–1959) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991), 2:489–491. 183. Carlo Mazzantini, “Sopra una filosofia dell’azione assoluta,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 20 (1928): 458. 184. Ibid., 459; see also 461. 185. Ibid., 462. 186. Guzzo, “Neoscolastica e idealismo,” 35–36. Guzzo elaborated on this argument in his 1936 Idealismo e cristianesimo. 187. Guzzo, “Neoscolastica e idealismo” 38. 188. See the collected articles in Olgiati and Carlini, Neo-­scolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo. For an account of the debate, see Leonardo Messinese, Pensiero e trascendenza: La Disputa Carlini-­Olgiati del 1931–33 (Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1990). 189. Olgiati and Carlini, Neo-­scolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo, 17. 190. Ibid., 12. 191. In his response, Carlini was adamant that the “being” in Aristotle was dif­fer­ent from the “being” in Thomas, and that to deny such would be “both a philosophical and religious heresy.” Ibid., 25–27. 192. See correspondence Carlini-­Olgiati, file 187, Fondo carte Mons. Francesco Olgiati archive, AGSUCSC. And letter, Gemelli to Guzzo, December 19, 1928, where Gemelli commiserated with Guzzo a­ fter the death of his m ­ other. Box 30, file 33, subfile 309, Correspondence Archives, AGSUCSC. And correspondence Gemelli-­Carlini, June–­ July 1945, in box 168, file 300, subfile 2177, Correspondence Archives, AGSUCSC. 193. Guzzo, “Neoscolastica e idealismo,” 40. 194. See Olgiati and Carlini, Neo-­scolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo, 176. 195. Ibid., 63. Olgiati instead suggested that it was not necessary to accept the presuppositions of modern philosophy to understand it, and looked to build a new theology based upon the transcendent (ibid., 120–121). 196. Armando Carlini, Il Mito del realismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1936), vii–­v iii. For Carlini’s development in this direction, see Messinese, Armando Carlini, 46–55; and his own account, which emphasizes the impact of the Olgiati debate: Armando Carlini, Alla ricerca di me stesso (Florence: Sansoni, 1951), 51–66. I ­w ill discuss this at greater length in Chapter 7. 197. Armando Carlini, “Esistenzialismo e spiritualità,” in Pelloux, L’Esistenzialismo, 36. Carlini criticized other existentialists for collapsing the two forms of existence to-



NOTES TO PAGES 178–180 405

gether in a new “metaphysics in which our being is implicated in the being of the existence of the world in general.” For Carlini, this was “the precise negation and destruction of the prob­lem itself.” 198. Guzzo, Idealismo e cristianesimo (Naples: L. Loffredo, 1936), 5, 44. On this, see de Maria, Augusto Guzzo, 26–34. The Christian spiritualists and Thomists carried on their conversation about metaphysics a­ fter the war, in a new philosophical center at Gallarate. 199. For Enrico Castelli’s reading of Blondel, see Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 148–152. 200. Carlini, Orientamenti, 99–100; Carlini, Il Mito del realismo, 44–45. See also Prini, La Filosofia cattolica, 118; Flavia Silli, Stefanini interprete di Blondel (Milan: Prometheus, 2005). Nevertheless, Stefanini sought to reduce the distance between Blondel and Thomism in his “L’Ortodossia di Maurizio Blondel,” Convivium 1 (1929). See Silli, La Genesi del personalismo in Luigi Stefanini, 31. 201. Castelli translated Blondel’s Principio di una logica della vita morale, which was published in 1924. Blondel also corresponded with many Italians, including Ernesto Buonaiuti, Enrico Castelli, Ernesto Grassi, Eugenio Pacelli, and Michele Frederico Sciacca. 202. See his remarks in Primato 1943, reprinted in Bruno Maiorca, ed., Esistenzialismo in Italia (Turin: Paravia, 1993), 118. Guzzo expressed his closeness to Le Senne while distancing himself from Heidegger, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and Nietz­sche. 203. Armando Guzzo, “Gaston Berger et l’Italie,” Les Études Philosophiques (1961): 401–402. 204. In Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 5 (1936). Le Senne also had a number of connections to other countries. He published “La Relation idéo-­ existentielle” in the German Tatwelt (March  1937), and “Philosophie et spiritualisme” in the Romanian Revista di filosofie (1935), and he edited one of the first editions of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1939). See the bibliography in Jules Pirlot, Destinée et valeur: La Philosophie de René Le Senne (Namur: Secrétariat des Publications, 1953). 205. See Sciacca, La Philosophie Italienne contemporaine, 255. 206. See Serra, Esistenza e dialogo, 48. 207. Silli, La Genesi del personalismo in Luigi Stefanini, 116n. 208. See Augusto Guzzo, “Bilancio dell’esistenzialismo in Italia,” Log­os: Rivista internazionale di filosofia 1 (1942): 104. 209. The lectures ­were collected in his 1940 book Sguardi su la filosofia contemporanea; see 35–38 for Le Senne. 210. Augusto Guzzo, “Dopo la ‘filosofia dell’esistenza,’ ” Archivio di filosofia (1939): 175. 211. See Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 233; Enzo Paci, Pensiero, esistenza e valore (Milan: Principato, 1940), 107–108. 212. See Augusto Guzzo, “Bilancio dell’esistenzialismo in Italia,” 104; and Guzzo, “Gaston Berger et l’Italie,” 401. 213. All of his early essays on existentialism are collected in his Studi sull’esistenzialismo, which was first issued in 1943, with a new edition in 1950. The 2001 re-­issue of the 1950 edition contains a helpful appendix by Claudio Ciancio on the differences

406

NOTES TO PAGES 180–185

between the two editions. See Luigi Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo (Milan: Mursia, 2001), 225–237. 214. Luigi Pareyson, La Filosofia dell’esistenza e Carlo Jaspers (Naples: Loffredo, 1940), v–vi. 215. Ibid., viii. 216. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 16–19, 172–173; as well as Pareyson, Carlo Jaspers xvii. 217. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 29–31. In his discussion of the French, Pareyson closely followed Le Senne’s analy­sis in Introduction à la philosophie, 2nd ed., 232–235. 218. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 19–20. In his pa­norama from 1941, Pareyson added to the French and German strands a discussion of Rus­sian existentialism, particularly of Berdyaev. Ibid., 31–32. 219. Ibid., 202. 220. Pareyson, Carlo Jaspers, x. L ­ ater he would argue that although existentialism was dif­fer­ent from spiritualism, one could nonetheless talk of the “spiritualistic resolution of existentialism.” Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 47. This why, Pareyson argued, the Christian spiritualists, both in France and Italy, renounced the term “existentialism” ­a fter the war. 221. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 13–17. 222. Ibid., 24. 223. Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, quoted in Prini, La Filosofia cattolica, 193–194. 224. For the vari­ous ways in which existentialism was read by both Thomists and Christian spiritualists in conversation, see the 1943 volume edited by Pelloux, Esistenzialismo, which contains contributions from Carlini and Fabro; and the 1943 Primato volume, which contains contributions by Carlini, Guzzo, and Olgiati, reprinted in Maiorca, Esistenzialismo in Italia. 225. See Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 29; Fabro, Fabro e l’esistenzialismo, 32–33; Le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 2nd ed., 233.

6. The Cartesian Thomist 1. Joseph Maréchal, Le Point de départ de la métaphysique, vol. 1. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947), vii–ix. 2. René Kremer, “Sur la notion du réalisme épistémologique,” in Philosophia Perennis, vol. 2, ed. Fritz-­Joachim von Rintelen (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1930), 736. 3. Ibid., 734. 4. Ibid., 736. 5. Ibid., 740. 6. Étienne Gilson, “Le Réalisme méthodique,” in von Rintelen, Philosophia Perennis, 2:745–746. 7. Gilson’s argument has been rightly criticized for its ­handling of Noël. See Andrea Robiglio, “Alle Cose stesse,” in Tomismo creativo, ed. M. Salvioli (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 2015). 8. Gilson, “Le Réalisme méthodique,” 746.



NOTES TO PAGES 186–187 407

9. Ibid., 748–749. 10. Ibid., 750. 11. Ibid., 751. Gilson was more conciliatory in his correspondence with Noël. See letters, Etienne Gilson to Léon Noël, August 21, 1931, and April 7, 1932, Fonds Noël. 12. Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris: J. Vrin, 1939), 7. 13. Gilson, “Le Réalisme méthodique,” 755. 14. Roland-­Gosselin, “Bulletin de métaphysique,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 20 (1931): 135–137. 15. See responses by Garrigou-­Lagrange in his Le Réalisme du principe de finalité (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932), 148–175. Gilson expanded his argument in the Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques (1932), collecting the two essays in a short book published in 1935, Le Réalisme méthodique. The debate keyed into another one, also starting in the Philosophia Perennis volume with the contribution by Roland-­ Gosselin, and expanded in his Essai d’une étude critique de la connaissance (1932). See also Régis Jolivet, “L’Intuition intellectuelle,” Revue Thomiste 37 (1932): 52–70; and Aimé Forest, “Essai d’une étude critique de la connaissance,” Revue Thomiste 38 (1933): 109–123, and Jourdain Messaut, “Thomisme et critique de la connaissance”, Revue Thomiste 40 (1935): 48–78, which against Jolivet’s mediating efforts emphasizes the secondariness but also necessity of the critical moment. 16. See his courses, especially “Logique et épistémologie,” CII 3352, in ISP Archives. 17. Léon Noël, “La Méthode du réalisme,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 34 (1931): 433–447. 18. Ibid., 437. 19. Letter, Noël to Maritain, April 14, 1932, Fonds Maritain. 20. Noël, “La Méthode du réalisme,” 439. 21. Ibid., 441. 22. Ibid., 447. Note ­here the parallels to Noël’s arguments against Gilson in the Christian philosophy debate (see the Introduction). Noël expanded on his analy­sis, taking into account other participants in the debate, in Noël, “Le Progrès de l’épistémologie thomiste,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 35 (1932): 429–448; Noël, “Encore l’Illationisme’ du Cardinal Mercier,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 42 (1939): 585–590; and Noël, “Le ‘Réalisme critique’ et le ‘bon désaccord,’ ” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 43 (1940): 41–66. His essays ­were collected in the book Léon Noël, Le Réalisme immédiate (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur der Philosophie, 1938). 23. Letter, Jacques Maritain to Léon Noël, April  27, 1932, Fonds Noël. Noël agreed with Maritain’s position. But he differed from Maritain on w ­ hether it was pos­ si­ble  to prove this critically. “We would not say that the ‘fundamental truths’ are uniquely confirmed by the reduction to impossibility of the ­t heses that deny them; they are also confirmed by a positive analy­sis that shows that objective real­ity is the endpoint of the cognitive act.” Noël, “Le Progrès de l’épistémologie thomiste,” 444. 24. Maritain, Distinguer pour unir; ou, les dégrés du savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932), xv.

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NOTES TO PAGES 187–189

25. In the opening pages he reproached idealism for taking one par­t ic­u ­lar form of knowledge as a model, which “tends to reduce the diversities of the life of the spirit to a noetic monism.” Ibid., vii. 26. Ibid., viii. This pre­sen­t a­t ion resonated with Le Senne, who, though critical of parts of Maritain’s arguments, was sympathetic to his proj­ect. Correspondence, Le Senne to Maritain, November 17, 1932, Fonds Maritain. 27. Maritain, Les Dégrés de savoir, 141. 28. Ibid., 145. 29. Ibid., 142. 30. Ibid., 146. 31. Ibid., 168. 32. Ibid., 181. 33. Ibid., 137–140. 34. Ibid., 153–154. 35. Ibid., 146–147. 36. Ibid., 149. 37. Ibid., 151. Noël disagreed. For him, doubt and a bracketing of real­ity ­were necessary “before one arrives at the critical affirmation of real­ity; it seems also that one could stop at this stage to assert that it comprises a certain notion of objective truth.” Noël, “Le Progrès de l’épistémologie thomiste,” 440–441. 38. Maritain, Les Dégrés de savoir, 153. 39. In a note Maritain suggested that Noël might even agree with this. Ibid., 156n. 40. Ibid., 209. As noted in Gerald McCool, From Unity to Pluralism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 118, by starting Les Dégrés de savoir with a study of the philosophy of nature, before his analy­sis of critical realism, Maritain reaffirmed his point about the latter’s secondary status. 41. Phélan had completed his PhD in Louvain in 1925 and became one of the found­ers of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. See Laurence Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 219–223. Maritain’s Sept leçons sur l’être was also dedicated to Phélan. 42. Fritz-­Joachim von Rintelen, ed., Philosophia Perennis, vol. 1 (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1930), vii. 43. Guglielmo Biasutti, “Dispute tra realisti,” L’Avvenire d’Italia, December 27, 1931, 3. See Francesco Olgiati, “Il Problema della conoscenza nella filosofia moderna ed il realismo scolastico,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 28, no. 6 (November 1936). 44. Olgiati, “Il Problema della conoscenza,” 460. 45. Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:149n11. When asked by Zamboni to redefine his position, Gemelli instead chose the title Professor of Gnoseology. See “Giuseppe Zamboni, Relazione Annuale, 1923–4,” Miscellaneous, box 1, file 19, AGSUCSC. 46. For a clear account of Zamboni’s ideas, see Georges Van Riet, L’Épistemologie thomiste: Recherches sur le problème de la connaissance dans l’école thomiste contemporaine (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1946), 403–417. And Prini, La Filosofia Cattolica italiana del novecento (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 46–51.



NOTES TO PAGES 189–191 409

47. See, for instance, his discussion of the scholastic correspondence theory of truth, in Giuseppe Zamboni, Introduzione al corso di gnoseologia pura (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1924), 14–16. 48. See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:169–170. Mangiagalli also draws attention to institutional issues ­a fter the Gentile reforms and the Concordat with the Fascists, which divided Zamboni and Gemelli. See ibid., 189–190. 49. The nihil obstat was formally removed on September  12, 1932. Letter, Sacra Congregazione dei Seminari e delle Università degli Studi, Roma, to Giuseppe Zamboni, September 12, 1932, Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, file 131, AGSUCSC. For Gemelli’s role in the pro­cess, see his letters to Cardinal Bisleti in the same file. 50. Gemelli, “Il ‘Caso’ Zamboni,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 27 (1935): 393. 51. Francesco Olgiati, “Il ‘Caso’ Zamboni,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 27 (1935): 398. Interestingly, Gilson refers positively to Zamboni. See Gilson, Réalisme thomiste, 188n. 52. Letter, Gemelli to Sig Card Gaetano Bisleti, Prefetto della S. Congregazione dei Seminari, July 20, 1932, Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, file 131, AGSUCSC. As we saw in Chapter 2, Olgiati was also a professor of the history of philosophy. 53. Gemelli, “Il ‘Caso’ Zamboni,” 393. Gemelli was prob­a bly responding to the April 24, 1932, article in Italia letteraria Roma, “Neoscolastici e archeoscolastici,” by Siro Contri, one of Zamboni’s students, which directly attacked Catholic University in Milan in ­t hese terms. Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, file, 131, AGSUCSC. 54. See Charles Ranwez, “La Controverse gnoséologique en Italie,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 38 (1935): 538. See also Charles Ranwez, “Giuseppe Zamboni, Il realismo critico della Gnoseologia pura. Risposta la ‘Caso Zamboni,”” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 39 (1936). We see a similar response in the German-­ speaking world. See, for instance, Anton Hilckman’s very positive review of Zamboni’s work in “Guiseppe Zamboni und seine reine Gnoseologie,” Philosophishes Jahrbuch 49 (1933): 479–485. 55. Letter, Olgiati to Noël, contained in letter, Joseph Dopp to Gemelli, March 4, 1936, AGSUCSC, Correspondence Archives, box 76, file 117, subfile 1101. 56. Letter, Noël to Olgiati, February 13, 1937, AGSUCSC, Mons. Francesco Olgiati Archives, file 149. 57. Letter, Olgiati to Noël, February 25, 1937, AGSUCSC, Mons. Francesco Olgiati Archives, file 149. The Milanese w ­ ere closer to Gilson and Maritain in the 1930s, before po­l iti­cal differences intervened. Both ­were invited to give lectures at Milan (an honor that apparently was not extended to any Louvain phi­los­o­phers), and Gilson was granted an honorary degree in 1932. See letters, Gilson to Gemelli, January 18, 1933, and Gemelli to Gilson January 26 and February 2, 1933, AGSUCSC, Correspondence Archives, box 40, file 52, subfile 493. 58. See Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, new ed., trans. E. Levinas and M. Peiffer (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992), 17–18, 51. It is telling that Husserl related this approach to a “radicalism of the starting point” (ibid., 25, 42–47).

410

NOTES TO PAGES 191–194

59. On Fink’s essay, see Peter Gordon, Continental Divide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 60. Eugen Fink, “Edmund Husserl und die gegenwärtige Kritik,” Kantstudien (1933): 338–343. Fink explic­itly distanced this problematic from “metaphysical dog­ matism.” 61. Ronald Bruzina, translator’s introduction, in Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xxxviii. 62. The word “digression” was in the title when the piece was published in the Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, which suggests that it also functioned as a pun. In the Cartesian Meditations, in a section entitled “Digression,” Husserl has discussed the scholastic residues of Descartes’s thought to explain why he had failed to develop a transcendental philosophy. Maritain’s title implies that Husserl’s rejection of t­hese residues explains his own “digression.” Maritain had also briefly referred to Husserl in his first contribution to the debate, “Science et philosophie, d’après les principes du réalisme critique,” Revue Thomiste (1931): 11–12. 63. Maritain, Les Degrés de savoir, 195–196. 64. See ibid., 157, 180 65. Ibid., 198–199. Maritain had used the word “intentional” on his own account earlier to describe the relationship between ­things and the soul. (Ibid., 165n; see also 221–222). 66. Ibid., 197. 67. Ibid., 192–193. 68. Ibid., 200. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 204. 71. Ibid., 196–197 and n. 72. Ibid., 206. 73. In the continuation of his argument, Maritain suggested that idealism could be converted into realism by accepting the difference between divine and ­human intelligence. Ibid., 210–212. 74. Régis Jolivet, Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933); Michele Losacco, Preludi al nuovo realismo critico (Modena: Guanda, 1938), 330–338. Losacco saw Husserl’s epoché as producing a “science of essences” in the scholastic sense, but he agreed with Maritain that Husserl’s use of scholastic intentionality had denatured it. See also Jourdain Messaut, “Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance,” Revue Thomiste (1935): 41. 75. For an analy­sis of this event, see Christian Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 279–298. 76. Meeting reported in Bulletin Thomiste (1930): 70. 77. See Bulletin Thomiste (1932): 372. Also see the review of the Journée d’Études in Bulletin Thomiste (July–­December, 1932): 559–562. 78. See Correspondence with Noël, October 8, 1932, Fonds Maritain. 79. See Société thomiste, La Phénoménologie: Journées d’études de la Société thomiste (Kain: Société thomiste, 1932), 9.



NOTES TO PAGES 194–197 411

80. Société thomiste, La Phénoménologie, 11. Gilson had criticized Duns Scotus for exaggerating the in­de­pen­dence of our intellect from the sensible order, presenting it as only the “occasion” of intellectual knowledge. Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), 241. Gilson also figured Scotus as the progenitor of modern philosophy. See letter, Gilson to Fernand Van Steenberghen, March 23, 1948, quoted in Francesca Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (London: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 203. 81. For Feuling, see Johannes Schnaber, “Der Beuroner Benediktiner Daniel Feuling (1882–1947),” Freiburger Dioezesan-­Archiv 124 (2004): 73–84. 82. Société thomiste, La Phénoménologie, 30–31. 83. Ibid., 33. Similarly, in the conversation that followed, Bonn neo-­scholastic Gottlieb Söhngen suggested that Husserl’s idealism was one of a seizing act, rather than a production of the object, following the scholastic distinction between actio and productio. As such it had to be distinguished from other forms of idealism, such as that presented by the Marburg School. Nevertheless, according to Söhngen, Husserl had deviated from this realist model “in the idealist sense of a unilateral dependence of all that is vis-­à-­v is ‘pure’ consciousness” (ibid., 48–49; see also 42–43, 51–52). In her review of the proceedings, Sofia Vanni Rovighi a­ dopted this interpretation too, but she did not follow Feuling in his assertion that this implied that Husserl’s thought was a realism, due to the par­t ic­u ­lar slant of Italian neo-­T homism. See S. Vanni Rovighi, “Il Valore della fenomenologia,” La Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (1933): 340–341. Husserl himself seems to have approved of Feuling’s line. He wrote to Feuling, ­a fter reading the volume, that his contribution “is by far the best of that was said in this Congress about phenomenology.” Husserl to Feuling, March 30, 1933, Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 87. Husserl expressed caution about using phenomenology for theology, not ­because it was not suited to it, but instead ­because it was not sufficiently developed as yet: “Thus the sentences referring to God in your paper should not be understood as my theoretical teachings; I wish I had progressed so far!” (ibid., 88). 84. Société thomiste, La Phénoménologie, 61–62. 85. Ibid., 66–67. 86. Ibid., 69–70. 87. Ibid., 67. In this way Kremer suggests that Husserl’s successors, like Scheler, when they tried to draw a science of religion from phenomenology while departing from Husserl’s “primitive intention,” still remained caught by his excessive rationalism. 88. Ibid., 69; see also 90. 89. Ibid., 68. 90. Ibid., 65. Kremer argued that the “second intention” required the first and that thus the real world could never be fully reduced (ibid., 67). 91. Letter, Koyré to Conrad-­Martius (undated, prob­ably 1933), Conrad-­Martiusiana, C II. 92. Carlo Mazzantini also provided a written contribution, which was published with the proceedings. Reviews appeared in Ciencia Tomista, Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, Civiltà Cattolica, Scholastik, and Angelicum. 93. Société thomiste, La Phénoménologie, 13.

412

NOTES TO PAGES 197–199

94. M. Flory, “Notas criticas sobre la ‘Introducción a la fenomenología’ de Husserl,” Estudios eclesiásticos 13 (1934): 155–174. 95. J. Wolters, “Het universale in de philosophia perennis en bij Husserl,” Studia Catholica 16 (1940): 350. 96. Erich Przywara, “Edmund Husserl,” Modern Schoolman 11, no. 3 (March 1934): 60. See also his correspondence with the editor, Henles to Przywara, November 19, 1932, in Przywara Archives, call no. 47-182-717, where Henles suggests the Husserl article. 97. Herman Boelaars, De Intentionaliteit der kennis bij Edmund Husserl (Nijmegen: N. V. Centrale Drukkerij, 1940). 98. Alphonse de Waelhens, “Phénoménologie et réalisme,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 39 (1936): 497–499. 99. Ibid., 505–506. 100. J. Nota, “Phaenomenologie als method,” Tijdschrift voor filosofie 3 (1941): 229. 101. Marcel de Corte, “Idée sommaire de la phénoménologie,” Revue de Philosophie (1935): 29. 102. Józef Roskwitalski, “Metoda fenomenologiczna,” Miesięcznik Katechetyczny i Wychowawczy 4 (1934): 154. 103. Kurt Reinhardt, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Thomistic Philosophy,” New Scholasticism 11 (1937): 326–329. 104. Carlo Mazzantini, “L’Undecisimo Volume dell’Annuario,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 23 (1931): 281. 105. Jacques Maritain, “Notes sur la connaissance,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 24 (1932). Maritain had given lectures in Milan in November 1931 dealing with the critical realism debate, which seems to have been the impetus b­ ehind his Husserl article. AGSUCSC, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Annuario 1931–2, 381. 106. See Mangiagalli, La “Rivista,” 2:189. 107. See Michele Losacco, “I Fondamenti dell’oggetivismo,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 22 (1930): 464–465. Losacco suggested that the “ontological” prob­lem was only the first stage and that phenomenology ­ hadn’t tackled the more difficult “gnoseological-­metaphysical” prob­lem of the relationship between objective thought and real existence. Losacco explic­itly distanced Husserl from the “prejudices so beloved to idealism” that the subject constituted its objects. See also Carmelo Ottaviano, “L’Unica forma possibile di idealismo,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 28 (1936): 47–64. Ottaviano wanted to show that all idealisms, even Husserl’s, w ­ ere contradictory, and that thus we had to assume a realist starting point. 108. Letter, Giuseppe Zamboni to Amadeo Rossi, August 3, 1933, AGSUCSC, Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, file 131. Quite how useful this trip was is questionable, since according to his personnel file at Catholic University, Zamboni’s German was merely “elementary.” AGSUCSC, Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, box 170, file 131. “Giuseppe Zamboni: Stato Matricolore.” 109. S. Vanni Rovighi, “Edmund Husserl e la perennità della filosofia” in Edmund Husserl, 1859–1959 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), 191–192. 110. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, review of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, in Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 22 (1930): 491–494.



NOTES TO PAGES 200–204 413

111. Ibid., 494. 112. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Il ‘Cogito’ di Cartesio e il ‘cogito’ di Husserl,” in Cartesio (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1937), 767–768. 113. Ibid., 771. 114. Ibid., 772. While Descartes’s universal doubt, Vanni Rovighi argued, transformed quickly into “universal negation,” Husserl’s remained a methodological bracketing. 115. Ibid., 773. 116. Ibid., 777. 117. Ibid., 776. 118. Ibid., 777–780. 119. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, La Filosofia di Edmund Husserl (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1938), 151. 1 20. Ibid., 153–154, quoting Ideen, §49. 121. Ibid., 155–156. 1 22. Ibid., 162. 1 23. Ibid., 165–166. 1 24. Ibid., 168. 1 25. Ibid., 166. 1 26. Vanni Rovighi, “Il ‘Cogito,’ ” 774–775. ­Here Vanni Rovighi referred to Fink. 127. For an analy­sis of this essay, see Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy, 267– 274. Maréchal’s essay was first published in the Philosophia Perennis volumes, in which Gilson had first presented his attack on Noël. 1 28. Joseph Maréchal, “Phénoménologie pure ou philosophie de l’action,” in von Rintelen, Philosophia Perennis, 2:393–394. 1 29. Ibid., 2:395. 130. Ibid., 2:379. 131. Gaston Fessard, “Une Phénoménologie de l’existence,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 25 (1935). 132. Ibid., 145–149, 316. Fessard was in most cases an ardent critic of the Thomists, but he came close to their position h­ ere. 133. See Maurice de Gandillac, “Nicolas Berdiaeff et Gabriel Marcel,” in Gabriel Marcel: Une Métaphysique de la communion, ed. Joël Bouëssée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), 102. 134. Marcel, Être et avoir (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1991), 138; see also 28–29 and n, 33, 107. In a looser sense, phenomenology appeared in Marcel’s publications. See, for instance, Gabriel Marcel, “Aperçus phénoménologiques sur l’être en situation,” Recherches Philosophiques 6 (1936–1937); and Gabriel Marcel, “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de l’avoir,” in Marcel, Être et avoir. 135. For Filiasi Carcano, see Mauro Mocchi, Le Prime interpretazioni della filosofia di Husserl in Italia (Florence: La Nueva Italia, 1990), 58–562; Michelle Sciacca, La Philosophie Italienne contemporaine (Paris: E. Vitte, 1951), 219–220. 136. Filiasi Carcano, “Da Cartesio ad Husserl,” Ricerche filosofiche 6 (1936): 20–21. 137. Ibid., 31–33. It is significant h­ ere that Carcano reverses the neo-­scholastics’ assessment of the relationship between Descartes and Husserl. 138. Arturo Massolo, “Husserl e il cartesianismo,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 20 (1939): 441–451.

414

NOTES TO PAGES 204–207

139. René Le Senne, Introduction à la Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1939), 230–233. 1 40. Armando Carlini, “Le Interpretazioni di Cartesio,” Giornale de metafisica 1 (1946): 199. See also Enzo Paci, “Temi fondamentali del pensiero di Husserl,” in Pensiero, esistenza, e valore (Milan: Principato, 1940), 30–46. Paci wrote, “The prob­lem of the person is the limit in which Husserl’s hopeless rationalism is overcome.” This was the opening to “the philosophy of existence” (46). 141. See Nicolas Monseu, “Gaston Berger, lecteur de Husserl: ‘L’Élégance française,’ ” Les Études Philosophiques (2002): 293–315. 1 42. Gaston Berger, Recherches sur les conditions de la connaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), 1. 143. Ibid., 40. Berger nonetheless distanced this théorique from previous “theories of knowledge,” ­because they sought to explain knowledge by referring it to something ­else (ibid., 36–38). 1 44. Ibid., 3–12. Berger’s other major criticism h­ ere was directed at positivism (ibid., 13– 31), which neglected “the irreducible character of knowledge that it is experienced by a subject.” 1 45. Ibid., 5. 1 46. Ibid., 6–8. 147. See esp. ibid., 44–48. 1 48. Ibid., 48, quoting Maritain, Les Degrés de savoir, 209. 1 49. Berger, Recherches, 84. 150. Ibid., 153. Berger immediately qualified this claim by suggesting that the immediate realists went too far in attributing self-­sufficiency to that real­ity. 151. For Berger, what was given in knowledge “existed.” Being was existence in general. 152. Ibid., 74. 153. Ibid., 106. 154. Ibid., 101–102; on “real­ity,” see 84–86. 155. Ibid., 102–104, 133. 156. Ibid., 48. 157. Gaston Berger, Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Aubier, 1941), 9–16. In this way, Berger argued, Husserl’s proj­ect aligns with Descartes’s trajectory in the first two of his Meditations, rather than his philosophical construction on the basis of the “cogito, ergo sum” ­a fter that. 158. Ibid., 49. 159. See, for instance, ibid., 57. 160. Ibid., 55. 161. See ibid., 9, 16. Presenting the reduction as a conversion, Berger argued that it could not be motivated by mundane desire. The “scandal of ­every conversion” was that “it appears necessary ­a fter the fact, to the one who has converted, but it seems paradoxical to the person who has not yet delivered himself.” Ibid., 58. Fink had made a similar argument in his 1933 essay. 162. Ibid., 93–94. 163. Ibid., 47, 100. Berger nevertheless argued that the term “creative” was only analogical, ­because as transcendental the ego could not be understood to be using mundane categories like “construction.”



NOTES TO PAGES 207–212 415

164. Ibid., 97. 165. Ibid., 135–136. Berger also worked out a comparison between Husserl and Kant, but saw the latter as more distant. 166. Ibid., 128–129. 167. Ibid., 136–137. Berger thought that Descartes had reached the transcendental but had betrayed this insight by failing to recognize that the ego is intentional. 168. Ibid., 44, 135–137. 169. Berger, Recherches, 75. 170. See ibid., 92–100. 171. Ibid., 168–171. 172. Ibid., 164–165. Berger related this to love, as the “intentional identification of points of view” whereby we embraced the goals of our neighbor. Science emerged as the “­union of scholars.” In higher knowledge, however, we leave all viewpoints ­behind, and thus “we can all unite.” 173. Ibid., 167. 174. Ibid., 171. 175. The similarities, however, made progressive neo-­scholastics very interested in Berger’s work. See, for instance, Juan Zaragüeta, “Gaston Berger et la pensée espagnole” Les Études Philosophiques (1961): 417–418.

7. The Secular Kierkegaard 1. See Baring, “Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before Sartre,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 41 (2015). 2. For an excellent analy­sis of this meeting with emphases dif­fer­ent from mine, see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 182–186. Moyn concentrates mostly on Levinas’s assertion that Heidegger’s transcendence moved beyond the ontic relationship between the self and an other, t­ oward the ontological comprehension of Being. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael Smith (London: Athlone, 1993), 81. 4. Wahl thought, moreover, that ­t here w ­ ere forces within Kierkegaard’s work that led to such a secularization. See Jean Wahl, “Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 37 (1937): 168; and Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Éditions de l’Esprit, 1938), 434–435. 5. Wahl, “Subjectivité et transcendance,” 162. In the meeting of the Société, Wahl seems more skeptical about this possibility than elsewhere, such as in Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, or in Wahl, “Heidegger et Kierkegaard,” Recherches Philosophqiues 2 (1932–1933). 6. Wahl, “Heidegger et Kierkegaard,” 349. For another article that relates Heidegger’s ontology to scholasticism, see Siegfried Marck, “La Philosophie de l’existence dans l’oeuvre de Karl Jaspers et Martin Heidegger,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 77 (1936): 210. 7. Wahl, “Heidegger et Kierkegaard,” 359–360. In his analyses Wahl cites Erich Przywara, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards (Munich: Verlag Oldenbourg, 1929).

416

NOTES TO PAGES 212–214

8. Wahl, “Heidegger et Kierkegaard,” 368n. When discussing the value of Heidegger’s thought earlier, he had put aside “existential [existentiale] conceptions” (ibid., 363). See also Wahl’s critical remarks about Heidegger’s ontology in his response to Levinas, in Wahl, “Subjectivité et transcendance,” 195; and the distinction that Wahl makes between Jaspers and Heidegger in Wahl, “Le Problème du choix, l’existence et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 41 (1934): 449. 9. For an excellent analy­sis of Wahl’s realism in his Vers le Concret: Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004), see Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 72–80. Geroulanos focuses on the way in which Wahl constructs his realism in conversation with developments in modern, especially quantum, physics. 10. Scholastic realism could not be seen simply as an inheritance from Aristotle, b­ ecause, as Wahl argued, the latter had “shown the diversity of ideas of being,” and thus the necessity of defining abstract notions “in par­t ic­u ­lar cases.” Wahl, Vers le concret, 6. See also Wahl, “Notes sur l’existence,” 589. 11. Wahl, Vers le concret, 19–20. 12. See especially his discussion of Kierkegaard and Hegel, Wahl, “Subjectivité et transcendance,” 166–167. 13. Ibid., 170–1. Wahl says “Entworfenheit” h­ ere, apparently confusing Heidegger’s concepts of “Entwurf” and “Geworfenheit.” Given the context, I have translated it as the latter. See also Wahl, “Heidegger et Kierkegaard,” 361–362. 14. Though ­there have been studies of both the Protestant and the Catholic receptions of Heidegger, they have very rarely been placed in conversation with each other. Two exceptions are Richard Schaeffler’s Frömmigkeit des Denkens (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), and more recently Judith Wolfe’s excellent and helpful book Heidegger’s Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136–161. 15. In this way I provide another contextualization of what Ethan Kleinberg has called the first two readings of Heidegger in France. I want to suggest, however, that t­ hose two readings ­can’t be chronologically separated in the way Kleinberg does, and that the second, “ontological” reading was explic­itly rejected by t­ hose scholars embracing the first, “humanist” reading, b­ ecause of the religious coding both ­were given. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 11. In this way my analy­sis comes close to Geroulanos in An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, who challenges the idea that the early reading of Heidegger was anthropological. 16. For a useful overview of the German reception of Kierkegaard, see Heiko Schulz, “Germany and Austria: A Modest Headstart,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). And while their reading of Kierkegaard is not central to his account, Peter E. Gordon draws out fascinating philosophical parallels between Rosenzweig and Heidegger in his Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 17. For a close analy­sis of the ways in which Bultmann used Heidegger’s analyses, see Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie: Heidegger, Bultmann, und die Folgen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 105–107. For an account of their friendship,



NOTES TO PAGES 214–216 417

see Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 152–157. 18. Barth criticized Bultmann for remaining too close to Schleiermacher and thus profaning the divine. See Pöggeler, Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie, 52. 19. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 33. 20. Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 38 (1930): 342. 21. Ibid., 347. 22. Ibid., 340. 23. Heinrich Barth, “Ontologie und Idealismus,” Zwischen den Zeiten 7 (1929): 511–512. 24. See, among other places, Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Eschatologie des Johannes-­ Evangeliums,” Zwischen den Zeiten 6 (1928): 12 (“Faith only became a possibility for humanity, once God sent his son”). 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Gerhardt Kuhlmann, “Krisis der Theologie?,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 39 (1931): 123. 27. Barth, “Ontologie und Idealismus,” 525–526. 28. Ibid., 540. ­Later in the pages of Zwischen den Zeiten Heinrich Barth characterized the debate as concerning the possibility of unifying theology and ontology, and set himself the task of undoing the “ontological version of Existenzphilosophie.” Heinrich Barth, “Philosophie, Theologie und Existenzproblem,” Zwischen den Zeiten 10 (1932): 99. 29. Löwith published a set of two articles titled “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie zur Philosophie und ihr Verhältnis zur protestantischen Theologie” in Rudolf Bultmann’s Theologische Rundschau, vol.  2 (1930), and one article titled “Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 38 (1930). 30. Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie,” 397–398. 31. Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 342. In a 1927 article for Zwischen den Zeiten, Karl Barth had even declared the dialectical theologians to be the “loyal ­children of [Feuerbach’s] ­century.” Quoted in Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 343. 32. Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 344–345. 33. Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie,” 366; see also 385. Citing Nietz­ sche, Löwith also wanted to argue for the “factual Protestantism of German philosophy”; see Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 360–361. 34. Löwith’s articles fit into his broader proj­ect of producing a communitarian philosophy out of Heidegger’s ontology, one where the Kierkegaardian “solipsism” of Heidegger’s account did not challenge the social implications of Mitsein. See Moyn, Origins of the Other, 70–77. 35. Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 51. Heidegger took issue with this pre­sen­t a­t ion of his thought.

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NOTES TO PAGES 216–219

36. See, for example, Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie,” 371, quoting Heidegger, Being and Time, 34. See also the letter from Heidegger to Löwith, August 19, 1921, in Richard Wolin, ed., Martin Heidegger and Eu­ro­pean Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 236. 37. Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 334–336. See also Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie,” 385. 38. Barth, “Philosophie, Theologie und Existenzproblem,” 113 and n. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Emil Brunner, “Theologie und Ontologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 39 (1931): 114, 119. 41. Brunner, “Theologie und Ontologie,” 120, Brunner’s emphasis. For Karl Barth’s rejection of natu­ral theology, even Brunner’s version, see Karl Barth, “Nein!,” in “Dialektische Theologie” in Scheidung und Bewährung, ed. Walter Fürst (Munich: Kaiser, 1966). 42. See, for example, Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie,” 374; Löwith, “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie,” 55–64. Unlike the dialectical theologians, who emphasized the connections between authenticity and ontology, Löwith foregrounded the question of individuality. 43. Heidegger, Being and Time, 122. 44. Barth, “Ontologie und Idealismus,” 516–518. 45. See Gerhardt Kuhlmann, “Zum theologischen Prob­lem der Existenz,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 37 (1929): 55–56. 46. Karl Heim, “Ontologie und Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 38 (1930): 331–332, 337–338. ­Here he referred in par­t ic­u ­lar to the work of Martin Buber. See also Brunner’s criticism of Heim that such a philosophy depended upon a divine other. Brunner, “Theologie und Ontologie,” 119n. Bultmann, in contrast, suggested that the dialectical theologians’ (especially Gogarten’s) depiction of the “Other” was merely an ontic figuring of Heidegger’s ontological analy­sis. See Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube,” 358. 47. See Moyn, Origins of the Other, chap. 4. 48. Brunner, “Theologie und Ontologie,” 120. 49. See also Heinrich Barth’s suggestion that Heidegger’s statements about Existenz remained excessively objective due to his Aristotelian inheritance, Barth, “Philosophie, Theologie und Existenzproblem,” 111; Kuhlmann, “Krisis der Theologie?,” 144–145; Kuhlmann, “Zum theologischen Prob­lem der Existenz,” 33n. 50. See Barth, “Philosophie, Theologie und Existenzproblem,” 105–112. See also Bultmann’s par­tic­u ­lar pre­sen­ta­tion of “natu­ral theology” as an understanding of the “ ‘natu­ral’ Dasein” developed from the position of faith. Bultmann “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube,” 350 and n. 51. See Erdmann Schott, Die Endlichkeit des Daseins nach Martin Heidegger (Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1930), 7–8. Arguing that Heidegger’s concept of “Schuld” remained too egological and required a theological supplement, Schott claimed that “perhaps the prob­lem of the finitude of Dasein, as Heidegger poses it, is a theological prob­lem and thus c­ an’t be adequately discussed philosophically” (ibid., 19).



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52. Brunner, “Theologie und Ontologie,” 122. 53. The neo-­scholastic reception of Heidegger has received far less attention than the Protestant reception. For a brief overview, see Albert Raffelt, “Martin Heidegger und die christliche Theologie,” in Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers, ed. Norbert Fischer (Hamburg: Meiner, 2011). For a more detailed account, see Richard Schaeffler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens, esp. 48–65. 54. Erich Przywara, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” Stimmen der Zeit 115 (1928): 262. 55. Delp differed from Przywara in his judgment that Heidegger’s thought could not be recuperated for Catholicism. 56. Alfred Delp, “Sein als Existenz: Die Metaphysik von Heute,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1984), 586. For an analy­sis of Delp’s work, see Schaeffler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens, 48–53; Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1989), 44–61. 57. Delp, “Sein als Existenz,” 587. 58. Alfred Delp, “Tragische Existenz” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:106. 59. Ibid., 2:103. 60. Hans Urs v. Balthasar, “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus,” Stimmen der Zeit (1939): 8. This reading of Heidegger can also be found in more traditionalist scholastic journals. See, for instance, Theodor Droege, “Die Existenz-­ Philosophie Martin Heideggers,” Divus Thomas 16 (1938): 285; Johannes Ell, “Das Existenzproblem in die Scholastik” Divus Thomas 19 (1941): 81. 61. For Przywara’s relationship to Karl Barth, see Thomas O’Meara, Erich Przywara: His Theology, His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 99–107. A more philosophical account of the similarities and differences of the two can be found in Eberhard Mechels, Analogie bei Erich Przywara und Karl Barth (Neukirchen: Neukirchen Verlag, 1974). Przywara also contributed the article “Protestantismus II: Beurteilung vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus,” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4 (1930): 1600–1603. H ­ ere he criticizes a broader swath of Protestant thinkers in a spectrum leading from Schleiermacher to Barth. 62. Przywara, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards, 61. 63. See, among ­others, ibid., 8–9. 64. Ibid., 25. Przywara presented this reading as psychoanalytic b­ ecause he wanted to align it with that proposed in August Vetter, Frömmigkeit als Leidenschaft (Leipzig: Insel-­Verlag, 1928). 65. Przywara, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards, 30. 66. Karl Wittkemper, “Existenzialismus und moderne protestantische Theologie,” Theologie und Glaube 30 (1938): 644. 67. Przywara, citing Kierkegaard TG II, 331–332, in Das Geheminis Kierkegaards, 71. 68. ­T here was also considerable exchange between the two groups. For instance, Kuhlmann cited Przywara, and Delp cited Kuhlmann. Löwith was cited extensively by both sides, and he cited all of Kuhlmann, Przywara, Barth, and Brunner. 69. It is for this reason that some neo-­scholastics even came to embrace Spinoza to oppose the dialectical theologians’ gnosticism. See Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted (Prince­ton NJ: Prince­ton University Press), esp. 67–68, 80–82.

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70. Bernhard Jansen, “La Philosophie existentielle de Kant à Heidegger,” Archives de Philosophie (1935). The article is ­under Jansen’s name, ­because it was a direct translation from the Aufstiege der Metaphysik book in which Delp’s argument had first appeared, and which Jansen edited. Alfred Delp, “Modern German Existential Philosophy,” Modern Schoolman 13 (1936); Delp, “Existenzphilosophie, Existential­philosophie II: Martin Heidegger,” Katorikku Daijiten (1942). 71. Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, “L’Existence, la substantialité et l’âme,” Recherches Philosophiques 3 (1933–1934): 168n. 72. Letter, Koyré to Conrad-­Martius, undated, ca. 1932, Conrad-­Martiusiana C II. The letter concentrated particularly on the difficulty of translating “Dasein.” 73. Henricus Geurtsen, “M. Heidegger: De Metaphysiek van de eindigheid,” Studia Catholica (1936): 479. 74. Ibid., 482. 75. Ibid., 479. 76. Alberto Wagner de Reyna, La Ontología fundamental de Heidegger: Su motivo y significación (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S.A., 1939), 25. 77. Ibid., 93. 78. Franciszek Sawicki, “Pojęcie i zagadnienie nicości u Heideggera,” Roczniki Filozoficzne 4 (1954): 135–136. 79. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Il Valore della fenomenologia,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 25 (1933): 342–343. 80. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, Heidegger (Brescia: La Scuola, 1945). For an analy­sis of Vanni Rovighi’s book, see Roberto Tommasi, L’Essere e Tempo in Italia (Rome: Glossa, 2000), 261–284. 81. Tommasi, L’Essere e Tempo in Italia, 244. 82. Carlo Mazzantini, “Martino Heidegger,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 27 (1935): 269, 276. See also Mazzantini’s account in “Il Significato della ‘realtà’ nella filosofia di M. Heidegger,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 27, suppl. (1935): 41. 83. Mazzantini “Martino Heidegger,” 14–15; see also 268. A similar line is taken up in Vanni Rovighi, La Filosofia di Edmund Husserl (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1938). 84. Mazzantini, “Martino Heidegger,” 268. Mazzantini rejected what he saw as the traditional charge of anthropologism against Heidegger’s thought, which saw in it purely an analy­sis of the being of Dasein (ibid., 16). 85. Ibid., 269. See also his account in “Il Significato della ‘realtà,’ ” 43. 86. Mazzantini, “Martino Heidegger,’ 269–270. In making this point, Mazzantini referred to the contributions by de Bruyne and Kremer in the Journées d’études of the Société Thomiste. 87. Ibid., 277. Mazzantini also criticized Heidegger’s concern to downplay the value of such cognition. See ibid., 271–273. 88. Ibid., 29. 89. Ibid., 276. 90. Ibid., 279–280. 91. Carlo Giacon, “Tomismo e esistenzialismo,” in Esistenzialismo, ed. Luigi Pelloux (Rome: Studium, 1943), 50.



NOTES TO PAGES 225–228 421

92. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. 1 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 48. 93. See Alphonse de Waelhens, “La Guerre à l’institut,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 43 (1940): 343–344. 94. See de Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1942), 302. 95. Ibid., 3. 96. Ibid., 103. This was a particularly idiosyncratic reading of Heidegger and was rejected by other neo-­scholastics. See, for instance, Vanni Rovighi, Heidegger, 82. 97. de Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger, 313–314, 318. 98. Ibid., 309–311, 321. 99. See also the connections de Waelhens makes between Heidegger and Kierkegaard’s idea of truth. Ibid., 352. 100. Ibid., 345–346. 101. Ibid., 336–337. 102. Ibid., 339. 103. Ibid., 362–366. 104. Ibid., vi. De Waelhens suggested that Marcel’s incarnated person was an improvement on “in-­der-­Welt-­Sein” and that Marcel better resisted the modern tendency to identify “man with his function” (ibid., 37, 44). See also ibid., 137, 174, and the remarks at Alphonse de Waelhens’s thesis defense “­T heses Qua, 17 July 1942,” ISP Archives, 68, “Programmes des cours depuis 1882.” 105. Letter, de Waelhens to Marcel, October  16, 1942, Correspondence 17, Fonds Marcel. 106. Paul Tillich, “What Is Wrong with Dialectical Theology?,” Journal of Religion 15 (1935): 127–145. Regin Prenter, “Martin Heideggers Filosofi og Teologien,” Teologisk Tidskrift (Kopenhagen) 5 (1933): 161–213, and see esp. 200 for Prenter’s rejection of ontology. 107. For Corbin’s life, see Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012), chap. 1. 108. Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 47. 109. See Henry Corbin, “Post-­Scriptum biographique,” in Henry Corbin, ed. Christine Jambet (Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 1981), 38–41. 110. Ibid., 41–43. See Karl Barth, “Misère et grandeur de l’église évangélique” trans. H. Corbin, Foi et Vie (1932). For Baruzi’s views on neo-­T homism, see Jean Baruzi, Philosophes et savants français du XXe siècle, vol.  1: Philosophie générale et métaphysique (Paris: Alcan, 1926), chap. 9. Baruzi questioned Maritain’s radical rejection of post-­ Cartesian thought, even while he recognized the justice of Maritain’s criticisms of “idealist madness” (ibid., 198). 111. Henry Corbin, “La Théologie dialectique et l’histoire,” Recherches Philosophiques 3 (1933–1934): 264. Corbin’s main target is, however, Hegelian idealism. 112. Ibid., 257–621; see also 266. 113. Henry Corbin, “Transcendance et Existential,” in Analyse reflexive et transcendance, pt. 1, ed. Raymond Bayer (Paris: Hermann, 1937), 26. 114. Corbin, “La Théologie dialectique,” 267–270.

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115. Ibid., 275. According to Corbin, revelation could not be a discovery of existential philosophy b­ ecause its true subject was God (ibid., 277). 116. See Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 1:47n. 117. See Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995), 73–75. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 1:45–48. For a dif­fer­ent view, see Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 53. 118. Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, trans. H. Corbin (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 11. Corbin, “Transcendance et existential,” 24, 30. 119. See Corbin, “Avant-­Propos,” in Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, 10. 1 20. See Corbin, “Transcendance et existential,” 31, published just before the translations. Corbin’s tendency in this direction helps explain why Barth should have declared one of Corbin’s publications on Sohravardî to be a “natu­ral theology.” Quoted in Corbin, “Post-­Scriptum biographique,” 45. L ­ ater Corbin would take the Löwith line that Heidegger’s existential analytic depended upon a worldview, and dif­fer­ent worldviews, like that of Sohravardî, could be put in its place. Henry Corbin, “De Heidegger à Sohravardî,” in Christine Jambet, ed., Henry Corbin (Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 1981), 30–31. 121. Heinemann made this claim in his Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (London: Adam, 1953), 1. Heinemann’s claim is not without a certain bit of self-­ promotion, and the word Existenzphilosophie appears in numerous other articles and books published the same year. For Heinemann, see Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 27n60. 1 22. Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1929), 373–374. 1 23. Ibid., 376. 1 24. See also Heinemann’s criticism of Heidegger on this point, Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie, 389–390. 1 25. Ibid., 400–403. Heinemann argued, “The limitation of existence to the relation to Christ is, however, overcome, for this limitation means that anything living outside of this relation, e.g. paganism, does not exist.” 1 26. See ibid., 329, 343. 127. Ibid., 318–320. 128. Ibid., 375. See also 389: “­W hether the analytic of Dasein is ­really fundamental-­ ontology is at least questionable and grounds itself on the specifically modern thesis of subjectivity.” Importantly Heinemann also rejected the idea that the ontology of Dasein made it into an object. Dasein was, he asserted, “not a ­t hing, not substance, not an object, but is a person, who cannot be determined through concrete categories” (ibid., 378). 1 29. See Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1956), 72–85. For a good analy­sis of the differences and parallels between Jaspers and the dialectical theologians, see Chris Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002), 141–156. 130. Johannes Pfeiffer, Existenzphilosophie (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1933) 58n10. 131. Ibid., 38–40.



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132. See, for instance, René Le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 2nd  ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1939), 233; Luigi Pareyson, “Note sulla filosofia dell’esistenza,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 6 (1938): 421–423. 133. Nicolai Berdiaev, Cinq méditations sur l’existence (Paris: Aubier, 1936), 56–57. 134. Luigi Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico della Germania (Padua: CEDAM 1948), 148. Stefanini was not universally positive about Jaspers (ibid., 150). See also Stefanini, L’Esistenzialismo di M. Heidegger (Padua: CEDAM, 1944), 52–54. 135. Luigi Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, (Florence: Sansoni, 1943), 95–96. 136. Ibid., 169, 176–177. 137. Stefanini, L’Esistenzialismo di M. Heidegger, 50–51. 138. Louis Lavelle, Le Moi et son destin (Paris: Aubier, 1936), 94–95. 139. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico della Germania, 143. See also Stefanini, L’Esistenzialismo di M. Heidegger, 18. 1 40. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico della Germania, 157–158. 141. Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 171. 1 42. Augusto Guzzo, “Bilancio dell’esistenzialismo in Italia,” Log­os: Rivista international di filosofia 25 (1942): 103. 1 43. Carlini erroneously dates it as 1928. See Armando Carlini, “Il Problema del nulla nella metafisica di Heidegger,” in Principi metafisici del mondo storico: Con un’appendice su l’esistenzialismo (Urbino: Argalia, 1943), 102. Carlini admitted that at the time he understood “­little or nothing.” For the outline of Carlini’s paper at the Hochschulkurse, see Leonardo Messinese, Armando Carlini (Vatican City: Lateran University Press, 2012), 233–235. 1 44. Carlini, “Il Problema del nulla,” 102–103. For Carlini’s early account of Heidegger, see Carlini, Orientamenti della filosofia contemporanea (Rome: Critica Fascista, 1931), 89–90, where he sees Heidegger’s work as taking up the “scholastic prob­lem of being” by focusing on h­ uman real­ity. 1 45. For Carlini’s reading of Heidegger, see Tommasi, Essere e tempo, 164–166, 172–176. Tommasi emphasizes Carlini’s reading of the act, and thus his attempt to read Heidegger and Gentile together. 1 46. See Carlini, Il Mito del realismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1936), 38–39, 156. 147. ­Later Carlini would understand this as a result of Heidegger’s emphasis on the nothing, which, rather than affirming the existence of value, denied it. See Carlini, “Il Problema del nulla,” 106. 1 48. Carlini, Il Mito del realismo, 39–40. 149. Ibid., 70n. On this point, see also Guzzo, Sguardi su la filosofia contemporanea (Rome: Perrella, 1940), 53–58. 150. Carlini, Il Mito del realismo, 49. For Carlini’s own account of his reading of Heidegger, and its relationship to scholasticism, see Carlini, Alla ricerca di me stesso (Florence: Sansoni, 1951), 51–66. 151. Tommasi, L’Essere e Tempo in Italia, 240. 152. See Wilhelm Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi: Humanismus zwischen Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (Freiburg im Breisgau: K. Alber, 2009), 30. In 1923 Grassi matriculated

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at the Accademia scientifico-­letteraria, where he studied u­ nder Piero Martinetti, who had also been Banfi’s teacher (ibid., 38). 153. Student report cards, AGSUCSC, Miscellaneous, box 1, file 4, 6. And letters, Rector to Grassi, February 15 and July 25, 1923, AGSUCSC, Correspondence Archives, box 17, file 7, subfile 57, 572. See also Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 36. 154. Ernesto Grassi, review of La Vision greca della vita, in Rivista di filosofia neo-­ scolastica 14 (1922): 491–494. Quoted in Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 40–41. 155. Ernestto Grassi, “Scolastica e storia,” Rassegna nazionale 42, no. 2 (1923), quoted in Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 48–49. 156. Martinetti presented his idealism as a transcendent counterpart to Gentile’s immanentist idealism. Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 60. 157. Ernesto Grassi, review of Varisco, Rassegna di coltura 4 (1926), quoted in Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 75. 158. Letters to Castelli, 1925, quoted in Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 140–142. See also Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 73. 159. See letters, Grassi to Castelli, May 1927, quoted in Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 82. See also Grassi’s article “La Più recente attività della filosofia dell’azione in Francia,” Rivista di filosofia 19 (1928): 88. Grassi criticized Blondel both for erasing immanent ­human value in the face of God, and for failing to give an adequate account of this transcendence. Interestingly in this article, Grassi traces the emergence of the Catholic philosophy of action back to Leo’s Aeterni Patris, in a way that strongly resembles the self-­understanding of the progressive neo-­scholastics, though he linked the Louvain neo-­scholastics to “official Thomism.” See ibid., 65–66. 160. See, for example, letter, Ernesto Grassi to Blondel, November  19, 1927, CXLI  18, Fonds Maurice Blondel, Louvain-­ la-­ Neuve, Belgium (hereafter cited as Fonds Blondel). 161. See, among ­others, Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 261. For Grassi’s investigations into Re­nais­sance humanism, see Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 209–219. 162. See letters, Grassi to Muth, December 10, 1927, and March 21, 1928, Ana 390, II.A. Grassi flattered Muth as “one of the ‘most enlightened’ and most impor­tant thinkers in Catholic circles” and suggested Muth would have pride of place in Grassi’s essays on Germany philosophy for the Rivista di filosofia. 163. Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 173. 164. See letters, Grassi to Blondel, February 24, 1928, CXLI 36, and December 23, 1928, CXLI 28, Fonds Blondel. Grassi already notes Heidegger’s explicit rejection of religious transcendence. 165. Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 116. 166. See Chapter 2. For Grasselli’s experience at the Milan University of the Sacred Heart and his friendship with a fellow student, whom Büttemeyer has identified as Grassi, see Giulio Grasselli, Storia di una mente: Testimonianze del nostro tempo (Bari: Laterza e Figli, 1932), 146f. 167. See letter, Grassi to Gentile, March 29, 1930, quoted in Rubini, The Other Re­nais­ sance, 185n.



NOTES TO PAGES 235–237 425

168. See, for instance, letter, Grassi to Blondel, December  23, 1928, CXLI  28, Fonds Blondel. Most scholars have emphasized first and foremost Grassi’s engagement with Gentilian actualism. See Tommasi, L’Essere e Tempo, 157–163; Rubini, The Other Re­ nais­sance, 170–194. Büttemeyer instead emphasizes Grassi’s religious concerns. See esp. Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 104–105. 169. Ernesto Grassi, “Sviluppo e significato della scuola fenomenologica,” Rivista di filosofia 20 (1929): 130–134. 170. Ibid., 139. 171. Ibid., 144–145. ­Here Grassi lamented that German Catholicism had produced no thinker of the level of Blondel. Grassi was, however, much more complimentary about neo-­scholastic historians, referring to Grabmann (ibid., 146). See also his remarks about the “Catholic-­scholastic” inheritors of Husserl, in Grassi, “Il Problema del nulla,” 322. Grassi was more sympathetic to Przywara in letters to Blondel. See Grassi to Blondel, December 30, 1927, CXLI 28, Fonds Blondel. 172. Grassi, “Sviluppo e significato,” 135. 173. Ibid., 133. 174. Ibid., 135–136, 147. Grassi nonetheless detached this from any anthropology, ­because Dasein could never be presented as an object. 175. Ibid., 147–148. See also Grassi’s discussion of Heidegger’s Habilitation, in Grassi, “Il Problema della metafisica immanente di M. Heidegger,” Giornale critic della filosofia italiana 11 (1930): 294. 176. Grassi, “Il Problema della metafisica immanente,” 295. 177. See Grassi to Blondel, March 28, 1934, CXLI 22, Archives Blondel. For Grassi’s turn to secular philosophy, see Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 105. 178. Grassi, “Sviluppo e significato,” 148–149. See also Grassi, “Il Problema della metafisica immanente,” 313–314; and his correspondence with Gentile where he asserts the closeness of Heidegger to Gentile’s actualism, quoted in Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 131. 179. Grassi, “Sviluppo e significato,” 149. 180. Grassi, “Il Problema della metafisica immanente,” 300. 181. Ibid., 301. See also appendix 1 in Ernesto Grassi, Il Problema della Metafisica Platonica (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1932), where Grassi compares his reading of Plato to Blondel’s reading of Augustine to distinguish “ontology” from “rational theology” (ibid., 207). 182. Grassi, “Il Problema del nulla,” 331. 183. Büttemeyer, Ernesto Grassi, 187. 184. Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 178–180. 185. For Abbagnano’s place within Italian thought, see Rubini, The Other Re­nais­sance, 147–169. Rubini places Abbagnano alongside Grassi as the proponent of a new positive vision of the Italian Re­nais­sance. 186. Nicola Abbagnano, “La Struttura dell’esistenza,” in Scritti Esistenzialisti, ed. Bruno Maiorca (Turin: Unione tipografico-­editrice torinese, 1988), see esp. 61–70. See also Nicola Abbagnano, “Inchiesta su ‘Primato’ (1943),” in Esistenzialismo in Italia, ed.

426

NOTES TO PAGES 238–240

Bruno Maiorca (Turin: Paravia, 1993), 93; and his criticisms of the Christian existentialists in Possibilità e libertà (Turin: Taylor, 1956). 187. For Kojève, see Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990); Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential; Michael Roth, Knowing and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Dominique Pirotte, “Kojève, lecteur de Heidegger,” Les Études Philosophiques (April–­June 1993). The best treatment of Kojève can be found in Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 68–72 and chap. 3. As Geroulanos has shown, by presenting Dasein ontologically as not-­Being or negation, Kojève was able to “demythologize” the anthropos, the God-­man from Christian theology, to reveal the f­ ree historical individual. 188. Geroulanos remarks on Kojève’s revision of Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit ­here as Vorhandensein. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 68–69. 189. See, for instance, Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 527n1, where Kojève identifies “atheism” and “ontological finitude.” 190. Thus, in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Kojève relates Hegel’s revolution to his ac­cep­tance of ­human finitude. 191. Letter, G. Fessard to A. Kojève, June 25, 1935, in Fonds Alexandre Kojève, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (hereafter cited as Fonds Kojève). 192. Alexandre Kojève, “Compte-­rendu de A. Delp. Tragische Existenz: Zur Philosophie Martin Heideggers,” Recherches Philosophiques 5 (1935–1936). See also Kojève’s review of the Société Thomiste meeting on phenomenology, Recherches Philosophiques 3 (1933–1934): 429–431. 193. Kojève, “Compte-­rendu de A. Delp,” 419. 194. Ibid., 416–417. 195. Kojève remarks on the way Heidegger’s ontology ties him to the “metaphysics of the traditional type,” in his long review of Georg Misch’s Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, in Recherches Philosophiques 2 (1932–1933): 470–475. 196. Alexandre Kojève, “Note inédite sur Hegel et Heidegger,” Rue Descartes 7 (June 1993). 197. See Kojève, “Compte-­rendu de A. Delp,” 418–419. 198. Kojève argued that Hegel needed the supplement of Heidegger’s dualist ontology ­because his monist ontology was unable to account for his (implicitly ontic) anthropology. Kojève, “Note inédite,” 38. 199. Ibid., 41–45. The centrality of reason to the Thomist reading of nonhumanist ontology explains an impor­t ant shift in Kojève’s thought. As Stefanos Geroulanos has shown, ­u ntil around 1936 Kojève had regarded Hegel’s “end of History” as the product of a rational development. But ­a fter the Delp review, Kojève came to see Reason (with an uppercase “R” to distinguish it from personal and immanent reason of individuals), an objective order to the world, as exclusively and irredeemably Christian. That is why Reason drops almost totally out of his discussion of Hegelian “Wisdom” in the last two years of the Hegel course, 1937–1938 and 1938– 1939. See Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 146–51, quoting Kojève’s review of Fessard, Interpretations 19 (1991–1992): 380. See also Fessard’s correspondence with Kojève on the question of history and reason, Fessard to Kojève,



NOTES TO PAGES 240–244 427

August 11, 1937, in Fonds Kojève. My thanks to Stefanos Geroulanos for pointing this out to me. 200. In this, my argument resembles that put forward by Alan Kors in his Atheism in France (1650–1729) (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1990).

8. The Black Nietz­sche 1. Moyn refers to the “essential meaninglessness” of the term. Samuel Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 70–71. 2. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 173. 3. For Marc’s analy­sis of the German youth groups, see Alexandre Marc, “La jeunesse allemande,” Esprit (February 1933). 4. See John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc’s Ordre Nouveau, 1930–2000 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014). 5. The fullest account of Marc’s intellectual development is Christian Roy, “Alexandre Marc et le Jeune Eu­rope, 1904–1934” (PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, 1993). 6. See Alexandre Marc, “Autour d’un thème fondamental: La Personne,” Revue Néo-­ Scolastique de Philosophie 39 (1936): 86–87. 7. Ibid., 90. 8. See ibid., 86, 89, 94. 9. Ibid., 94, quoting Denis de Rougement, Politique de la personne (1934). 10. Marc, “Autour d’un thème fondamental,” 87. 11. Ibid., 92. The same type of convergence can be seen in his other essays. See Marc, “L’Existence humaine et la raison,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 39 (1936), where he aligns Jaspers and the Thomists (ibid., 524). And his very positive review of Le Senne’s work: Alexandre Marc, “Les Métamorphoses du moi,” Recherches Philosophiques 3 (1933–1934): 377–384. 12. See Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 13. 13. See Roy, “Alexandre Marc et le Jeune Eu­rope,” 117–129. As Roy argues, in Scheler’s book Formalism, Marc “found, not only in all likelihood the very notion of a doctrine of that name [personalism], but several ele­ments of what he would designate thus in turn” (129). 14. See interview with John Hellman quoted in Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 210n. 15. For Marc’s analy­sis of Przywara as the culmination of his thought, see Roy, “Alexandre Marc et le Jeune Eu­rope,” 241–246. 16. Thomas Keller, Deutsch-­französische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse (Munich: F. Fink, 2001), 241. 17. Alexandre Marc, “Principe et méthode de la métaphysique,” Archives de Philosophie 11 (1935): 103, 108. 18. Marc connected t­ hese ideas to his own concept of the person. See ibid., 90–91, 108. Marc also referred in the notes to Peter Wust. 19. Anton Hilckman, “Un’Epoca novella per la filosofia cattolica in Germania?,” Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica 16 (1924); Erich Przywara, “Le Mouvement théologique et

428

NOTES TO PAGES 244–246

religieux en Allemagne,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique (June–­August  1929); René Kremer, “La Philosophie de M. Scheler: Son analyse de la sympathie et de l’amour,” Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie 30 (1927): 167; P. Descoqs, review of Geyser, Archives de Philosophie 3 (1926); A. Boehm, “Le Thomisme en Allemagne,” Bulletin Thomiste (1927): 156–169. 20. See, among ­others, Ernst Kamnitzer, “Max Scheler: Portrait d’un philosophe par un non-­philosophe,” La Vie Intellectuelle 2 (1929); L. Bellon, “Max Scheler als godsdienstwijsgeer,” Thomistisch tijdschrift voor katholiek Kultuurleven 2 (1931); H. Robbers, “Phaenomenologie als wijsgeerige houding I,” Studia Catholica (Nijegen) 10 (1933–1934); Hunter Gunthrie, “Max Scheler’s Epistemology of the Emotions,” Modern Schoolman 16 (1939); Józef Pastuszka, “Filozofia Maxa Schelera,” Ateneum Kapłańskie 36 (1935). See also Louis de Raeymaeker, De philosophie van Scheler (Amsterdam: De Spieghel, 1934). 21. See letter, Maritain to Wust, June  20, 1928, in Peter Wust, Lettres de France et d’Allemagne (Paris: Téqui, 1985), 110. 22. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” 137. 23. Letter, Wust to Maritain, March 17, 1928, 102, Fonds Maritain. 24. See letter, Wust to Maritain, May 26, 1928, Fonds Maritain. Wust, Lettres de France et d’Allemagne, 108. 25. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Filosofia e religione nel pensiero di M. Scheler,” in Religione e filosofia: Relazioni e communicazioni all’ XI congresso nazionale di filosofia (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1936), 167. See also J. B. Schuster, “La Philosophie de la valeur en Allemagne,” Archives de Philosophie 9 (1932): 242–243; Bellon, “Max Scheler als godsdienstwijsgeer.” 26. Józef Pastuszka, “Intuicjonizm Maza Schelera,” Przegląd Powszechny 190 (1931): 290. 27. See the discussion of Landsberg in Anton Hilckman, “Un’Epoca novella,” 413–414. For its value in attacking the Church’s enemies, see Kremer, “La Philosophie de M. Scheler,” 178; and Robbers, “Phaenomenologie als wijsgeerige houding I.” 28. Gaston Rabeau, “La Philosophie religieuse de Scheler,” La Vie Intellectuelle (1929): 246. See also T.-­L . Penido, “Psychologie religieuse, phénoménologie, et théologie,” Revue Thomiste 37 (1932): 214. 29. See, for instance, Descoqs, review of Geyser; Hilckman, “Un’Epoca novella,” 414; Bellon, “Max Scheler als godsdienstwijsgeer.” 30. Louis Lavelle, Le moi et son destin (Paris: Aubier, 1936), 50. 31. Harold Eklund, Evangelisches und Katholisches in M. Schelers Ethik (Upsala: Almqvist och Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1932). 32. See, for instance, Johann Hering to Neumann, September 26, 1917, in Cod. Ms. Friedrich Neumann, Staats-­und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 1,170. 33. See John Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 232. 34. Rudolf Schmitz-­Perrin, “Strasbourg, ‘banlieue de la phénoménologie,’ Edmond Husserl et l’enjeu de la philosophie religieuse,” Revue des Sciences Religieuses 69 (1995):



NOTES TO PAGES 246–249 429

482. Baudin and Hering planned a trip together to visit Husserl in 1934, though it never took place. See Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 16–18. 35. See Chapter 2. 36. Jean Hering, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1925), 2. This development could be seen in both Catholic and Protestant theology. 37. Ibid., 3. 38. Ibid., 8–31. 39. Ibid., 4. 40. Ibid., 141. 41. Ibid., 144. 42. Hering rejects Wundt’s claim about the “scholastic” tendency of phenomenology, but seems to have interpreted this in terms of the difficulty of phenomenologists working together as a school (ibid., 77). Hering also discusses briefly the similarities and differences between phenomenological epistemology and scholasticism (ibid., 113), but limits his criticism to the scholastic entelechy. Hering refers to Geyser’s books on Scheler, but claims that he had been unable to get hold of them (ibid., 78–79n). 43. See ibid., 62: “The ‘intentional’ object does not exist necessarily in the ontological sense. . . . ​But in no case—­a nd this is impor­t ant—­c an it exist ‘inside’ consciousness.” See also Hering’s essay “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit, und die Idee,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 4 (1921). 44. Hering, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse, 52–53. Hering referred to Mercier’s Logique. 45. Ibid., 83–85. For an analy­sis of Husserl’s response to Hering, see Schmitz-­Perrin, “Strasbourg, ‘banlieue de la phénoménologie,’ ” 490–496. 46. Hering, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse, 35, 3n (for Wust), 70n, 94–96 (for Hildebrand). Hering was particularly complimentary of Gründler’s work; see ibid., 7n, 90n, 100n, 104, 107n. 47. Ibid., 93–96. 48. Ibid., 91–92. 49. Ibid., 118–121, 131–140, quotation at 137. 50. Hering, for instance, dispensed quickly with Scheler’s more “journalistic” writings on politics, ­because he thought that Scheler had not fully thought through the relationship between essences and their par­t ic­u ­lar historical instantiations. 51. See Martin Conway, Catholic Politics in Eu­rope, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5–7. 52. See ibid., 31. 53. Ibid., 33. 54. See Mario Casella, L’Azione Cattolica del novecento (Rome: AVE, 2003), 140. 55. See Gérard Cholvy and Yves-­Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 1880–1930 (Toulouse: Privat, 1990), 295. 56. See Piotr Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 27–32.

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NOTES TO PAGES 249–252

57. See Conway, “Building the Christian City: Catholics and Politics in Inter-­War Francophone Belgium,” Past and Pres­ent (August 1990): 120. The Vatican was also suspicious of many Catholic demo­cratic parties. See John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 231–233. 58. Conway, Catholic Politics in Eu­rope, 33. 59. Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire religieuse, 299. 60. Ibid., 301. 61. ­Things w ­ ere more complicated in Italy. Though the Milan Rivista, unlike many other Catholic journals in Italy, gave space to the condemnation of Action Française, the implications of the Pope’s rejection of Maurras’s approach w ­ ere not extended to the Italian situation, and focused more on its danger to Catholic youth. See Paolo Pecorari, ed., Azione cattolica e fascismo nell ­Italia settentrionale (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1979), 423–425. 62. See Martin  F. Ederer, “Propaganda Wars: Stimmen der Zeit and the Nazis, 1933– 1935,” Catholic Historical Review (July 2004). 63. See Conway, Catholic Politics in Eu­rope, 66. 64. See Pius X’s encyclical “Il Fermo proposito” (1905); Paul Misner, “Catholic ­Labor and Catholic Action: The Italian Context of ‘Quadragesimo Anno,’ ” Catholic Historical Review (2004). 65. Quoted in Winfried Mogge, “ ‘Das Faschismus braucht keine Feigenblätter mehr . . .’: Deutsche katholische Jugendbewegung und italienischer Faschismus,” in Italienische Faschismus und deutschsprachiger Katholizismus, ed. Richard Faber, Elmar Locher (Würzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 2013), 192–193. 66. Karl Gabriel, “Die Enzyklika Quadragesimo Anno in Deutschland, Italien und Österreich,” in Faber, Italienische Faschismus, 280. 67. Misner, “Catholic ­Labor and Catholic Action,” 656. 68. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, 34. 69. Misner, “Catholic ­Labor and Catholic Action,” 655. 70. Giuseppe Lazzati, quoted in Giorgio Vecchio, “Francesco Olgiati e l’Azione Cattolica,” in Francesco Olgiati, nel centenario della nascita, ed. Adriano Bausola (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1986), 51. See Olgiati’s books Battaglie dei giovani (1916) and Nuovi orizzonti della gioventù femminile (1920). 71. Vecchio, “Francesco Olgiati e l’Azione Cattolica,” 61, 68–69. 72. Quoted in Pecorari, Azione cattolica e fascismo, 336. On the close relationship between the Catholic University and Catholic Action, see Ernesto Preziosi, Piccola storia di una grande associazione: L’Azione cattolica in Italia (Rome: AVE, 2013), 64–69, 109–111. 73. Conway, “Building the Christian City,” 126. 74. For Maritain’s ­later turn to democracy and h­ uman rights, see Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights, chap. 2. 75. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” 141. 76. Ibid., 147. 77. James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Making of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 13–15. 78. Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights, 34–35.



NOTES TO PAGES 253–257 431

79. See Casella, L’Azione Cattolica del novecento, 227. 80. Gemelli quoted in Misner, “Catholic ­Labor and Catholic Action,” 669. Nonetheless, many Christian Demo­crats who gained power in Italy a­ fter the war w ­ ere educated at Sacred Heart University, and Gemelli, having denounced Fascism in 1942, cheered their success. As Pollard has noted, Gemelli never took the Fascist oath in 1931, and so had to resign from the Consiglio Superiore dell’Educazion Nazionale, and he refused the formation of the Fascist student organ­ization at the Catholic University. See John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianisms, 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 197. 81. Misner, “Catholic ­Labor and Catholic Action,” 666. 82. See Mogge, “Faschismus braucht keine Feigenblätter mehr,” 185. 83. H. Thielemans, “Existence tragique: La Métaphysique du nazisme,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 63 (1936): 561. Thieleman’s article was noted that same year in Italy, in the Scuola Cattolica. See “ ‘La Scuola cattolica’ e il fascismo,” in Pecorari, Azione Cattolica et fascismo, 577. 84. Theodor Droege, “Die Existenz-­Philosophie Martin Heideggers,” Divus Thomas 16 (1938): 392. Droege did try to show the contradictions in Heidegger’s thought but recognized that the argument only worked from a Thomistic perspective, and thus the main criticism of Heidegger’s thought was its lack of hope. See also Karl Wittkemper, “Existenzialismus und moderne protestantische Theologie,” Theologie und Glaube 30 (1938): 641–655. 85. See Flavio Silli, La Genesi del personalismo in Luigi Stefanini (Rome: Aracne, 2006), 23. 86. Pecorari, Azione cattolica e fascismo, 750. 87. Quoted in Silli, La Genesi del personalismo, 24. 88. Stefanini’s book was reprinted a­ fter the war as Il Dramma filosofico della Germania (Padua: CEDAM, 1948). See 64; also 96–99. 89. Ibid., 65–66. ­Here Stefanini paid attention to the way in which Scheler was able to appropriate and transform Nietz­sche’s vitalism. 90. Ibid., 93–96. 91. Ibid., 110. 92. Ibid., 113–14. 93. From the 1920s Stefanini had argued against a “false mysticism” that negated the intellect. See Silli, La Genesi del personalismo, 50. 94. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 66. 95. Ibid., 107. 96. Ibid., 108; see also 70–73. 97. For the ­later development of this argument, see Pietro Prini, La Filosofia cattolica italiana del novecento (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 140–149. 98. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 108–109. 99. Ibid., 114–115. 100. Ibid., 80. 101. Ibid., 235; see also 6. 102. This is one of the main arguments put forward by Silli in her La Genesi del personalismo, 123.

432

NOTES TO PAGES 257–261

103. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 3–10, 230. 104. Ibid., 237. 105. Ibid., 244. 106. Ibid., preface 1948, 11. 107. Ibid., 115–116. 108. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 247. 109. See Luigi Stefanini, Il Personalismo sociale (Rome: Studium, 1979). 110. Luigi Stefanini, La Chiesa Cattolica (Milan: Principato, 1944), 352–33, 356–357, 367. Stefanini was more sympathetic to the Italian Catholic liberals around 1848 (ibid., 371–372). 111. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 237–238. 112. Ibid., 79. 113. Stefanini, La Chiesa Cattolica, 409. 114. Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 242, see also 3. 115. Ibid., 10, 246. Stefanini thought that Scheler’s thought, despite itself, had tendencies ­toward this liberal form of education (ibid., 76–80; see also 102–104). 116. Stefanini, La Chiesa Cattolica, 409–410. See also 352, where Stefanini criticizes “economic liberty” insofar as it catered only to bourgeois interests and ignored Christian charity and social justice; and 364–366, where he discusses the po­l iti­cal implications of social Catholic ideas and corporatism. 117. Luigi Stefanini, “L’Esistenzialismo tedesco e il pensiero italiano,” in Atti del XIII congresso nazionali di filosofia (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1940), 445. See also Stefanini, La Chiesa Cattolica, 408. 118. See Stefanini, La Chiesa Cattolica, 374–377. Stefanini referred ­here to the conflicts over education and Catholic Action. 119. Stefanini, “L’Esistenzialismo tedesco,” 443. 1 20. Ibid., 445. See also Stefanini, Il Dramma filosofico, 246. 121. See also Glori Cappello, “Stefanini e il fascismo,” http://­w ww​.­fondazionestefanini​.­it​ /­news​/­stefanini​-­e​-­i l​-­fascismo​/­. The article emphasizes the pragmatic nature of Stefanini’s engagement with the Fascists. 1 22. Olivier Mongin, “Paul-­Louis Landsberg, un lien entre Esprit et l’École de Fancfort?,” Esprit 5 (1978). 1 23. John Oesterreicher, Five in Search of Wisdom (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 193; Pierre Klossowski, introduction to Paul-­Louis Landsberg, “Les Sens spirituels chez Saint Augustin,” Dieu Vivant 11 (1948): 83–86. 1 24. Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” 149. 1 25. See Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg, “Nietz­sche i Scheler,” Revista di psicologia y pedagogia 3 (1935): 97–116. 1 26. Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg, “L’Acte philosophique de Max Scheler,” Recherches Philosophiques 6 (1936–1937): 300. Landsberg saw this as a proto-­Heideggerian ele­ment of Scheler’s thought, and a point of difference from Husserl. 127. Ibid., 303–304. 1 28. Paul-­Louis Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions sur l’idée chrétienne de la personne,” Esprit 3 (1934): 398–399.



NOTES TO PAGES 261–265 433

1 29. Ibid., 389. 130. Ibid., 390. 131. Paul-­Louis Landsberg, Essai sur l’expérience de la mort (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936), 41–42. 132. Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions,” 394. See also Landsberg, “L’Acte philosophique,” 309: “The order of the world and the ‘ordo amoris’ discover themselves at the same time.” 133. Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions,” 391. 134. Ibid., 392. 135. Quoted in Chappel, “Slaying the Leviathan,” 178. 136. My emphasis. This idea is developed most fully in Paul-­Ludwig Landsberg, Einführung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1960). See esp. chap. 4. 137. Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions,” 388. Landsberg related t­ hese f­ actors to both Nazi and Communist materialism, one emphasizing an “interior destiny, coming from the depths of heredity,” the other emphasizing “the pressure of the environment.” 138. Ibid., 388. See also Landsberg, Einführung, 176. 139. Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions,” 392. 1 40. Landsberg, “L’Acte philosophique,” 309 141. Ibid., 312. See also Paul-­Louis Landsberg, “Réflexions sur l’engagement personnel,” Esprit 6 (1937): 191; Landsberg, “Réflexions pour une philosophie de la guerre et de la paix,” Esprit 8 (1939): 37: “To discover certain values, we need to move ourselves morally in their direction.” 1 42. Landsberg, “Réflexions sur l’engagement personnel,” 180. Landsberg states that his argument does not apply h­ ere to the saint or the monk, whose vocations w ­ ere “exceptional” (179n). 1 43. Ibid., 182–184. 1 44. Ibid., 185–186. 1 45. Ibid., 181. 1 46. Landsberg, “Réflexions pour une philosophie de la guerre et de la paix,” 18. 147. Landsberg, “L’Acte philosophique,” 304. 1 48. Landsberg, “Quelques réflexions,” 389. 1 49. Landsberg, “Réflexions pour une philosophie de la guerre et de la paix,” 46. 150. Ibid., 40. 151. See also ibid., 38–39. 152. Landsberg, “Réflexions sur l’engagement personnel,” 197n. 153. Paul-­Louis Landsberg, “Lettre de Paul-­Louis Landsberg à José Bergamin,” Esprit 242 (1956): 460. 154. Ibid., 460–461. 155. Landsberg, “Réflexions pour une philosophie de la guerre et de la paix,” 14. 156. Paul-­Louis Landsberg, “Marx et le problème de l’homme,” La Vie Intellectuelle (July 1937): 90. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid., 75, 91. 159. Ibid., 93.

434

NOTES TO PAGES 265–269

160. Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 312; Thomas Keller, “Alexandre Marc et Paul L. Landsberg,” in Ni gauche, ni droite: Les Chassés-­c roisés idéologiques des intellectuels français et allemands dans l’entre-­deux-­g uerres, ed. Gilbert Merlio (Talence: Éd. de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 1995), 262. 161. See Emmanuel Mounier, “Paul-­Louis Landsberg,” Esprit (1946): 155. 162. Michel Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit: 1930–1950 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 29. 163. Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 111, 226. 164. Danilo Veneruso, “Il Dibattito politico-­sociale nella chiesa genovese,” in Pecorari, Azione cattolica e fascismo, 48. 165. See Piotr Kosicki, “L’Avènement des intellectuels catholiques,” Vingtième-­Siècle: Revue d’Histoire (2009): 34; Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, chap. 2. 166. See Ze’ev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1983), chap. 7 and conclusion; John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 167. Hellman, Mounier, 125. 168. See ibid., 158–182. As with all his interventions, Mounier hoped to Christianize Vichy, and many in the government ­were very suspicious of him. See Keller, Deutsch-­ französische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 334–335. 169. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 218. See Goulven Boudic, Esprit, 1944– 1982 (Paris: IMEC, 2005), 13. 170. John Hellman, “The Opening to the Left in French Catholicism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1973): 384. Maritain would l­ ater break with his student Mounier over the po­l iti­cal and philosophical direction of the journal. 171. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 38, 43, 56. 172. Ibid., 69. 173. Ibid., 71. 174. Ibid., 56. 175. Hellman, Mounier, 30. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 39. 176. Hellman, Mounier, 59. 177. Quoted in Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 247. 178. Mounier, Entretiens, Oeuvres, vol. 4, quoted in Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 62. 179. See Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 231–287. 180. Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 17–18, 25–27. See also Keller, Deutsch-­ französische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, who argues that, for Mounier, the Ordre Nouveau’s “Nietz­schean concepts” had prevented them from “sufficiently distancing themselves from the extreme right” (ibid., 293). 181. Letter, Maritain to Mounier, quoted in Hellman, Mounier, 6. For their relationships but dif­fer­ent networks, see Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, esp. 226–227, 289–295. 182. Marc introduced Neumann in his “Le Christianisme et la révolution spirituelle,” Esprit 2 (1933). 183. See Hellmann, The Communitarian Third Way, 68–70.



NOTES TO PAGES 269–273 435

184. Hellman, Mounier, 151. 185. Maurice de Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé: Souvenirs de neuf décennies (Paris: Michel, 1998), 152. 186. Letter, Mounier to Berdyaev, quoted in Hellman, Mounier, 81. 187. Mounier criticized other essays by Denis de Rougement and Michel Souriau. See Emmanuel Mounier, “Qu’est-­ce-­que le personnalisme?,” Esprit 3 (1934): 367n. 188. Ibid., 364n, 365n. 189. Ibid., 365–366. 190. Emmanuel Mounier, Entretiens, Oeuvres, vol. 4, quoted in Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 62. 191. Mounier, “Qu’est-­ce-­que le personnalisme?,” 358, 366. 192. Emmanuel Mounier, “Révolution communautaire,” Esprit 3 (1935): 548. 193. Ibid. 194. Ibid., 553; see also 565–566. ­Here Mounier argued that the distinction between liberal society of the “one” and Fascist society of the “we” had not been sufficiently recognized by Scheler. 195. For instance, while recognizing the “incontestable positive contribution of the French Revolution and the liberation it represents,” he argued that it was linked to a “radical evil.” Mounier, “Qu’est-­ce-­que le personnalisme?,” 359n; see also 361–363. 196. Mounier, “Révolution communautaire,” 572. 197. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 127. See also Boudic, Esprit, 39; Heller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 104. 198. Jean-­Marie Domenach, Emmanuel Mounier, quoted in Olivier Mongin, “Paul-­Louis Landsberg,” 58. And Emmanuel Mounier, “Paul-­Louis Landsberg,” 154. See also Mounier, “Sur l’engagement” manuscript notes, published in Esprit (2002): 7. 199. Mounier, “Révolution communautaire,” 576. 200. Ibid., 556. 201. Mounier, “Qu’est-­ce-­que le personnalisme?,” 358. 202. Mounier, “Révolution communautaire,” 580. 203. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 106. 204. Ibid., 121–123. 205. Ibid., 160. See also, Hellman, Mounier, 121. Hellman emphasizes Mounier’s refusal to embrace the Republicans fully. 206. Hellman, Mounier, 173. 207. See Boudic, Esprit, 59. 208. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 262, 266. Esprit nonetheless thought that nationalizations did not go far enough. 209. Mounier, Manifeste au ser­vice du personnalisme, quoted in William Rauch, Politics and Belief in Con­temporary France (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), 277. 210. Dominique Olivier, “Liberté et révolution économique,” Esprit (December  1946), quoted in Boudic, Esprit, 58. 211. See Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 252–256. 212. Emmanuel Mounier, “L’Affrontement chrétien (1943–4),” in Emmanuel Mounier, Oeuvres, vol. 4 (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 31–33.

436

NOTES TO PAGES 273–280

213. Emmanuel Mounier, “Suite française aux maladies infantiles des révolutions,” Esprit (December 1944), quoted in Boudic, Esprit, 52. 214. See Gabriel, “Die Enzyklika Quadragesimo Anno,” 280. This soft-­peddling allowed Dollfuss to pres­ent his authoritarian reforms in Austria in 1934 as leading to a “Quadragesimo-­a nno-­State.” 215. Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 97. 216. See Keller, Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse, 297–298. 217. Mounier makes explicit the connection between personalism and existentialism. Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes (Paris: Denoël, 1947), 65. 218. Ibid., 70–74. 219. Ibid., 120–121. 220. Ibid., 128. 221. Ibid., 89–90. See also Marxisme ouvert contre marxisme scolastique, special edition, Esprit (May–­June 1948). 222. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 122. 223. Ibid., 112. 224. Ibid., 119. 225. Ibid., 10.

9. Saving the Husserl Archives 1. For a full and rich account of the rescue, see Leo Van Breda, “The Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” in Geschichte des Husserl-­Archivs / History of the Husserl Archives, ed. Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), first published in French and German in Husserl et la pensée moderne, ed. Herman Van Breda (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), esp. 52–62. 2. In my account I draw on the institutional papers of the Husserl Archives, which are stored separately. Many folders have individual names, and they have been labeled thus ­here. In addition, many documents pertaining to individuals, especially correspondence, are alphabetically or­ga­n ized within the folders. Nevertheless, the files are not completely or­ga­n ized by individual, and some related correspondence is kept together. For instance, the Merleau-­Ponty file contains several Tran Duc Thao letters. In this case, I have listed the name ­under which the letters have been filed. In addition, André Wylleman, who was president of the Archive for a considerable period ­after the war, grouped together a number of the most impor­t ant documents into one file (Wylleman). See also the extremely useful essay by Thomas Vongehr, “A Short History of the Husserl-­A rchives,” in Vongehr, Geschichte des Husserl-­Archivs. 3. Van Breda’s wealthy ­brothers ­were very useful to him, providing short loans and serving as the Archives’ bankers, including a monthly loan of 2,000 francs to support Malvine Husserl, from February 1943 ­until the end of the war. See letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, November 20, 1944, in Marvin Farber, Husserl Archives. 4. See Van Breda, “The Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” 39. See the list of students at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in ISP Historique, ISP Archives, 74 Statistiques



NOTES TO PAGES 281–284 437

des Inscriptions; and Wylleman’s speech at Van Breda’s memorial ser­v ice, March 8, 1974, in Van Breda, Husserl Archives. 5. Van Breda claims that he had the idea to transport the archives out of Germany. Van Breda, “The Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” 40. In a letter to Gerhart Husserl, he suggests that it was Malvine Husserl who instigated the proj­ect. Draft letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, October  19, 1938, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. Walter Biemel also suggests that Malvine Husserl suggested the rescue; Walter Biemel, “Dank an Löwen,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, 22 (1989). 6. The agreement between Van Breda and Malvine Husserl has been preserved in “Vereinbarung, 21.9.38,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 7. Letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, January 24, 1939, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. 8. Letter, Van Breda to Jean Hering, July 11, 1939, HA1, Husserl Archives. 9. For a colorful account of Dopp, see Biemel, “Dank an Löwen,” 253–255. 10. Letter, Joseph Dopp to Van Breda, September  12, 1938, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 11. See letter, Van Breda to Stein, April 18, 1942, in Stein, Husserl Archives. 12. See “Nota über die vertraglichen Verpflichtungen Finks und Landgrebes gegenüber dem Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, November 1940,” in HA 6, Husserl Archives. 13. Letter, Joseph Dopp to Van Breda, September  12, 1938, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 14. Letter, Noël to Ladeuze, October 25, 1938, in Fonds Noël, ISP Archives, 154. 15. See Fondation Francqui: Statuts et Règlement Organique (Brussells: Fondation Francqui, 1932), 13–19. 16. Letter, Joseph Dopp to Jean Willems, October  22, 1938, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 17. See letter, Ladeuze to Noël, October 27, 1938, in Fonds Noël, ISP Archives, 153. For a list of other foreign researchers funded in the same way, see Fondation Francqui, 91. A similar grant had funded a visit by Einstein in 1932–1933. 18. Letter, Léon Noël to Jean Willems, October 10, 1942, and letter, Jean Willems to Léon Noël, October 28, 1942, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. See also the Archives’ financial accounts, “Uitgave Husserl-­werk van Oktober 1942 af tot 30 Julii 1944,” in Bank VA., Husserl Archives. 19. “Rechten Betreffende Het Husserl-­A rchief,” V2W, Husserl Archives. 20. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, January  25, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. Van Breda had asked for Farber’s discretion at the beginning of the war. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, December 22, 1939, in Marvin Farber, Husserl Archives. Farber agreed to this in a letter sent by Farber to Noël, March 12, 1941. 21. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, January  25, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 22. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, December  6, 1939, and then letter, Farber to Noël, March 12, 1940, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 23. Letter, Van Breda to Fink, December 23, 1941, in Fink, Husserl Archives.

438

NOTES TO PAGES 285–286

24. See letters, Van Breda to Landgrebe, December 3, 1938, and Landgrebe to Van Breda, December 9, 1938, in Landgrebe, Husserl Archives. See also letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, January 24, 1939, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. 25. See letter, Léon Noël to Finke [sic], December  29, 1938, Declaration Léon Noël, March 28, 1939, and Declaration Rector des Universität Leuven, September 29, 1940, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. Landgrebe was supposed to have worked on Kant, Hegel, and phenomenological logic. 26. See letter, Gerhart Husserl to Van Breda, December  28, 1945, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. Fink denied the connection, but Gerhart remained suspicious, and relations appear to have been strained u­ ntil the early 1950s, when discussions developed about a Freiburg branch of the archives ­under the direction of Fink and G. Husserl had l­ ittle to say against it. 27. See, for instance, Van Breda’s avoidance of the name Husserl in his letter to the Foundation, December 25, 1943, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 28. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, January  25, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 29. Van Breda had been listed as a member of the International Phenomenological Association since 1941, but he was only listed as a consulting foreign editor for the September  1945 edition of the Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Farber’s first mention of the archives at Louvain was in his article “Remarks about the Phenomenological Program,” in the same edition. Van Breda provided a short article on the archives in 1947. 30. Letter, Van Breda to Tran Duc Thao, May 5, 1944, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 31. “Zusammenfassung betreffend den Lift 30. IX. 1940,” in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. 32. Letter, Patočka to Van Breda, November 6, 1938, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 33. See letter, Patočka to Van Breda, September 6, 1946, and then contract, January 10, 1947, in Patočka, Husserl Archives. In his account Van Breda suggested that he received the documents in 1939 through diplomatic mail; Van Breda, “Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” 61, 64. 34. See H. L. Van Breda, “Notes from the Husserl Archives,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (December 1947): 302–307. 35. See “The Posthumous Manuscripts of Edith Stein: Origin, 1st November, 1947,” in Stein, Husserl Archives. 36. “Protokoll der Besprechungen anlässlich des Besuches von Prof. M. Farber, Präsident der ‘International Phenomenological Society’ vom 2–4 September 1947,” in Arbeitsbesprechungen bis 1964, Husserl Archives. 37. “Bericht der Besprechung H. L. Van Bredas mit Prof. Buytendijk vom 17. Oktober 1947, in Amsterdam, H ­ otel Europa,” in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 38. See Maria Scheler from Van Breda, January 14, 1948, in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 39. Van Breda to Maria Scheler, March 19, 1948, in Scheler, Husserl Archives. The confidence with which Van Breda was able to offer such a deal suggests that he had support from the ISP, which would perhaps have been more attracted to the Scheler archives



NOTES TO PAGES 286–289 439

than the Husserl ones. In contrast, Malvine Husserl, ­after having exhausted the monies gained from the sale of Husserl’s library, was supported by Van Breda and loans from his b­ rothers. Gerhart Husserl repaid them at the end of the war. 40. Biemel, “Dank an Löwen,” 243. 41. Letter, Van Breda to Louis Millet, June 22, 1955, in Stein, Husserl Archives. From my conversations with Thomas Vongehr, it seems Van Breda found Gelber too willing to restrict access to the archives for religious reasons. 42. Letter, Maria Scheler to Van Breda, April 22, 1948, in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 43. Biemel, “Dank an Löwen,” 243. 44. “Van Breda meeting with Maria Scheler 28. December  47,” in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 45. “7. 12. 1944 Besprechung, Van Breda, Frau Van Breda at Antwerp,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. In the end this agreement fell through, for reasons that I could not determine, and in 1947 Van Breda concluded a contract with Martinus Nijhoff, the press that still publishes the Husserliana. See “Systematische Zusammenfassung der Resultats der Besprechungen zwischen Professor Gerhart Husserl und der Leitung der Archives-­Husserl à Louvain (25.,26., und 27. Juli 1947),” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. And then the first meeting with Nijhoff, in October, “Bericht der Unterredung  H.  L. Van Bredas mit Dir. Kern Vom Verlag Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag, 16.x.47,” in Arbeitsbesprechungen, Husserl Archives. 46. See letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, November  20, 1944, and “Systematische Zusammenfassung der Resultats der Besprechungen zwischen Professor Gerhart Husserl und der Leitung der Archives-­Husserl à Louvain (25.,26., und 27. Juli 1947),” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 47. See correspondence and contract, 1947–1948, in Nijhoff, Husserl Archives. 48. See “Vereinbarung über den wissenschaftlichen Nachlaß von Edmund Husserl, 25th December 1938,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 49. See letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, December  6, 1939, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 50. “Rapport sur les travaux aux Archives Husserl, 8th  September  1942,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. Nevertheless, in a letter to the Belgian finance ministry in 1945, Van Breda suggested that he had sole control of the archive during the occupation ­because the ISP could not afford to be officially connected to it. Letter, Van Breda to the Belgian Minister of Finance, February 4, 1945, in Bank VA, Husserl Archives. 51. Letter, Van Breda to Landgrebe, August 28, 1941, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 52. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, January 25, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 53. Letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, May  12, 1949, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. 54. Letter, Van Breda to Van Waeyenbergh, September 25, 1948, in ISP Historique, ISP Archives. 55. “Statutes dec. 1950,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 56. Letter, Eugen Fink to Gerhart Husserl, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives.

440

NOTES TO PAGES 289–293

57. Letter, Tran Duc Thao to Van Breda, September 30, 1943, in Merleau-­Ponty, Husserl Archives. The request was repeated in another letter to Van Breda, November  13, 1943, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 58. See letter, Van Breda to Noël, October 27, 1943, in Merleau-­Ponty, Husserl Archives. 59. See, for instance, the letters from February  6, 1948, in Madame  G. Hislaine Lorphèvre, HA1, Husserl Archives. 60. See Van Breda, “Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” 48–49. 61. Malvine, letters to her c­ hildren, August 20, 21, 25, and 26, and December 18, 1943, transcriptions in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 62. Malvine Husserl was baptized by Van Breda and Raeymaeker. She remained very close to Van Breda, who referred to her in letters as “bonne-­maman.” See correspondence in Malvine Husserl, Husserl Archives. 63. “Rapport sur l’activite du comité pour la preparation de l’édition des manuscrits de Edmund Husserl 28 Mars 1939,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 64. See Van Breda, “The Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass,” 48. 65. See ibid., 42. 66. Van Breda suggests, mistakenly, that he had always intended to study the “reduction.” Ibid., 40. 67. The letters w ­ ere sent in August 1938 to Malvine Husserl and Heidegger. Letters to Heidegger and Malvine Husserl, August  25 and 26, 1938, respectively, in Malvine Husserl, Husserl Archives. Van Breda was not yet fluent in German and, for help in crafting the letter, wrote to a fellow Franciscan who had studied in Berlin. Draft letter, December 1937, in Malvine Husserl, Husserl Archives. 68. Draft letter, Van Breda to Malvine Husserl, August  26, 1938, in Malvine Husserl, Husserl Archives. 69. “Séance 20th  March  1945,” in Société Philosophique de Louvain, in Groupes d’Étudiants, ISP Archives. 70. Ibid. 71. Letter, Van Breda to G. Husserl, November 20, 1944, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. Van Breda’s dissertation is found in his papers at the Husserl Archives. Herman Leo Van Breda, De Transcendenteel phaenomenologische reductie in Husserls laatste periode (1920–1938). I’d like to thank Hannah Vanndebussche for guiding me through ­t hese Dutch texts. 72. Herman Leo Van Breda, “Het ‘zuivere phaenomeen’ volgens Edmund Husserl,” Tijdschrift voor philosophie 3 (1941): 480. 73. Van Breda, “La Fécondité des ­g rands thèmes husserliens pour le progrès de la recherche philosophique,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 72 (1958): 8. See also Van Breda, “La Phénoménologie husserlienne comme philosophie de l’intentionnalité,” in La fenomenologia (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1956), 43, where he argues that this was the crucial change between the Logical Investigations and Ideas. 74. Van Breda, “La Réduction phénoménologique,” in Husserl, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: 1959), 310. 75. H. L. Van Breda, “Note sur réduction et authenticité d’après Husserl,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 56 (1951): 4; Van Breda, “Husserl et le problème de la liberté,”



NOTES TO PAGES 293–296 441

in La Liberté: Actes du IVème congrès des sociétés de philosophie du langue française (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1949), 380–381. 76. Herman Van Breda, “La Fécondité,” 10. See also Van Breda, “Le Réduction phénoménologique,” 311–312, where he relates the existence that is reduced to vorhanden-­Sein. 77. Van Breda to Ortegat, April 28, 1948, HA1, Husserl Archives. See also Van Breda, “La Fécondité,” 7; and “Séance 20th March 1945,” where Van Breda argued that “the base of Husserl’s thought is closer to our perspective than the express content of his writing.” 78. Letter, Van Breda to Merleau-­Ponty, December  17, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 79. Van Breda, “Husserl et le problème de la liberté,” 380. See also Van Breda, “La Réduction phénoménologique,” 313–314, where he explic­itly rejects the subjectivist reading of constitution as “creation.” 80. Van Breda, “Note sur réduction,” 4. 81. Van Breda, “La Réduction phénoménologique,” 316. Van Breda further said that this being could not be considered as a “static in-­itself of physical or ideal nature,” ­because it was “real­ity correlative of the conscious act,” or “ontological truth.” See also his comparison of phenomenological with scholastic metaphysics, in Van Breda, “La Phénoménologie husserlienne,” 47. 82. Van Breda, “La Phénoménologie husserlienne,” 47. 83. Ibid., 44. See also Van Breda, “La Fécondité,” 11. 84. Van Breda, “La Réduction phénoménologique,” 318. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 318. 87. See A. Wylleman, “In Memoriam Prof. H. L. Van Breda,” Tijdschrift voor filosofie 36 (June 1974): 382. 88. Van Breda, “Husserl et le problème de Dieu,” International Congress of Philosophy (10th: Amsterdam, 1948), 1210. 89. Letter, Paul Ortegat to Van Breda, April 18, 1948, HA1 Husserl Archives. The book would appear ­later that year as Paul Ortegat, Philosophie de la religion: Synthèse critique des systèmes contemporains en fonction d’un réalisme personnaliste et communautaire (Gembloux: Duculot, 1948). Ortegat also asked for information on Brentano, Külpe, Munsterberg, and Stern. For this, Van Breda passed him to Landgrebe, writing: “I have to let you know that he is a Protestant; on the other hand, he is a believer, and accepts revelation, and our conception of Christ and the trinity.” Letter, Van Breda to Ortegat, April 28, 1948, HA1, Husserl Archives. 90. Letter, Van Breda to Ortegat, April 28, 1948, HA1, Husserl Archives. Van Breda suggested that Husserl had not determined what the primordial given of religion was. 91. Letter, Paul Drochon and Pierre Geais to Van Breda, May 26, 1945, in Parijs Archiev, Husserl Archives. 92. Letter, Van Breda to Paul Drochon and Pierre Geais, December  15, 1945, in Parijs Archiev, Husserl Archives. See also letter, Van Breda to Merleau-­Ponty, December 17, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives.

442

NOTES TO PAGES 296–299

93. Letter, Van Breda to Paul Drochon and Pierre Geais, December 15, 1945. In the same letter, Van Breda also was clear to praise the scholastics, and ­t hose who had renewed scholasticism in l­ ater centuries, including Mercier. 94. Interviews, J. M. and Marvin Farber, Paris, October 16, 1947, Rocke­fel­ler Archives, New York. I am grateful to Giuseppe Bianco for drawing my attention to this document. 95. Letter, Van Breda to Marvin Farber, December  6, 1939, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 96. Leo Van Breda, “Les Archives Husserl à Louvain,” Les Études Philosophiques (1954): 18. This was a French translation from a document prepared for the Philosophisches Jahrbuch. Compare to his self-­presentation in “List of Members of the International Phenomenological Society,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (June 1945): 627; and Van Breda, “Notes from the Husserl Archives,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (December 1947): 302–307. The only indication of his relationship to the ISP comes when he gave the address of the archive: Place Cardinal Mercier, 2. An earlier article for the journal, however, was more direct about the connection. Van Breda, “The Husserl Archives in Louvain,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March 1947). But this was a direct translation from an article that appeared in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain, as was Van Breda, “Das Husserl-­A rchiv in Löwen,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 2 (1947). 97. Letter, Van Breda to J. Willems, December  25, 1943, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 98. “Systematische Zusammenfassung der Resultats der Besprechungen zwischen Professor Gerhart Husserl und der Leitung der Archives-­Husserl à Louvain (25.,26., und 27. Juli 1947),” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 99. “Bericht der Besprechung vom 5. November 1947,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 100. Letter, Van Breda to Gerhart Husserl, November 6, 1947, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives. 101. “Protokoll der Besprechungen anlaszlich der Besuches von Prof. M. Farber. Präsident der ‘International Phenomenological Society’ vom 2–4 September  1947,” in WZW, Husserl Archives. Farber was skeptical of the committee, suggesting that the members ­were “not in a position to deny the use of their names,” and worried that it was only cover for a Catholic proj­ect. See Interviews, JM and Marvin Farber, Paris, October 16, 1947, Rocke­fel­ler Archives. 102. See “Overeenkomst 7.7.62,” in VZW, Husserl Archives. 103. “Bericht der Besprechung  H.  L. Van Bredas mit Prof. Buytendyk vom 17. Oktober 1947, in Amsterdam, H ­ otel Europa 14:40–15h,” in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 104. “Arbeitsbesprechungen 2nd  December  1939,” in Arbeitsbesprechungen, Husserl Archives. 105. Letter, Van Breda to l’Abbaye, Saint-­Paul de Wisques, December 15, 1946, HA1, Husserl Archives. 106. Letter, Van Breda to Fink, December 15, 1946, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 107. Letter, Gerhart Husserl to Van Breda, December 27, 1938, in Gerhart Husserl, Husserl Archives.



NOTES TO PAGES 299–302 443

108. Vongehr, “A Short History,” 114. 109. Herman Van Breda, “Maurice Merleau-­Ponty et les Husserl-­archives à Louvain,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 67 (1962): 413–414. 110. Letter, Van Breda to Fink, December 15, 1946, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 111. Tran Duc Thao was even entrusted personally with 2,100 pages of transcriptions from 1944 to 1948, though t­ hese did not find a permanent home in Paris. 112. See Van Breda, “Maurice Merleau-­Ponty,” 419. 113. Letter, Merleau-­Ponty to Van Breda, June  1, 1942, in Merleau-­Ponty, Husserl Archives. 114. Letter, Noël to René Le Senne, Louvain, February 10, 1944, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 115. Letter, Le Senne to Noël, Paris, February 19, 1944, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 116. Letter, Van Breda to Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, December  17, 1945, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. Van Breda also asked that Sartre be left out of the proj­ect, and asked that the Père Geiger “be kept up-­to-­date and that we invite him onto the committee.” 117. Letter, Bréhier to Van Breda, January 2, 1946, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. A Paris branch opened in 1958 when Paul Ricoeur accepted a position at the Sorbonne. 118. See letter, Van Breda to Ricoeur, August 30, 1949, in Depôt Abschriften, Husserl Archives. See also the correspondence in Ricoeur, Husserl Archives. Ricoeur was given a room for the archives and an hour per week for a course. Letter, Ricoeur to Van Breda, December  23 [prob­a bly 1948], in Ricoeur, Husserl Archives. The deal was struck the following August and the transcripts w ­ ere duly sent to Strasbourg. 119. “Rapport sur la conférence entre Professeurs Fink, Landgrebe, et Van Breda å Cologne, les 24 et 25 juillet 1948,” in Arbeitsbesprechungen, Husserl Archives. 1 20. See Vongehr, “A Short History,” 109. 121. See “Bericht der Besprechung  H.  L. Van Bredas mit Prof. Buytendijk vom 17. Oktober 1947, in Amsterdam, H ­ otel Europa,” in Scheler, Husserl Archives. 1 22. See letter, Van Breda to Roger Martin, July  29, 1954, in Parijs Archiev, Husserl Archives. 1 23. Letter, J. Willems to Van Breda, February 14, 1944, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 1 24. Letter, Van Breda to Messieurs les Président et Membres de la Section de Philosophie et Lettres de L’UNESCO-­Mexique, October 22, 1947, in V2W, Husserl Archives. 1 25. See the explanation given in the letter from Bayer to Van Breda, March 9, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 1 26. Fawtier, “Establishment of an International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies,” September  22, 1948, UNESCO / PHS / 8, UNESCO Archives, http://­w ww​.­u nesco​.­org​/­new​/­e n​/­u nesco​/­resources​/­online​-­m aterials​/­publications​ /­unesdoc​-­database​/­. 127. “Draft Constitution of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic studies,” in Fawtier, “Establishment of an International Council.” 1 28. Letter, Van Breda to the Comité Permanent du Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines, April 25, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives.

444

NOTES TO PAGES 302–306

1 29. Letter, Gaston Berger to Van Breda, February 28, 1950, in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 130. “Discours du Dr Luther H. Evans, Directeur Général de L’UNESCO at Rome, 24 November 1953,” in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 131. Letter, Jacques Havet to Van Breda, March 9, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 132. Letter, Robert Fawtier to H. J Pos, February 27, 1950, in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 133. See “Publications subventionnées par le CIPSH de 1948–1957,” in CIPSH/ass. gen./57/9, UNESCO Archives. 134. See the discussion in “Compte-­R endu de la première réunion du Comité de Direction des Archives-­Husserl, Bruxelles, 29 november 1947,” in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. 135. See Annex I of the application sent to UNESCO on April  25, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. According to the accounts of the archive, Raeymaeker and Dondeyne gave yearly gifts up u­ ntil the end of the war. Additional gifts include one from the ­mother superior of a nunnery in Huldenberg. See letter from Van Breda to the Belgian Minister of Finance, February  4, 1945, in Bank VA, Husserl Archives. 136. ­Later Van Breda did mention that the archives ­were located at the ISP. See “Rapport sur l’activité scientifique des Archives Husserl à Louvain en 1950,” in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 137. See Annex I of letter sent to the Section de Philosophie, and letter, UNESCO Louvain, October 22, 1947, in Arbeitsbesprechungen, Husserl Archives. 138. Letter, Pos to Van Breda, January  26, 1950, in UNESCO 1950–1945, Husserl Archives. 139. Letter, Van Breda to Farber, January  25, 1950, in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 1 40. Letter, Farber to Van Breda, February 7, 1950; also letter, Farber to Van Breda, February 2, 1950, in which he had suggested that this was likely; both in UNESCO 1950– 1965, Husserl Archives. 141. Letter, Van Breda to Jean Thomas, February 1, 1950, in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 1 42. Sartre was asked for a letter, but he was one of the very few who seemingly d ­ idn’t write one. See letter, Van Breda to Jean-­Paul Sartre, July 26, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 143. “Liste des personnalités dont on trouve ci-­joint une recommandation, 10 September 1949,” in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 1 44. The letters are all contained in the file and are dated August–­September  1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 1 45. Letter, Jacques Havet to Van Breda, May 17, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives. 1 46. Letter, Van Breda to Jacques Havet, May 11, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–1949, Husserl Archives.



NOTES TO PAGES 306–311 445

147. For instance, Koyré had referred to Heidegger, if negatively, when discussing Husserl’s politics, but this was cut. Letter, Alexandre Koyré, August  30, 1949, in UNESCO 1947–49, Husserl Archives. Compare with the letter from Van Breda to Jean Thomas, February 1, 1940, in UNESCO 1950–1965, Husserl Archives. 1 48. See the remarks by Walter Biemel at the beginning of “Dank an Löwen,” 236.

10. Postwar Phenomenology 1. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 2. Pope Pius XII, “Humani Generis,” http://­w ww​.­papalencyclicals​.­net​/­pius12​/­p12​ human​.­htm. The Pope was especially concerned about the impact of existentialism in Catholic seminaries and universities. One of the fullest Catholic responses to the encyclical was Albert Dondeyne’s Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine (Louvain: Publications de l’Université de Louvain, 1951). 3. It would be enlightening to see if this analy­sis could be extended to Jean-­Paul Sartre. He engaged with many of the figures in my story: We have already discussed his reading of Heidegger alongside the priest Marius Perrin during World War II, his reading of de Waelhens, and his participation in Marcel’s study group. In his letter to Marcel that I quoted in the introduction, Sartre argued that his description of the world was very similar to Marcel’s: “The point of divergence—­and it is considerable—is the very fact of God” (Sartre to Marcel, 1943, Marcel Archives). Nevertheless, Sartre’s relationship to Catholic thinkers was in general much less direct than that of Merleau-­Ponty or Ricoeur, and although he occupied a dominant position in French thought, and l­ater international thought, he lies at the margins of the story I am telling h­ ere. 4. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful D ­ aughter, trans. J. Kirkup (London: Penguin, 1963), 246. 5. See his account, Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1995), 15–16. 6. See de Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé: Souvenirs de neuf décennies (Paris: Michel, 1998), 111. 7. De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful D ­ aughter, 246–247, where de Beauvoir states that Merleau-­Ponty “still felt a nostalgia for his lost faith.” According to de Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé, 128n, de Beauvoir’s account of “Pradel [sic]” only loosely covers Merleau-­Ponty. 8. Though Gandillac notes that Merleau-­Ponty had several serious reservations about Catholicism. De Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé, 110–111. De Gandillac provides a dif­ fer­ent etymology for “tala” in “talapoin.” 9. Zaza, Correspondance et carnets d’Elisabeth Lacoin, 1914–1929 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 275; at 283 she suggests that Merleau-­Ponty’s thought was in the tradition of Barrès, even if he criticized the earlier thinker. 10. Ibid., 280–282; see also 343. 11. ­T here was also the hint of a scandal in Merleau-­Ponty’s ­family, which made Lacoin’s parents resistant to the match. See Dierdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990), 152–153.

446

NOTES TO PAGES 311–313

12. See Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1, 1926–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 286–287. 13. Maritain, Notebooks, trans. Joseph Evans (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1984), 158, diary entry from December  1927. And Emanuel de Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 57. See also Bernard Doering Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 24. 14. See Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 19; Paul Ricoeur, “Mon premier maître en philosophie,” in Marguerite Léna, Honneur aux maîtres (Paris: Critérion, 1991), 221–225; Ricoeur, Réflexion faite: Autobiographie intellectuelle (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 12. For his feeling of exclusion from Catholicism, see Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 19. 15. For the complex relationship between Dalbiez and Maritain, see Agnès Desmazières, “Roland Dalbiez ou la philosophie thomiste à la rencontre de la psychanalyse (1928– 1939),” Recherches Philosophiques 3 (2007): 57–78. As Desmazières shows, in the period 1930–1936, Dalbiez distanced himself from Maritain, and his thesis contains no direct reference to the Thomist revival or to Aquinas. Nevertheless, the book bears the imprint of his earlier engagement with Maritain, which allowed the latter to embrace it a­ fter its publication. 16. Ricoeur, “Mon premier maître en philosophie,” 221. See also Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 12; Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 17–18. For Dalbiez’s hostility to idealism in his courses, see, for instance, Ricoeur, notes from Dalbiez, “Logique Formelle, 1931– 32,” Inventaire 1, PF 2, “Notes de cours et notes de lecture (1930–1936),” Fonds Paul Ricoeur, Bibliothèque de l’IPT, Paris (hereafter cited as Fonds Ricoeur). 17. For his criticism, see Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “La Querelle de l’existentialisme,” in Sens et non-­sens, 5th ed. (Paris: Nagel, 1966), 130–132. 18. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Philosophie de l’existence,” in Parcours II: 1951–1961 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), 248, 253–256. For an account of Merleau-­Ponty’s debt to Marcel, see de Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 2005), chap. 3. 19. See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Le Primat de la perception (Paris: Verdier, 2014), 9. 20. Ibid., 10–11. 21. This is the judgment of the two most distinguished scholars of Merleau-­Ponty’s early ­career. See de Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien, 60–70, 77; Theodore Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale (Dordrecht: Springer, 1971), 11. 22. Aron Gurwitsch met Merleau-­Ponty at Marcel’s home in the fall of 1933. See Ted Toadvine, ed., Merleau-­Ponty’s Reading of Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), x. 23. Merleau-­Ponty, review of Être et Avoir, 1936, in Merleau-­Ponty, Parcours I: 1935–1951 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), 35–44. Significantly for my argument h­ ere, Marcel’s major criticism resembles Maritain’s (ibid., 43–44). 24. For his early stance on the Christian philosophy debates, see Merleau-­Ponty, review of Être et Avoir, 39–40. See also Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie, 26. At this time Merleau-­Ponty also started to frequent Kojève’s course on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. 25. De Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé, 198n. 26. See Henri Thomas, Carnets, 1934–1948 (Paris: Éditions Claire Paulhan, 2008), 283n.



NOTES TO PAGES 313–315 447

27. See Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare (New York: Arcade, 2012), 19; Jean-­Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life: Letters to de Beauvoir, 1926–1939 (London: Penguin, 1994), 151–154. In the Sartre letters, Gibert’s name was replaced by a pseudonym. 28. On this see Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Merleau-­Ponty vivant,” in Temps Modernes, reprinted in Jean-­Paul Sartre, Situations IV, trans. C. Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2009), 271–272. 29. See Maurice de Gandillac, “Nicolas Berdiaeff et Gabriel Marcel,” in Gabriel Marcel: Une Métaphysique de la communion, ed. Joël Bouëssée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), 102. 30. According to Ricoeur’s recollections, he first got to know Merleau-­Ponty in the period 1945–1948. Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 46 31. Ibid., 21. 32. Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 16; Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 21. See also his notes from his visits to the rue de Tournon, PF 14, “Leçons de Morale, entretiens chez Gabriel Marcel (1934–1935),” Fonds Ricoeur. For Ricoeur’s understanding of Marcel in the interwar period, see the draft essay “La Pensée de Gabriel Marcel” (1935), Inventaire 1, PF 14, Fonds Ricoeur. 33. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 71. 34. Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 35. In the notes of Marcel’s soirées, May  11, 1945, is marked as the “Retour de Ricoeur,” “Entretiens du vendredi (janvier 1945–­ juin 1947),” Fonds Marcel. 35. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 35. 36. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Philosophie de l’existence,” 257. See also conversation with Herbert Spiegelberg, quoted in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), 547. According to the historian of philosophy Geraets, Merleau-­Ponty had attended Husserl’s lectures at the Sorbonne in 1929, though it ­doesn’t seem to have influenced his thought substantially ­until four years ­later. See Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie, 7. For a concise overview of Merleau-­Ponty’s reading, see Ted Toadvine, “Merleau-­Ponty’s Reading of Husserl: A Chronological Overview,” in Toadvine, Merleau-­Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. 37. See Sartre, Witness to My Life, 150; de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre, 19n. 38. See Annie Cohen-­Solal, Jean-­Paul Sartre: A Life (New York: New Press, 2005), 151. 39. See Merleau-­Ponty, Le Primat de la perception, 16–18, where he also discusses his reading of German phenomenology. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie, 12. 40. On this, see de Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien, chap. 4. 41. Merleau-­Ponty, review of Être et avoir, 38–39. 42. Merleau-­Ponty, “Christianisme et ressentiment,” in Parcours  I, 33. Merleau-­Ponty also referred to Jean Wahl in this context. 43. The book was not published ­until 1942. 44. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1942), 3. 45. See, e.g., ibid., 37, 135. 46. See ibid., chap. 3. 47. See ibid., 315–316.

448

NOTES TO PAGES 315–317

48. Ibid., 278–279. 49. Ibid., 339. 50. See letter, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty to Van Breda, March 20, 1939, in Merleau-­Ponty, Husserl Archives; Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie, 29–30, 137. 51. Leo Van Breda, “Maurice Merleau-­Ponty et les Husserl-­archives à Louvain,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 67 (1962): 413–414. 52. Letter, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty to Van Breda, October 1, 1942, in Wylleman, Husserl Archives. See also Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), viii n. 53. Van Breda, “Maurice Merleau-­Ponty,” 417–419. 54. Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 17. See also Catherine Goldenstein’s claim that Ricoeur learned of Husserl at Marcel’s study group. Goldenstein, “Chronologie,” in Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 2004), 351. 55. Ricoeur interview with Katherina von Bülow, France Culture, September 13, 1993, cited in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 29. 56. Paul Ricoeur, “Réalisme et Idéalisme: L’Intelligence. Qu’est-ce que comprendre? (May 1935),” Inventaire 1, PF 4, Devoirs et Notes de cours (1931–1933), sheet 19016, Fonds Ricoeur. 57. Ibid., 1–3. 58. Ibid., 8–11. Ricoeur had made a similar argument in non-­phenomenological terms, but with direct reference to Le Senne, in an earlier essay, “L’Idéalisme,” from Lycée, Inventaire 1, PF 4, Réalisme et Idéalisme, Fonds Ricoeur. The archives also contain many notes on Le Senne’s work from the mid-1930s. See box 38, “Rauh, le Roy, Brunschvicg, Blondel, Le Senne, notes de lecture (1933–1939),” Fonds Ricoeur. 59. Paul Ricoeur, “L’Attention: Étude phénoménologique de l’attention et de ses connexions philosophiques,” in Bulletin du Cercle Philosophique de l’Ouest 4 (1940): 18, contained in Inventaire 1, PF 7, Fonds Ricoeur. 60. Ibid., 27. 61. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 77. 62. Ibid., 87. 63. Letter, Ricoeur to Marcel, May  1941, in Correspondance 21, Fonds Marcel. Many thanks to Catherine Goldenstein for drawing my attention to this letter. 64. See Paul Ricoeur, Marcel et Jaspers (Paris: Éditions du temps pres­ent, 1947), 369, 386. He nonetheless suggested that Marcel could learn from Husserl’s expanded notion of reason and the intellect. 65. See Paul Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel et la phénoménologie,” in Entretiens autour de Gabriel Marcel (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1976), 55–64. 66. ­There are impor­t ant differences between The Structure of Be­hav­ior and The Phenomenology of Perception. In the former, Merleau-­Ponty performs his analyses of be­hav­ior and embodied perception from the position of the detached spectator, whereas in the latter he analyzes from the position of the perceiving embodied subject. On this, see Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie. I discuss this difference ­later in the chapter. 67. Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ix.



NOTES TO PAGES 317–322 449

68. Ibid., xxii–­x xiv; see also vii–­v iii. In discussing phenomenology as “constructive” rather than descriptive, he referred to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), viii n. 69. Merleau-­Ponty wrote that the trick of perception was that it allowed us “to forget it as a fact and as perception in the interest of the object which it pres­ents to us and of the rational tradition to which it gives rise.” Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 66. 70. Compare Gabriel Marcel’s criticism of the same idea in Gabriel Marcel, Du Refus à l’invocation (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), 36–37. 71. Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 263; for an analy­sis of “sensation,” see chap. 1. 72. Ibid., 25. 73. Ibid., 31–36. 74. Ibid., 64–65. 75. Ibid., 71. 76. Taylor Carman, Merleau-­Ponty (London: Routledge, 2008), 110. 77. Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 235. 78. Ibid., 230–231. 79. Ibid., 6–7, 13. 80. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 3. The original French title was Philosophie de la volonté, vol. 1, Le Volontaire et l’involontaire. 81. Ibid., 6–8. 82. Ibid., 38–41. 83. Ibid., 61. 84. Ibid., 72. 85. Ibid., 66. 86. Ibid., 62. 87. Ibid., 19. 88. Ibid., 14–15. 89. Ibid., 54. 90. Ibid., 77. 91. Ibid., 91. 92. Paul Ricoeur, “Méthodes et tâches d’une phénoménologie de la volonté,” in À l’École de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 66–67. 93. See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 8–13, 86–88. 94. Ibid., 86. 95. See François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Un philosophe dans son siècle (Paris: Colin, 2012), 62. See “L’Attention,” Séance du 4 Mars 1940, Inventaire 1, PF  7, “L’Attention,” Préparation d’une communication (1938–1946), Fonds Ricoeur. 96. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 150. 97. See ibid., 143–149. 98. Ibid., 156. Ricoeur argues ­here for an essential relationship between attention and time, and ultimately of attention and freedom. Freedom consisted in our ability to elucidate

450

NOTES TO PAGES 322–325

some motivations (­whether rational or emotional) rather than ­others, not in the adherence only to rational motivations or in the freedom from motivations. See 163. 99. Ibid., 169. 100. Ibid., 171–178. This pro­cess was crucial for ­t hose situations where ­t here was an irreconcilable “conflict of duties.” 101. Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 22. 102. See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 17–18. 103. Ibid., 444. 104. For an argument about the fault and how it relates to Kantian philosophy, see Pamela Sue Anderson, Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the ­Will (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993). 105. For an analy­sis of this comparison and its implications for Ricoeur’s ­f uture ­career, see Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986). 106. Ricoeur, “Méthodes et tâches,” 78–83. 107. One could argue that similar considerations led Merleau-­Ponty to his l­ater understanding of “flesh.” 108. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 194. 109. Ibid., 196. 110. Ricoeur, “Méthodes et tâches,” 67–68. Ricoeur d ­ oesn’t mention Merleau-­Ponty ­here, but he relates this argument to Merleau-­Ponty in his introduction to Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, trans. P. Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), xxxviii n. On the importance of focusing on the “progressive abandon” of Husserl’s idealism, rather than simply on the endpoint of that development, see Paul Ricoeur, “Husserl (1858–1938),” in À l’École de la phénoménologie, 17–18. 111. De Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien, 87. Dan Zahavi is right to emphasize Merleau-­ Ponty’s proximity to Husserl, as expressed in his unpublished papers. See Zahavi, “Merleau-­Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal,” in Toadvine, Merleau-­Ponty’s Reading of Husserl. But we should be aware of the chronology: Husserl’s l­ater work attracted ­because it seemed compatible with a Marcelian argument that Merleau-­Ponty had earlier made in opposition to Husserl. 112. Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, vii. 113. Ibid., xi. Merleau-­Ponty recognized moments in Husserl’s writing when the reduction was understood in this way. “For a long time, and even in recent texts, the reduction is presented as the return to a transcendental consciousness before which the world is spread out and completely transparent” (ibid., xii). 114. Ibid., xviii; see also 436: “It is of the essence of my vision to refer not only to an alleged vis­i ­ble entity, but also to a being actually seen.” 115. In the preface Merleau-­Ponty distinguishes between a Kantian form of intentionality (our repre­sen­ta­t ions are repre­sen­t a­t ions of the noumena) and a Husserlian “operative intentionality,” which “produces the natu­ral and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life” (ibid., xx). On this, see de Saint Aubert, Le Scénario cartésien, 136. 116. Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xv. 117. Ibid., xv; see also 429–430.



NOTES TO PAGES 325–327 451

118. André Hayen, “La Phénoménologie de Merleau-­Ponty et la métaphysique,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 50 (1952): 105–106. In a footnote, Hayen argues against Maritain’s insufficiently noetic analy­sis in Les Degrés de savoir. Hayen claims that Merleau-­Ponty is actually closer to Aristotle, but that a greater fidelity to their Aristotelian sources should have led the scholastics “to practice themselves the method that their influence, by the mediation of Brentano and Husserl, was ­going to find again for the moderns—in par­t ic­u ­lar Maurice Merleau-­Ponty” (ibid., 105n). 119. Paul Ricoeur, “Sur la phénoménologie,” in À l’École de la phénoménologie, 168, Ricoeur’s emphases. This is also how Ricoeur understood Husserl’s development, especially in his ­later work, to an engagement with history. See Ricoeur, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire,” in À l’École de la phénoménologie, 19–64. 1 20. See Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 87. 121. Ricoeur, introduction, xxxiv. 1 22. Ibid., xvii. 1 23. Ricoeur, “Husserl (1858–1938),” 14–15. Tellingly, Ricoeur’s most sustained analy­sis of Husserl’s Méditations cartésiennes, which makes this argument, appeared in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain (the renamed Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie). Paul Ricoeur, “Étude sur les Méditations cartésiennes de Husserl,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain (1954). 1 24. Ricoeur, introduction, xxiii–­x xiv. Ricoeur suggested that Husserl had only pointed to this “proto-­constitution” in Ideas. 1 25. Ricoeur, “Sur la phénoménologie,” 168; see also Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 22. 1 26. Ricoeur, “Sur la phénoménologie,” 182. see also Ricoeur, “Husserl (1858–1938),” 9. 127. Paul Ricoeur, “Notes sur les rapports de la philosophie et le christianisme,” Le Semeur 38 (1935): 552–555. The Thomists, of course, believed in the Fall, and the Barthians accepted that we w ­ ere created in the image of God. The question came down to the extent to which the former had undermined the latter. 1 28. Ricoeur, “Notes sur les rapports,” 556–557. Ricoeur’s archives contain a large file of notes on the Christian philosophy debates, especially Marcel, Gilson, and Maritain, alongside a range of Protestant thinkers. See Inventaire 1, PF 9, Philosophie Chrétienne, Fonds Ricoeur. 1 29. Ricoeur had first framed his phenomenological argument in terms of its relationship to Thomism in his 1940 essay “Attention,” Inventaire 1, PF 7, Fonds Ricoeur. The religious implications are also front and center in the very first outline of the proj­ect, composed during Ricoeur’s captivity during the war. See 13 V I, “Texte de présentation de la thèse pour l’obtention d’une bourse,” Fonds Ricoeur. 130. See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 190–197, 384–409. Ricoeur l­ ater suggested that the very notion of an “absolute involuntary,” with which he criticized the Cartesian cogito, was an inheritance from his old teacher. Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 13. 131. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 170–171, 182n. 132. Ibid., 190–191. Over the next few pages Ricoeur engages in a deconstructive reading of Thomism, which “takes the ‘I’ rather than nature as the root center of perspective. . . . ​I n brief we could say that Thomism tends t­ oward the recognition of the power of thinking without recognizing absolute originality in it. . . . ​[ It]

452

NOTES TO PAGES 328–331

incorporates the ele­ments of an autonomous eidetics of the subject without recognizing it” (193). 133. Ibid., 467. Ultimately it also implied the hope for something beyond this world, “hope which awaits something ­else” (ibid., 480). 134. Ibid., 468. Ricoeur argued that the “philosophy of Transcendence” completes the “philosophy of conciliation” but cannot be derived from it. 135. Ibid., 472. For Ricoeur’s reading of phenomenology and how it relates to his l­ater hermeneutics, see Bruce Bégout, “L’Héritier hérétique: Ricoeur et la phénoménologie,” Esprit 323 (2006): 191–205. 136. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 191–192, 471–472. 137. Ricoeur, Marcel et Jaspers, 34–37. See also Paul Ricoeur, “La Renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne par les philosophies de l’existence” in Le Problème de la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949), where he talks about the “neutralization of the most radical existential motif of the concrete ­human.” 138. As we saw, their reading of phenomenology allowed progressives like Van Breda and de Waelhens to align Thomism with Christian existentialism. 139. The paper was published in Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); the discussion can be found in Merleau-­Ponty, Parcours II: 1951–1961 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000). 1 40. Merleau-­Ponty, “L’Homme et l’adversité,” in Parcours II, 328–330. 141. Quoted in ibid., 335–337. 1 42. De Waelhens was close to Merleau-­Ponty from just ­a fter the liberation, and Merleau-­ Ponty asked him to write the preface. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Alphonse de Waelhens,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 87 (1982): 434. 143. Alphonse de Waelhens, “Une Philosophie de l’ambiguité,” in Merleau-­Ponty, La Structure du comportement, v–­x iii. 1 44. Ibid., xvii. 145. Earlier in the book, de Waelhens did develop a parallel criticism that although ­humans disclosed truth, they ­were not its mea­sure. Alphonse de Waelhens, Une Philosophie de l’ambiguïté: L’Existentialisme de Maurice Merleau-­Ponty (Louvain: Éditions de l’Université de Louvain, 1951), 172–174. 1 46. Ibid., 386. 147. Ibid., 389. 1 48. Ibid., 390–391. 1 49. De Saint Aubert makes a similar point. See his Le Scénario cartésien, 96n. 150. De Waelhens, Une Philosophie de l’ambiguïté, 392–395. In making this argument, de Waelhens referred to Jaspers (ibid., 405). 151. Merleau-­Ponty, “L’Homme et l’adversité,” 370–371. Thévanaz was explic­itly referring to a secularized “Christian existentialism,” though, as we have seen, that term was ambiguous, and Merleau-­Ponty’s response also counts for the Thomists. 152. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Querelle de l’existentialisme,” 88. 153. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Métaphysique dans l’homme,” in Sens et non-­sens, 167. 154. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Querelle de l’existentialisme,” 131; see also 133.



NOTES TO PAGES 331–334 453

155. At about the same time, Merleau-­Ponty made a similar argument referring to modernism. See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Foi et bonne Foi,” in Sens et non sens, 313. See also Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 456. 156. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2016), 392–394. 157. In his essay Merleau-­Ponty interestingly breaks with his earlier understanding of their opposition and aligns Marcel with Thomism, not Pascal. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Querelle de l’existentialisme,” 130–131. It is significant on this point that Merleau-­Ponty admits that Sartre and Marcel differ in only minor ways, and argues that the logic of Marcel’s thought leads to an “affirmation of man” rather than of God (ibid., 132; see also 137). See also his discussion of Thomism and its relationship to con­temporary Catholic students in Merleau-­Ponty, Parcours II, 298–299. 158. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Philosophie de l’existence,” 258–259; Ricoeur, Réflexion faite, 18–19. 159. See, for example, Maxime Chastaing, “L’On,” Esprit 2 (1934). 160. Paul Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Mounier: Une Philosophie personnaliste,” in Histoire et vérité, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1964), 103–106. 161. Paul Ricoeur, “Note sur la personne,” Le Semeur 38 (1935): 437. 162. See Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 47–63; Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviction, 23–28. 163. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 131; Ricoeur, La Critique et la conviciton, 40–41. 164. Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Mounier,” 115. 165. Quoted in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 159. 166. Ricoeur, “La Crise de la démocratie et de la conscience chrétienne,” in Christianisme social (1947), quoted in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 134. 167. Ricoeur, “Le Christianisme et le sens de l’histoire,” in Histoire et vérité, 82–85. Ricoeur admitted that “large cosmic catastrophies” could set this pro­g ress back. 168. Ibid., 80. 169. Ricoeur ­here referred to “fragmented ­labor, the slavery of users with re­spect to the goods of civilization, total war, the abstract injustice of the ­g reat bureaucracies, ­etc.” (ibid., 86–87). Moreover, Ricoeur noted, dif­fer­ent social groups would come to dif­ fer­ent conclusions about pro­g ress (ibid., 91–92). 170. Ibid., 97–98. 171. Ibid., 100. 172. Hervé le Baut, “Merleau-­Ponty entre Mounier et le Père Maydieu,” Transversalités 4 (2009): 136. 173. See John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc’s Ordre Nouveau, 1930–2000. (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014), 149. For the circumstances of his departure, see Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie, 26. 174. Le Baut, “Merleau-­Ponty,” 134–135. 175. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Mort d’Emmanuel Mounier,” Les Temps Modernes 5 (1950): 1906. 176. See le Baut, “Merleau-­Ponty,” 135, 140–143. For an analy­sis of Merleau-­Ponty’s understanding of religion and its relationship to politics, see Gilles Labelle, “Merleau-­Ponty et le christianisme,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 58 (2002): 317–340.

454

NOTES TO PAGES 334–339

177. It was prob­a bly due to his work on this article that, in February of that year, Merleau-­ Ponty wrote to de Gandillac, who was in Germany at the time, to procure for him a copy of Scheler’s Formalism. De Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé, 178. Nevertheless, Merleau-­Ponty does not refer to Scheler’s Formalism, which de Gandillac would translate in 1955, even though his discussion is clearly guided by it. Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty, “Christianisme et ressentiment,” in Parcours I, 20n. 178. Merleau-­Ponty, “Christianisme et ressentiment,” 14–15. 179. Ibid., 16. 180. Ibid., 20–24. 181. Ibid., 25. 182. Ibid., 26n. Merleau-­Ponty hardly diverges from Scheler in his account, but in the final two pages he makes a criticism that tries to draw Scheler even further in this direction, challenging ­t hose moments when Scheler suggested that Christian values ­were compatible with vital ones like war. See ibid., 31–33. 183. See le Baut, “Merleau-­Ponty,” 143–144. 184. Merleau-­Ponty, “Foi et bonne foi,” 306–307. 185. Merleau-­Ponty, “Christianisme et ressentiment,” 24. 186. Merleau-­Ponty, “Foi et bonne foi,” 316. 187. Ibid., 313–316. 188. See, for instance, Merleau-­Ponty, “Foi et bonne foi,” 308; Merleau-­Ponty, Parcours II, 298; Merleau-­Ponty, Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier, 397–398. For the relationship between Merleau-­Ponty’s views on religion and his views on Marxism, see A. Rabil, Merleau-­Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 215–235. 189. Merleau-­Ponty, “La Querelle de l’existentialisme,” 136–143. 190. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Prob­lem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 109. 191. Ibid., 23–24. 192. Ibid., 58. 193. See Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 281–282. 194. Merleau-­Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 18. 195. Ibid., 153. 196. Ricoeur, review of Merleau-­Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, Esprit 2 (1948): 913. 197. Ibid., 914–916. It is telling that in making this argument, Ricoeur drew on the Schelerian language of historicization and the meeting of Marxism and Chris­t ian­ity, which we discussed in Chapter 8. 198. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Les Lettres d’une rupture,” in Parcours II. 199. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 200. On Merleau-­Ponty’s development on this point, see Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-­Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 82–86; Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 12.



NOTES TO PAGES 339–344 455

201. In Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-­Ponty had compared Sartre’s attempt to align his existentialism with Communism, to the confrontation of Christian philosophies and historical Chris­t ian­ity (ibid., 100). 202. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 11–15. 203. Ibid., 52–55. This is why he explic­itly rejected Maritain’s philosophy, which though rightly using philosophy to undermine false absolutes, unjustifiably sought to protect Maritain’s own God from this criticism. 204. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Christianisme et philosophie,” in Signes, 176–179; see also 183–184. 205. Ibid., 179. 2 06. Merleau-­Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie, 67–73. Merleau-­Ponty nevertheless suggested that philosophy was not thereby neutral, b­ ecause some responses to ambiguity (like Thomism and Cartesianism) obscured it, and thus should be rejected as false absolutes. 207. For an account of Merleau-­Ponty’s ­later understanding of religion, especially in his unpublished works—­where, while retaining a strict opposition to the rationalist theological tradition (­here represented by Leibniz), he comes to embrace Pascal even more fully—­see Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “ ‘L’Incarnation change tout’: Merleau-­Ponty critique de la ‘théologie explicative,’ ” Transversalités 112 (2009): 147–186.

Epilogue 1. See Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Deconstruction of Chris­tian­ity, 2 vols. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005–2013). 2. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, The Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 3. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus (Munich: W. Fink, 2003); John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the F ­ uture of Christian Theology (­Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010). 4. Georges Batailles, Oeuvres complètes, vols. 5–6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language Countermemory, and Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29. 5. Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, eds., The Legitimacy of the M ­ iddle Ages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 6. For Levinas’s relationship to Marcel, see Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlives of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago

456

NOTES TO PAGES 344–348

Press, 2016), 37–38, 67–74. For Vattimo and Eco, see “Intervista a Gianni Vattimo,” http://­movi100​.­azionecattolica​.­it​/­​?­p ​= ­605#more​-­605. 7. To take just a ­couple of examples, see Derrida, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique du secret” (1949), box 1, folder 8; Derrida, “Les Dieux et Dieu: Les Dieux existent-­ils? L’existence de Dieu, fait-­elle problème?” (1949), box 1, folder 12; Derrida “L’Homme est il la mésure de toute chose” (1950), box 1, folder 14; all in Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-­C001), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine (hereafter cited as Irvine). 8. See especially his course, Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?,” Course 1962– 1963, box 7, folder 9, Irvine; and Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Course 1963– 1964, box 8, folder 12, Irvine. 9. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 69. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pt. 2. 10. See Edward Baring and Peter Gordon, eds., The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 11. See, for instance, the work of Adriaan Peperzak. 12. Anthony Steinbock, “Evidence in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience” in The Oxford Handbook of Con­temporary Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 587. On the aporias of ­t hese forms of givenness and their necessary confrontation with non-­g ivenness, see François-­David Sebbah, Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 13. See Dominique Janicaud et  al., Phenomenology and “The Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 14. Quentin Meillassoux, ­After Finitude, trans. R. Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 45. 15. Quoted by Jeff Israely, “A Resounding Eco,” Time, Sunday, June  5, 2005, http://­ content​.­t ime​.­com​/­t ime​/­magazine​/­article​/­0,9171,1069054,00​.­html. 16. See Emmanuel Levinas, review of Hans Reiner, Das Phänomen des Glaubens, in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 124 (November 1937): 259–260. 17. Jean-­Luc Marion, God without Being, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2, 73–83. 18. Ibid., 199–236. See also Marion’s account of his development on this question in the preface to the second edition, xxx. 19. Explic­itly, Meillassoux compares his approach to Descartes’s, but the parallels with Maritain are more substantive. 20. Meillassoux seeks to challenge a range of dif­fer­ent modern philosophies, but he clearly takes his lead from Husserl’s correlation in Ideas, and groups all forms u­ nder the broader label “correlationism.” See Meillassoux, ­After Finitude, 6–18. 21. Ibid., 82, my emphasis. 22. See ibid., 65ff. We should recall ­here the subtitle of Maritain’s book: “The First Princi­ples of Speculative Reason.”



NOTES TO PAGE 348 457

23. See ibid., 26–27. 24. Ibid., 45–49. 25. Ibid., 60. 26. Quentin Meillassoux, “Divine Inexistence,” in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), esp. 177–182. 27. Meillassoux, ­After Finitude, 63. 28. In his thesis, Meillassoux admitted that his theory was ultimately an “irreligious” version of religious arguments. Meillassoux, “Divine Inexistence,” 179. See also his conclusion, where he relates his argument to medieval Catholic philosophy (228ff).

Selected Bibliography

Archives BELGIUM Archives de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, Louvain-­l a-­Neuve, Belgium (ISP Archives) Fonds Leon Noël, Louvain-­la-­Neuve, Belgium (Fonds Noël) Fonds Maurice Blondel, Louvain-­la-­neuve, Belgium (Fonds Blondel) Archives of the Husserlarchiv, Leuven, Belgium (Husserl Archives) FR ANCE Fonds Alexandre Koyré, at the Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris (Fonds Koyré) Fonds Gabriel Marcel, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Fonds Marcel) Fonds Alexandre Kojève, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Fonds Kojève) Fonds Jacques Maritain, Kolbsheim (Fonds Maritain) Fonds Paul Ricoeur, Bibliothèque de l’IPT, Paris (Fonds Ricoeur) GERMANY Freiburg Universitätsarchiv Joseph Geyser Nachlass, University of Freiburg Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Erich Przywara Nachlass, Jesuit Provinz, Munich, Germany (Przywara Archives) Alexander Pfänder Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (Pfänderiana) Johannes Daubert Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (Daubertiana) Conrad-­Martius Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (Conrad-­Martiusiana)

459

460

Selected Bibliography

Carl Muth Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (Ana 390) Max Scheler Nachlass, Munich Staatsbibliothek (Ana 315) ITALY Archivio Vecchio del Rettorato, and Fondo Corrispondenza, in Archivio generale per la storia dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy (AGSUCSC) Fondo Carte Agostino Gemelli, in AGSUCSC Fondo Carte Mons. Francesco Olgiati, in AGSUCSC USA Gabriel Marcel Archives, Henry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (Marcel Archives) Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-­C001), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine UNESCO Archives (http://­w ww​.­unesco​.­org​/­archives​/ ­)

Journals Consulted Archives de Philosophie (France) Archivio di filosofia (Italy) Ateneum Kapłańskie (Poland) Bulletin Thomiste (Belgium) Catholica (Germany) Ciencia Tomista (Spain) Civiltà Cattolica (Italy) Die Schildgenossen (Germany) Die Tatwelt (Germany) Dieu Vivant (France) Divus Thomas (Italy) Esprit (France) Estudios eclesiásticos (Spain) Études Philosophiques (France) Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (Italy) Giornale de metafisica (Italy) The Harvard Theological Review (United States) Hochland (Germany) Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung (Germany) Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie (­later Divus Thomas) (Germany and Switzerland) The Journal of Philosophy (United States) The Journal of Religion (United States) Kantstudien (Germany) La Vie Intellectuelle (France) Le Semeur (France)



Selected Bibliography 461

Les Temps Modernes (France) Log­os: Rivista internazionale di filosofia (Italy) Miesięcznik Katechetyczny i Wychowawczy (Poland) The Modern Schoolman (United States) The New Scholasticism (United States) Nouvelle Revue Théologique (Belgium) The Philosophical Review (United States) Philosophisches Jahrbuch (Germany) Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (United States) Prad (Poland) Przegląd Powszechny (Poland) Recherches de Science Religieuse (France) Recherches Philosophiques (France) Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (France) Revue Internationale de Philosophie (Belgium) Revue Néo- ­Scolastique (­later Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie, ­later Revue Philosophique de Louvain) (Belgium) Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger (France) Revue Thomiste (France) Ricerche filosofiche (Italy) Rivista di filosofia (Italy) Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (Italy) Roczniki Filozoficzne (Poland) Scholastik (Holland) Stimmen der Zeit (Germany) Studia Catholica (Holland) Synthese (Holland) Teologisk Tidskrift (Denmark) Theologie und Glaube (Germany) Theologische Rundschau (Germany) Thomistisch tijdschrift voor katholiek Kultuurleven (Belgium) Tijdschrift voor philosophie (Belgium) Verbum (Poland) Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche (Germany) Zwischen den Zeiten (Germany)

Suggestions for Further Reading Ackermann, Konrad. Der Widerstand der Monatsschrift Hochland gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1965. Aertsen, Jan. “Truth as Transcendental in Thomas Aquinas.” Topoi 11 (1992). Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Agard, Olivier. “Max Scheler et la Jugendbewegung.” Recherches Germaniques 39 (2009).

462

Selected Bibliography

Arjakovsky, Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Rus­sian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925 / 1940. Translated by Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Arnáiz, Marcelino. Psicología fundada en la experiencia. Madrid: Sáenz de Jubera, 1914. Aschheim, Stephen. The Nietz­sche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Bair, Dierdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1990. Banfi, Antonio. Principi di una teoria della ragione. Turin: G. B. Paravia, 1926. Baring, Edward. “Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before Sartre.” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 41 (2015). —­—­—. The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Baring, Edward, and Peter Gordon, eds. The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Part I, vol. 1. Translated by G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: Clark, 1975. Baruzi, Jean. Philosophes et savants français du XXe siècle. Vol. 1: Philosophie générale et métaphysique. Paris: Alcan, 1926. Batailles, Georges. Oeuvres complètes. Vols. 5–6. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Bausola, Adriano, ed. Francesco Olgiati, nel centenario della nascita. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1986. Beckmann, Beate. Phänomenologie des religiösen Erlebnisses: Religionsphilosophische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Adolf Reinach und Edith Stein. Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2003. Bell, David. Husserl. London: Routledge, 1989. Bello, Angelo Ales. Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-­Martius, Gerda Walther. Bari: G. Laterza, 2011. Bengtsson, Jan. Den Fenomenologiska rörelsen i Sverige: Mottagande och inflytande, 1900– 1968. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 1991. Berdiaev, Nicolai. Cinq méditations sur l’existence. Paris: Aubier, 1936. —­—­—. Esprit et liberté. Paris: Aubier, 1943. —­—­—. Essai d’autobiographie spirituelle. Paris: Buchet-­Chastel, 1979. Berdyaev, Nikolai. “The End of the Re­nais­sance I.” Slavic Review (June 1925). —­—­—. “The End of the Re­nais­sance II.” Slavic Review (December 1925). Berger, David. In der Schule des Hl. Thomas von Aquin. Bonn: Nova et Vetera, 2005. Berger, Gaston. Le Cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Aubier, 1941. —­—­—. Recherches sur les conditions de la connaissance. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1941. Bernet, Rudolf. “Husserls Bregriff des Noema.” In Husserl-­Ausgabe und Husserl-­Forschung, edited by S. Ijsselling. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990. Besse, Clément. Deux centres du mouvement thomiste: Rome et Louvain. Paris: Letouzey et Ané éditions, 1902.



Selected Bibliography 463

Bianco, Giuseppe. Après Bergson: Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015. Biemel, Walter. “Dank an Löwen.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 22 (1989). Binkowski, Johannes. Jugend als Wegbereiter. Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 1981. Bleistein, Roman. Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen. Frankfurt: Knecht, 1989. Boelaars, Herman. De Intentionaliteit der kennis bij Edmund Husserl. Nijmegen: N. V. Centrale Drukkerij, 1940. Boileau, David. Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir. Belgium: Peeters, 1996. Boudic, Galvin. Esprit, 1944–1982. Paris: IMEC, 2005. Bouëssée, Joël, ed. Gabriel Marcel: Une Métaphysique de la communion. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. Boyer, Carlo, ed. Esistentizalismo. Rome: Casa editrice Marietti, 1947. Breckman, Warren. Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-­Marxism and Radical Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Brentano, Franz. Psy­chol­ogy from an Empirical Standpoint. 2nd ed. Translated by Antos. C. Rancurello et al. New York: Routledge, 1995. Breuer, Marc. Religiöser Wandel als Säkularisierungsfolge. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012. Burgin, Angus. The G ­ reat Persuasion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Büttemeyer, Wilhelm. Ernesto Grassi: Humanismus zwischen Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus. Freiburg im Breisgau: K. Alber, 2009. Buttiglione, Rocco. Karol Wojtyła. Translated by Paolo Guietti. G ­ rand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997. Cairns, Dorion. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. Caputo, John. “Continental Philosophy of Religion Then, Now, and Tomorrow.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2012). —­—­—. Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Carlini, Armando. Alla ricerca di me stesso. Florence: Sansoni, 1951. —­—­—. Filosofia e religione nel pensiero di Mussolini. Rome: Istituto, 1934. —­—­—. Il Mito del realismo. Florence: Sansoni, 1936. —­—­—. Orientamenti della filosofia contemporanea. Rome: Critica Fascista, 1931. —­—­—. Principi metafisici del mondo storico: Con un’appendice su l’esistenzialismo. Urbino: Argalia, 1943. Carman, Taylor. Merleau-­Ponty. London: Routledge, 2008. —­—­—. “Phenomenology as Rigorous Science.” In The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Casella, Mario. L’Azione Cattolica del novecento. Rome: AVE, 2003. Caspar, Bernhard. “Das Theologische-­Scholastische Umfeld.” Quaestio 1 (2001). Cavarero, Gianfranco. Agostino e Pascal nel pensiero di Paul Ludwig Landsberg. Milan: Alboversorio, 2013. Celms, Theodor. Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls. Riga: Walters & Rapa, 1928. Chadwick, Owen. A History of the Popes, 1830–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Chappel, James. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Making of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. —­—­—. “Slaying the Leviathan.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012. Charle, Christoph. “Grundlagen.” In Geschichte der Universität in Europa, vol. 3, Vom 19. Jahrhundert zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993–. —­—­—. La République des universitaires, 1870–1940. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Cheetham, Tom. All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012. —­—­—. Green Man, Earth Angel. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. Chestov, Léon. Kierkegaard et la pensée existentielle. Paris: J. Vrin, 1936. Clément, Olivier. Berdiaev: Un philosophe russe en France. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991. Cohen-­Solal, Annie. Jean-­Paul Sartre: A Life. New York: New Press, 2005. Cole, Andrew. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Cole, Andrew, and D. Vance Smith, eds. The Legitimacy of the ­Middle Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Conill, Jesús. “La Fenomenologia en Zubiri.” Philosophia 4 (1997). Conrad-­Martius, Hedwig. Briefe an Hedwig Conrad-­Martius. Munich: Kösel, 1960. Copenhaver, Brian. From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Coreth, Emerich, ed. Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 2. Graz: Styria, 1987–. Corominas, Jordi. Xavier Zubiri: La Solitude sonore. Vol. 1. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. Coyne, Ryan. Heidegger’s Confessions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Craig, John. Scholarship and Nation Building. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Crowell, Steven Galt. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. D’Acunto, Giuseppe. Tomismo esistenziale: Fabro, Gilson, Maritain. Morolo, FR: IF Press, 2011. Dahlstrom, Daniel. Heidegger’s Concept of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Damberg, Wilhelm. “Jugendbewegung, Liturgie und Kirchenbegriff.” In Kirchenrecht und Theologie im Leben der Kirche, edited by Rüdiger Althaus. Essen: Ludgerus, 2007. de Beauvoir, Simone. Diary of a Philosophy Student. Vol. 1: 1926–1927. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. —­—­—. Letters to Sartre. Translated by Quentin Hoare. New York: Arcade, 2012. —­—­—. Memoirs of a Dutiful D ­ aughter. Translated by J. Kirkup. London: Penguin, 1963. de Gandillac, Maurice. Le Siècle traversé: Souvenirs de neuf décennies. Paris: Michel, 1998. de Lubac, Henri, ed. Gabriel Marcel-­G aston Fessard, correspondance (1934–1971). Paris: Beauchesne, 1985. de Maria, Amalia. Augusto Guzzo: La Vita e le opere. Milan: Mimesis, 2012. de Raeymaeker, Louis. De philosophie van Scheler. Amsterdam: De Spieghel, 1934. de Saint Aubert, Emmanuel. Le Scénario cartésien. Paris: Vrin, 2005. —­—­—. “ ‘L’Incarnation change tout’: Merleau-­Ponty critique de la ‘théologie explicative.’ ” Transversalités 112 (2009).



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de Waelhens, Alphonse. La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger. Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1942. —­—­—. Une Philosophie de l’ambiguïté: L’Existentialisme de Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. Louvain: Éditions de l’Université de Louvain, 1951. de Reyna, Alberto Wagner. La Ontología fundamental de Heidegger: Su motivo y significación. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S.A., 1939. Delp, Alfred. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Knecht, 1984. Denker, Alfred, Hans-­Helmut Gander, and Holger Zaborowski. “Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens.” Heidegger Jahrbuch 1 (2004). Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983. Dondeyne, Albert. Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine. Louvain: Publications de l’Université de Louvain, 1951. Dosse, François. Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie. Paris: La Découverte, 1997. —­—­—. Paul Ricoeur: Un philosophe dans son siècle. Paris: Colin, 2012. du Bos, Charles. Journal, 1930–1939. Paris: Buchet-­Chastel, 2005. Dubois, James. Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. Dupont, Christian. Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. École, Jean. Les Grandes notions de la métaphysique lavellienne et son vocabulaire. Genoa: L’arcipelago, 2002. Ederer, Martin. “Propaganda Wars: Stimmen der Zeit and the Nazis, 1933–1935.” Catholic Historical Review, July 2004. Eklund, Harold. Evangelisches und Katholisches in M. Schelers Ethik. Upsala: Almqvist och Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1932. Esposito, Roberto. Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Faber, Richard, and Elmar Locher, eds. Italienische Faschismus und deutschsprachiger Katholizismus. Wurzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 2013. Fabro, Cornelio. Introduzione all’esistenzialismo. Segni: Edivi, 2009. Feldes, Joachim. “Das Phänomenologenheim: Der Bergzaberner Kreis im Kontext der frühen phänomenologischen Bewegung.” PhD diss., Charles University Prague, 2013. Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. “Husserl’s Notion of Noema.” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969). —­—­—. “Noema and Meaning in Husserl.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990). Foucault, Michel. Language, Countermemory, Practice. Translated by Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Frege, Gottlob. “Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic.” Translated by E. W. Kluge. Mind 81, no. 323 (July, 1972).

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Frings, Manfred. The Mind of Max Scheler. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1997. Fürst, Walter, ed. “Dialektische Theologie.” In Scheidung und Bewährung. Munich: Kaiser, 1966. Gallagher, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. Gallo, Ruben. Freud’s Mexico. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Gehr, Richard. The Aesthetics of Horror: The Life and Thought of Richard Von Kralik. Boston: Brill, 2003. Gemelli, Agostino. Il Mio contributo alla filosofia neoscolastica. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1932. Gentile, Giovanni. I Problemi della scolastica e il pensiero italiano. 2nd ed. Bari: G. Laterza, 1922. Geraets, Theodore. Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale. Dordrecht: Springer, 1971. Gerl, Hanna-­Barbara. Romano Guardini, 1885–1968. Mainz: Matthias-­Grünewald-­Verlag, 1985. Geroulanos, Stefanos. An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Geyser, Joseph. Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre. Münster: Schnöningh, 1909. —­—­—. Grundlegung der empirischen Psychologie. Bonn: Hanstein, 1902. —­—­—. Max Schelers Phänomenologie der Religion. Freiburg: Herder, 1924. —­—­—. Neue und Alte Wege der Philosophie. Münster: Schöningh, 1916. Gilson, Étienne. Le Réalisme méthodique. Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1935. —­—­—. Le Thomisme. 4th ed. Paris: J. Vrin 1942. —­—­—. Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance. Paris: J. Vrin, 1939. Gilson, Étienne, and Jacques Maritain. Correspondance, 1923–1971. Paris: J. Vrin, 1991. Gleason, Philip. Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth ­Century. Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1995. Glendinning, Simon. The Idea of a Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Gordin, Michael. Scientific Babel. London: Profile Books, 2015. Gordon, Peter E. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. —­—­—. Continental Divide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. —­—­—. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Grabmann, Martin. Der Gegenwartswert der geschichtlichen Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Philosophie. Vienna: Herder, 1913. Grasselli, Giulio. Storia di una mente: Testimonianze del nostro tempo. Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1932. Grimme, Adolf. “Die Frohe Botschaft der husserlschen Philosophie.” Der Falke 1 (1917). Gründler, Otto. Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie auf phänomenologische Grundlage. Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1922. Gruss, Heribert. Transzendenzerkenntnis im phänomenologischen Ansatz. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980.



Selected Bibliography 467

Guardini, Romano. The Church and the Catholic, and the Spirit of the Liturgy. London: Sheed and Ward, 1935. Gubser, Michael. The Far Reaches: Phenomenology and Social Renewal in Central Eu­rope. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Guignon, Charles, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Guilead, Reuben. De la phénoménologie à la science de la croix. Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1974. Gurian, Waldemar. Die Deutsche Jugendbewegung. Habelschwerdt: Franke, 1924. Guy, Alain. Histoire de la philosophie espagnole. Toulouse: Le Mirail, 1983. Guzzo, Augusto. Giudizio e Azione. Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1928. —­—­—. Sguardi su la filosofia contemporanea. Rome: Perrella, 1940. —­—­—. Verità e realtà: Apologia dell’idealismo. Turin: Paravia, 1925. Hammerschlag, Sarah. Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlives of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962. —­—­—. Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern. Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 2010. —­—­—. Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. Heinemann, Fritz. Neue Wege der Philosophie. Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1929. Heinrich, Franz. Die Bünde katholischer Jugend-­Bewegung. Munich: Kösel, 1968. Hellman, John. The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc’s Ordre Nouveau, 1930– 2000. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014. —­—­—. Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by B. Bonowitz. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. Hering, Jean. Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse. Paris: Alcan, 1925. Hickerson, Ryan. The History of Intentionality. London: Continuum, 2007. Holsinger, Bruce. The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Housset, Emmanuel. Husserl et l’idée de Dieu. Paris: Cerf, 2010. Hubert, Bernard, ed. Jacques Maritain en Eu­rope: La Réception de sa pensée. Paris: Beauchesne 1996. Husserl, Edmund. Collected Works. Vol. 10, Philosophy of Arithmetic. Translated by Dallas Willard. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. —­—­—. Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by W. Boyce Gibson. London: Routledge, 2010. —­—­—. Logical Investigations. 2 vols. Translated by J. Findlay. London: Routledge, 2001. —­—­—. Méditations cartésiennes. New ed. Translated by E. Levinas and M. Peiffer. Paris: J. Vrin, 1992. —­—­—. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft.” Log­os 1 (1911). Ingarden, Roman. On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. Translated by A. Hannibalsson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.

468

Selected Bibliography

Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. Translated by Gillian Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Jambet, Christine, ed. Henry Corbin. Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 1981. Janicaud, Dominique. Heidegger en France. Vol. 1. Paris: Albin Michel, 2001. Janicaud, Dominique, et. al. Phenomenology and “The Theological Turn”: The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Jaspers, Karl. Existenzphilosophie. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer, 1956. —­—­—. Philosophie. 3 vols. 4th ed. Berlin: Springer-­Verlag, 1973. Jolivet, Régis. Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933. Jorland, Gérard. La Science dans la philosophie: Les Recherches épistémologiques d’Alexandre Koyré. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Keller, Thomas. Deutsch-­f ranzösische Dritte-­Weg-­Diskurse. Munich: F. Fink, 2001. Kisiel, Theodore. “The Genesis of Being and Time.” Man and World: A Philosophical Review 25, no. 1 (1992). —­—­—. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. —­—­—­, ed. Heidegger’s Way of Thought. 2nd ed. London: Continuum, 2002. Kisiel, Theodore, and John van Buren, eds. Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Kojève, Alexandre. “Note inédite sur Hegel et Heidegger.” Rue Descartes 7 (June 1993). Kors, Alan. Atheism in France (1650–1729). Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1990. Kosicki, Piotr. Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. —­—­—. “L’Avènement des intellectuels catholiques.” Vingtième-­Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 2 (2009). Kremer, René. Le Néo-­réalisme américain. Paris: F. Alcan, 1920. Krieg, Robert. Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican II. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Kristeva, Julia. The Incredible Need to Believe. Translated by Beverley Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Kugelmann, Robert. Psy­chol­ogy and Catholicism: Contested Bound­aries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kuhn, Helmut, ed. Die Münchener Phänomenologie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975. Labelle, Gilles. “Merleau-­Ponty et le christianisme.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 58 (2002). LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Lacau St. Guily, Camille. Henri Bergson en Espagne: Une histoire contrariée: 1875–1930. Paris: Harmattan, 2015. Landsberg, Paul-­Louis. Essai sur l’expérience de la mort. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936. Landsberg, Paul Ludwig. Die Welt des Mittelalters und Wir. 3rd ed. Bonn: F. Cohen, 1923.



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Acknowl­edgments

Intellectual history is driven by the insight that, however solitary

academic work might feel, we never think alone. In this book I hope to have shown that this is true for phenomenology: to understand its history, we need to pay attention to the hundreds of scholars across the world who engaged with the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler. It is also true of my own work. I made the first forays into this research almost ten years ago. ­Here I acknowledge a de­cade’s worth of debts. Reconstructing the academic networks of early twentieth-­century Eu­rope, I have drawn on the archives of a number of institutions and individuals, and I’d like to thank the archivists and scholars who guided me through them: Maurizio Romano at the Sacred Heart University in Milan, Françoise Mirguet at the archives of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain-­La-­Neuve, Doris Schweitzer at Freiburg University, Thomas Vongehr at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Jean Leclercq at the Maurice Blondel archives, Anne Verdure-­Mary at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, René Mougel at the Maritain archives, Clemens Brodkorb at the Przywara archive in Munich, Anne-­Marie Kaindl and Dietrich Gottstein at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) in Munich, Catherine Goldenstein at the Fonds Ricoeur, and Anabel Vazquez at the Centre Alexandre Koyré. 477

478

Acknowl­edgments

The story I tell ­here is a truly international one, and when it has extended beyond the English-­French-­, German-­, and Italian-­speaking worlds, I have been able to draw on the help of an exceptionally talented group of gradu­ate students. I am very grateful to Erica Ramirez and l­ ater Candela Potente for helping me read Spanish-­language documents, to Pehr Englèn for guiding me through the Scandinavian scholarship, to Hannah Vandenbussche for reading Flemish and Dutch, and to David Dunning for his help with Polish texts. In addition, Massimiliano Luca Delfino looked over my readings and translations of Italian texts. Pehr Englèn was also enormously helpful at the beginning of this proj­ect, when he compiled a general bibliography of the phenomenological reception before 1950. I have been lucky enough to receive financial support from a number of institutions. A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research grant funded a research year in 2012–2013 at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg in Konstanz. I am very grateful to Fred Girod and Rudolf Schlögl for their support during my time ­there. At that time, I was able to conduct research outside of Germany with the support of a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society. In 2016 and 2017, I completed the research and writing of this proj­ect thanks to fellowships from the American Council of Learned Socie­ties (ACLS) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, my work over the past eight years has been encouraged and supported by Drew University and my colleagues ­there. My research has taken me across the world, examining realms of intellectual history that w ­ ere entirely new to me, and I am very grateful for the insights that I have gained from the many interlocutors who have helped me on my way: Guiseppe Bianco, Peter Gordon, Catherine Keller, Seung-­Kee Lee, Knox Peden, Andrea Robiglio, and Judith Surkis, among ­others. Marci Shore kindly passed on some of her continuing work on the international diffusion of phenomenology, which helped me in the final stages. A number of scholars have generously read my work and provided detailed and valuable feedback. James Chappel, Louis Hamilton, Sigrid Leysson, Rocco Rubini, Daniel Shore, Judith Surkis, and Dan Zahavi all read portions of the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to ­those who read the manuscript in full, including Angus Burgin,



Acknowl­edgments 479

Stefanos Geroulanos, Michael Gordin, Peter Gordon, Michael Gubser, Katja Guenther, Samuel Moyn, and two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press. I have tested my claims in a number of forums. I gave pre­sen­ta­tions of the overall argument at the University of Manchester, Duquesne University, the University of Konstanz, and, in a very early form, at Drew. I presented individual chapters at a joint meeting of the North American Society for Early Phenomenology and the Scheler Society of North Amer­ i­ca, at the New York Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, at the NYU Intellectual History Workshop, at KU Leuven, at Missouri State University, at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, and at the University of Pennsylvania. I am very grateful for the conversations ­these talks have precipitated and for the insightful comments by ­t hose who ­were ­there. The Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 build on ideas first discussed in “Neo-­Scholasticism, Phenomenology, and the Prob­lem of Conversion” in So What’s New about Scholasticism?, edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphanie Symons (Walter de Gruyter GmbH., 2018). Chapter 1 incorporates discussions from “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 4 (October 2016): 567–587, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In Chapter 7 I expand on topics I first presented in “A Secular Kierkegaard: Confessional Readings of Heidegger before 1945,” New German Critique 42, no. 1 (February 2015): 67–97, published by Duke University Press. I am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Leuven for permission to quote from their institutional papers. I would also like to thank all t­ hose at Harvard University Press, including Lindsay W ­ aters, Joy Deng, and Stephanie Vyce, as well as copy editor Wendy Nelson, who have helped carry this proj­ect over the finishing line. My last book was published at the same time my first ­children w ­ ere born. Sofie and Luise w ­ ill be seven when this book comes out. I would not be entirely honest if I said that they helped in the writing, but they have certainly sustained me through the pro­cess, as has their younger ­sister, Kara. In all this, no one has been more impor­tant than Katja Guenther, whose love and support made this book pos­si­ble. I dedicate it to her.

Index

Abbagnano, Nicola, 182, 237 Action Française, 162, 249, 310, 334 Adenauer, Konrad, 121 Agamben, Giorgio, 343 Agnosticism, 34, 49, 71, 109, 255 agrégation de philosophie, 3, 313, 316 Akademikerverband (Association of Catholic Academics), 116–118 Akademischer Verein für Psychologie (Munich), 49, 78, 81 Ales Bello, Angela, 9 Aquinas, Thomas, 9, 15, 24, 29, 38, 70, 76, 83, 195, 198, 219, 289, 327, 340, 347; De Veritate, 34, 75, 223; and neo-­ scholasticism, 32, 38–39, 53, 64, 154, 162, 164, 171, 183, 245, 296; and realism, 30, 67, 185, 189; and reason, 76, 166, 199; and Scheler, 123, 143; and science, 31, 37, 39 Aristotle, 303; and Aquinas, 29–30; and Brentano, 40, 230; and Husserl, 48, 72, 82–84, 192, 201; and Heidegger, 89, 95, 106, 108, 114, 222; and Merleau-­Ponty, 329; and scholasticism, 176, 183, 227, 347 Arnaíz, Marcelino, 36, 52–53, 70 Aron, Raymond, 4 Aron, Robert, 268 Aschheim, Steven, 125

481

Atheism, 145, 166, 182, 240, 302–303, 347; de Beauvoir’s, 310; Derrida’s, 345–346; Grassi’s, 236–237; Heidegger’s, 18, 88, 108–110, 213, 215–219, 220–222, 232–233; Kojève’s, 238–240; Merleau-­Ponty’s, 309, 313, 331–332, 336, 339–340, 341; Nietz­sche’s, 142, 242, 274 Augustine, 340–341; and Christian existentialism, 175, 176, 181, 261; Cor inquietum, 107, 108, 122; and Heidegger, 107, 108, 109, 114; and Husserl, 191, 201; and Scheler, 122–123, 143, 256 Authenticity / inauthenticity, 111, 113, 213, 217–218, 262, 293 Averroës, 29, 32, 38, 227 Avila, Teresa of, 107

Badiou, Alain, 343 Bahr, Hermann, 127, 136–137 Banfi, Antonio, 5, 83, 304 Barelli, Armida, 25, 251 Barth, Heinrich, 215–216, 217 Barth, Karl, 109, 213, 214, 216, 227, 231; and Przywara, 143, 220–221; and Ricoeur, 236–237, 332 Bartoszewski, Władysław, 267 Baruzi, Jean, 10, 227, 244

482

Index

Bataille, Georges, 343 Baudin, Émile, 58, 246 Bäumker, Clemens, 81, 86, 87 Beck, Maximilian, 79 Becker, Oskar, 108 Bell, Winthrop, 3 Benda, Julien, 310 Berdyaev, Nicolai, 19, 153, 166–167, 169, 172, 211; and Heidegger, 230; and Husserl, 82; Soirées in Paris-­Clamart, 154, 163, 165, 170 Bergamin, José, 264, 336 Berger, Gaston, 158, 170, 203–209, 210, 292, 316; connections to Italy, 179–80; and Husserl Archives, 281, 297, 302, 306 Bergson, Henri, 3, 4, 54, 80, 94, 268; and Marcel, 155; and Maritain, 161 Bergzabern Circle, 75, 79 Berkeley, George, 58, 316 Biemel, Walter, 286, 287, 307 Birault, Henri, 9 Bixler, Julius Seelye, 82 Blondel, Maurice: and Berger, 205; and Christian philosophy, 12, 296, 340–341; and Grassi, 234–237; and Italian ­actualism, 178; and Marc, 242; and Maréchal, 203; and modernism, 62–63; and Zubiri, 70 Bloy, Léon, 161 Boelaars, Herman, 8, 197 Bolzano, Bernard, 43 Borne, Étienne, 344 Braig, Carl, 90 Bréhier, Émile, 12, 300–301 Brentano, Franz, 60, 71, 76, 92, 200; and intentionality, 9, 40–42, 44, 48, 192, 229–230; and scholasticism, 40, 48, 76, 192, 194, 230, 235; students of, 41–42, 51 Brunner, Emil, 217, 218–219 Bruno, Giordano, 174 Brunschvicg, Léon, 2, 65, 312 Bruzina, Ronald, 192 Buber, Martin, 214 Bultmann, Rudolf, 107, 108, 113, 214–215, 216, 226; and Corbin, 228–229 Buonaiuti, Ernesto, 62 Burgert, Helmut, 81 Büttemeyer, Wilhelm, 234, 237

Canella, Giulio, 37, 64, 65, 189 Caputo, John, 89, 345 Carlini, Armando, 182, 236–7; and Gentile, 174–175; and Heidegger, 232–233; and Husserl, 82, 204; and scholasticism, 176–178, 181, 232 Carman, Taylor, 318–319 Carnap, Rudolf, 1 Carteron, Henri, 9 Caspar, Bernhard, 89 Castelli, Enrico, 8, 174, 178, 234 Catholic Action, 7, 251–253, 255, 266 Catholic University, (Washington D.C.), 24, 36 Catholic Youth Movement, 7, 117–118, 131–134, 136–137, 139–142, 144–145, 251, 253, 255, 262, 266 Causality: in Heidegger, 96, 99; in Merleau-­Ponty, 315, 319; in neo-­ scholasticism, 36, 50, 66, 73, 74, 99, 164; in Ricoeur, 320, 327 Cavaillès, Jean, 300 Celms, Theodor, 81 Chappel, James, 7, 137, 241, 252 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 31 Chastaing, Maurice, 313, 316, 332 Chevalier, Jacques, 268 Chiocchetti, Emilio, 52 Christian philosophy, 6, 11–13, 38, 91, 109–110, 261, 340–341, 347, 348 Christian spiritualism. See Carlini, Armando; Guzzo, Augusto; Lavelle, Louis; le Senne, René; Pareyson, Luigi; Stefanini, Luigi Civiltà Cattolica (Italian journal), 24, 62 Cohen, Hermann, 90 Cole, Andrew, 343 Collège de France (Paris), 10, 13, 161, 170, 309, 339–340 Combat (French journal), 265 Communism, 6, 241, 250, 263, 276; and Landsberg, 264–265; and Merleau-­ Ponty, 336–338, 339; and Mounier, 271, 272–274, 275; and Ricoeur, 333, 338–339 Conrad, Theodor, 79 Conrad-­Martius, Hedwig: and Göttingen phenomenologists, 75, 78, 119, 196, 247; and scholasticism, 79–80, 222, 235

Index 483

Constitution: in Heidegger, 100–102, 103, 106; in Husserl, 15, 57–61, 81, 97, 207; in Merleau-­Ponty, 318; neo-­scholastic reading of, 71, 74, 75, 77, 103, 193, 195, 201–202; in Ricoeur, 326; in Van Breda, 292–294 Continental Philosophy: Prob­lems with term, 1; and the nation, 2–4; and phenomenology, 2; and religion, 11, 20, 280, 343–349 Conversion, 13–18, 109, 207, 211, 213, 221; and Heidegger, 15, 18, 89, 105, 114, 221–222; and Husserl, 14–16, 18, 61, 68, 114, 191, 209, 291; personal religious, 75, 79, 89, 156, 162, 289–290 Conway, Martin, 252 Corbin, Henry, 15, 222, 227–229 Corporatism (Catholic social theory), 123, 130, 253, 254 Correlation, noetic-­noematic, 56–57, 72, 203, 206, 209, 247; criticisms of, 73; Heidegger’s use of, 88, 99, 100–103, 106, 107–108, 111, 213, 232 Correspondence theory of truth, 30, 35, 199, 225; and Husserl, 48, 50, 294; and Heidegger, 95, 112, 224; and Mercier, 35, 48, 64, 65, 67, 95 Cosmological proof, 221, 224, 239, 329 Cotkin, George, 4 Critical Realism debate, 184–190, 192–194, 196, 203, 205, 291, 292 Croce, Benedetto, 65, 175 Crusoe, Robinson, 122

Dalbiez, Roland, 311, 327 Dandieu, Arnaud, 241, 268–269, 270, 274–275 Daniélou, Jean, 329, 336 Daubert, Johannes, 78 De Beauvoir, Simone, 7, 10, 153; and Merleau-­Ponty, 309–311, 313 De Bruyne, Edgar, 288, 305 De Clairvaux, Bernard, 107 De Corte, Marcel, 198 De Gandillac, Maurice, 269, 310, 312, 344 De La Rocque, François, 155 Déléage, André, 268

Delhomme, Jeanne, 172 Delp, Alfred, 219–220, 222, 238–240, 250, 254 De Man, Hendrik, 274 De Menasce, Jean, 244 Democracy: Christian, 7, 19, 121, 129, 249, 258; and Husserl, 305–306; liberal, 128–129, 240, 242, 254, 258, 270; personalist, 252, 272 De Rougement, Denis, 242 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 309, 344–345, 346, 347 De Saint Aubert, Emmanuel, 324 Descartes, 2, 110, 156, 305, 329, 345; Cartesian doubt, 32, 34, 80, 188, 200, 204, 208; the cogito, 186–7, 200, 202, 204; and Husserl, 72, 151, 191–192, 195, 197, 198, 200–202, 204, 208, 236; as representative of modern philosophy, 12, 61, 172, 186, 188; and scholasticism, 80, 191 De Vries, Hent, 345 De Waelhens, Alphonse, 8, 172, 288, 300; and Heidegger, 225–227; and Husserl, 197–198; and Merleau-­Ponty, 329–331 De Wulf, Maurice, 30, 37, 63, 90, 98 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 107, 256 Divus Thomas (German journal, previously Jahrbuch für Philosophie und speculative Theologie), 25, 81, 171 Divus Thomas (Italian journal), 25, 26, 171 Dmowski, Roman, 249 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 253, 336 Domenach, Jean-­Marie, 271 Domet de Vorges, Edmond, 26, 46 Dopp, Joseph, 282, 283, 288, 290 Droege, Theodor, 171 Dubarle, Dominique, 329 Duc Thao, Tran, 289, 300 Dufrenne, Mikel, 317 Duméry, Henri, 9 Duns Scotus, 80, 85, 88, 194, 340; Heidegger’s reading of (in fact Thomas of Erfurt), 97–108 Dupont, Christian, 4, 14 Dürer, Albrecht, 261 Dyroff, Adolf, 86, 104, 105

484

Index

Eckhart, Meister, 103, 107 Eco, Umberto, 344, 347 École, Jean, 168 École normale supérieure (Paris), 309, 310, 344 Edie, James M., 10 Eklund, Harold, 245 Embodiment (corporeality), 133–134; in Christian existentialism, 10, 155–156, 158, 178, 181, 205, 209, 210, 232, 265, 314–316, 317, 324, 345; in Husserl, 59, 314–316, 324; in Merleau-­Ponty, 312, 314–316, 318–319, 322, 324–325, 329, 331; in Ricoeur, 317, 321, 322–323, 328, 331 Engagement, 262–263, 264, 266, 271, 273, 274, 337 Epoché: in Husserl, 55–60, 79, 207–208, 236; in Merleau-­Ponty, 325; neo-­scholastic reading of, 62, 73–74, 192–193, 194–202, 292–293, 295; in Ricoeur, 317, 325 Esprit (French journal), 242, 262, 266–274, 325, 332, 334, 338 Essence (quiddity). in Aquinas, 30, 195–196; in Carlini, 232; in Geyser, 72–74; in Husserl, 45, 47, 55–56, 58, 59, 69, 71, 78, 79, 195–196, 197, 247; in Lavelle, 168; in Maritain, 162–163, 192; in Mercier, 35, 64, 66, 247; in Merleau-­Ponty, 314, 324; in Przywara, 244; in Stein, 76–77 Ethics, 6, 78, 119–120, 124, 138, 179, 213, 259, 337 Ettlinger, Max, 127 Études Philosophiques (French journal), 169, 170, 205, 286, 297, 299 Evans, Luther, 302 Evidence, 34–35, 47, 50, 55–56, 188, 200, 255 Existence, 78, 345; in Berdyaev, 166; in Berger, 206, 207; in Carlini, 177–178, 232; in Geyser, 50, 73–74; in Guzzo, 178; in Heidegger, 88, 91, 94, 95–96, 97, 99, 102–103, 111–112, 114, 215, 216, 219, 226, 228, 230; in Husserl, 47, 50, 59–60, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 204, 292–293; in Jaspers, 158–159; in Le Senne, 168, 172, 203; in Marcel, 155, 157, 160, 161, 165, 314; in Merleau-­Ponty, 318, 322, 324, 332; in Pareyson, 181, 232; in Ricoeur,

317, 320, 322, 326, 328, 332; in Sartre, 308; in Scheler, 123, 245; in scholasticism, 66, 77, 91, 162–163, 164, 166, 202, 219, 244; in Wahl, 169, 212 Existentialism, 7, 211–212; Christian, 19, 151–182, 203–204, 210, 211–213, 227, 230–233, 236–238, 240, 255–260, 274–276, 295–296, 308–309, 311–312, 313, 327–328, 331–332, 336–337, 339–341, 344, 346–347; in France, 10, 15, 151–170, 203, 230, 231, 238–240, 260, 274–276, 295–296, 300, 307; in Germany, 158–159, 171, 173, 229–230; in Italy, 8, 15, 172, 173–181, 203–204, 230–231, 231–233, 234–238, 255–260, 308–341; and Marxism, 2, 20, 333–334, 334–339, 264–265, 272–276; and phenomenology, 2, 18, 20; in Poland, 173, 223; secular, 169–170, 182, 211–213, 226–227, 233–240, 274–276, 307, 308–309, 331–332, 336–337, 346; and Thomism, 154–182, 184, 202, 225, 238–240, 274–276, 328–332, 336–337, 341

Fabro, Cornelio, 171, 172 Faith: in Christian existentialism, 157, 158, 161, 163, 176, 327, 340, 344, 346; in Derrida, 344; in dialectical theology, 215, 216, 220; in Heidegger, 109, 113, 233; in Maritain, 165; in Merleau-­Ponty, 331, 336, 340; in Ricoeur, 334, 338; in Scheler, 121; in scholasticism, 30, 91, 166–167, 233; in Stein, 76–77, 199 Farber, Marvin, 5, 284–285, 286, 288, 296–297, 298–299, 302, 304 Farges, Albert, 64, 65 Fascism, 19, 174, 175, 249, 252–253; and Esprit, 266–267, 271–274; Scheler and response to, 254–266 Fatta, Michele, 171 Fessard, Gaston, 165, 203, 238, 241 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 216 Feuling, Daniel, 194–195 Filiasi Carcano, Paolo, 203–204 Finitude (Heidegger), 109–110, 213, 217, 239; Catholic criticism of, 175, 180, 219–220, 224, 226, 227, 233

Index 485

Fink, Eugen, 2, 191–192, 200, 201, 207, 300; and the Husserl Archives, 282–285, 289, 290, 299, 301, 304; and Merleau Ponty, 293, 316 Finke, Heinrich, 85, 87, 103–104, 125 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 125 Forest, Aimé, 172 Foucault, Michel, 343 Franco, Francisco, 264, 266, 272 Francqui Foundation, 283–284, 285, 288, 297, 301, 303 Frankfurt School, 2, 117, 260 Frege, Gottlob, 1, 42–43 Freud (also psychoanalysis), 3, 41, 221, 311, 327 Frühwirth, Andreas, 125

Gambetta, Léon, 28–29 Gaos, José, 69 García Morente, Manuel, 15 Garin, Eugenio, 179 Geiger, Louis-­Bertrand, 300 Geiger, Moritz, 78, 286 Gelber, Lucy, 282, 284, 286, 290 Gemelli, Agostino, 25, 30, 39, 98, 349; and Husserl, 52–53, 151, 291; and the Louvain School, 36–37; politics of, 249, 253, 255; and the Sacred Heart University, 37, 82, 83, 88, 234, 235; and Zamboni, 189–190 Gentile, Giovanni, 2, 4, 65, 173–175, 204, 235, 237, 255 Geroulanos, Stefanos, 4 Getzeny, Heinrich, 136, 147 Geurtsen, Henricus, 222 Geyser, Joseph, 52, 53, 69, 77, 81, 88, 98, 188; and Heidegger, 86–87, 90–91, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 103–104; and Husserl, 49–51, 72–74, 102, 103–104, 190–191, 194, 235; and Scheler, 143, 245 Giacon, Carlo, 172, 224–225 Gibert, Colette, 313 Gilson, Étienne, 10, 13, 170, 191, 227, 296, 311, 326, 347; and Christian philosophy, 12, 167, 340–341, 348; and critical realism debate, 184–189, 192, 193, 194; and existential Thomism, 165–166, 171 Golgi, Camillo, 30

Gordon, Peter, 2 Görres-­Gesellschaft, 37, 51, 63, 81 Gouhier, Henri, 10 Grabmann, Martin, 31, 53, 63, 68, 92 Grasselli, Giulio, 82, 235 Grassi, Ernesto, 15, 234–238 Gregorian University (Rome), 7, 26, 27, 49 Grimme, Adolf, 118 Gründler, Otto, 130, 134–135, 248 Guardini Romano, 117–118, 133–134, 140, 144 Gurian, Waldemar, 132–133, 136, 137 Gurwitsch, Aron, 3, 305 Gutberlet, Constantin, 37–38 Guzzo, Augusto, 19, 174–175, 182; and Carlini, 232; connection to French spiritualists, 179; engagement with scholasticism, 176–178, 223; and Grassi, 237; and Pareyson, 180–181

Haecker, Theodor, 214 Hägglund, Martin, 346 Hamburger, Siegfried, 15, 79 Hardt, Michel, 343 Havet, Jacques, 303, 305–306 Hayen, André, 325 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 2, 80, 82, 238, 239, 241, 316 Heidegger, Martin, 70, 76, 125, 211, 285, 286, 306, 344, 346; Being and Time, 10, 88, 110–114, 151, 210, 217, 222, 225, 228, 236, 291, 317; The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism, 92–95; Habilitation, 89, 97–103, 111, 114; “The Real­ity Prob­lem in Modern Philosophy,” 95–96; “What is Metaphysics?” 228, 232; existentialist reading of, 152, 153, 168–169, 173, 179, 180–181, 182, 212–213, 229–233, 255, 261; and Husserl, 15, 18, 88–89, 92–94, 97, 99–104, 105–106, 109, 111, 114, 213, 229; and Nazism, 240, 254, 306; neo-­scholastic reading of, 7, 18, 103–105, 114–115, 163, 219–227, 250, 329; and Protestant theology, 107, 108–109, 214–219, 227–229; and scholasticism, 10, 15, 18, 85–92, 97–103, 105–106, 109, 110, 172, 229, 347

486

Index

Heinemann, Fritz, 136, 229–230 Hellman, John, 267, 269 Henry, Louis, 31 Henry, Michel, 345 Hering, Jean, 3, 79, 80, 245–248, 281, 314 Herwegen, Abbot Ildefons, 139, 250 Hochland (German journal), 104, 124–131, 132, 133, 134–135, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147, 235, 250 Hoffmann, Hermann, 131 Holsinger, Bruce, 343 Horthy, Miklós, 253 Humanism, 235, 261, 265, 273, 305, 333, 338–339; and Heidegger, 19–20, 110, 152, 228, 237. See also Personalism Husserl, Edmund, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 87–88, 107, 118–119, 121, 137, 152, 236, 244, 344; Cartesian Meditations, 151, 191, 192, 197, 200, 246, 300, 326; Crisis of the Eu­ro­pean Sciences, 200, 315, 323–324; Lectures on Fichte, 118; Logical Investigations, 13, 14, 39–40, 43–54, 55–57, 61, 70–71, 78, 89, 93–94, 195, 197, 199, 200, 291; Ideas, 18, 54, 55–61, 69, 82, 97, 99–103, 120, 191, 194, 247, 301, 309, 315, 317, 323, 325–326; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 43, 55; The Philosophy of Arithmetic, 42–43, 51; and Augustine, 191, 201; existentialist reading of, 153, 182, 203–209, 209–210, 229–230, 314, 316–317; neo-­scholastic reading of, 15, 48–54, 68–74, 84, 92, 103–104, 114, 143–144, 184, 190–202, 209–210, 227, 234, 325–327; and scholasticism, 48, 74–77, 80, 191, 235 Husserl, Gerhart, 285, 288, 289, 297, 299 Husserl, Malvine, 279, 281, 284, 288, 291; and Catholicism, 289–290 Husserl Archives, 8, 20, 279–307, 315–316 Hyperinflation in Germany, 25, 116 Hyppolite, Jean, 300, 305

Idealism: Berkeleyan, 58–59; French, 3, 65, 155, 156, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 212, 311, 315; Husserl’s transcendental, 15–16, 18, 56–62, 68, 72–74, 74–76, 83, 191,

193–196, 197–202, 206–209, 292–295, 316–317, 325–326; Italian, 173–178, 234; subjective, 57, 348 idealism / realism debate, 20, 80–81, 84, 152, 191, 246, 316 Index of Prohibited books, 62, 125 Ingarden, Roman, 2, 75, 81, 297, 304 Institut Catholique (Paris), 10, 28, 63–64, 162, 170, 186, 329 Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (Leuven, Belgium), 51, 52, 172, 184, 197, 225, 291; founding of, 24, 32; and the Husserl Archives, 280–282, 288–290, 292, 294, 297–298, 300, 303–304, 306–307; in international Catholic networks, 26, 27–28, 36–37; and the natu­r al sciences, 31 Intentionality: in Brentano, 9, 40–42, 44, 48, 192, 229–230; Heidegger’s reformulation of, 90, 99, 102, 106–107, 111; in Husserl, 9, 14, 15, 42, 44–47, 48, 50–52, 56–57, 70, 71, 79, 109, 203, 204, 207–208, 229–230, 292; in Merleau-­Ponty, 314, 317–318, 324–325, 332; in Scheler, 119–120, 143; in scholasticism, 9, 40, 185, 192–193, 194, 202, 203, 229–230 Intentio secunda, 71, 99 International Phenomenological Society, 299, 304 Intersubjectivity, 59, 218, 274 Intuition: in Geyser, 50; in Husserl, 42, 45–47, 57, 69, 192, 201, 293–294, 295, 325; in Meillassoux, 348; in Scheler, 119, 143, 144–145, 245, 256–257; in scholasticism, 76, 144, 163–164, 224 Irigaray, Luce, 343 Izard, Georges, 268

Jägerschmidt, Adelgundis, 279, 281, 290 Jagiellonian University (Kraków), 62 Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Philosophie (German journal), 54, 75–76, 80, 119, 299 Janicaud, Dominique, 4, 346 Jaspers, Karl, 214, 230–231, 238; and Christian existentialism, 152, 153, 157, 158–161, 168, 173, 179–180, 181, 231, 301;

Index 487

and Ricoeur, 313, 317, 328; the shipwreck, 159, 179, 180, 237; and Wahl, 169–170, 211 John of Saint Thomas, 162 Jolivet, Régis, 193 Jünger, Ernst, 137

Kant, Immanuel, 2, 12, 74, 132, 204, 256, 315; and Heidegger, 224; and Husserl, 60, 83, 191; and individualism, 258; as representative of modern philosophy, 32–33, 36, 61, 82, 92, 96, 123, 142, 144, 183, 348; and Scheler, 119, 123, 144 Kantianism, 119, 247; and Husserl, 191–193; neo-­K antians, 50, 65, 67, 83, 90, 92, 246; and neo-­scholasticism, 33, 35, 38, 70; and Thomism, 186, 189, 204, 230 Kantstudien (German journal), 39, 104, 293 Keane, John (Bishop), 36 Kearney, Richard, 345 Keller, Thomas, 244 Kierkegaard, Søren, 168, 169; Catholic reading of, 220–221, 226, 255; and Heidegger, 109, 114, 212–213, 215, 216, 218, 229, 239; and Merleau-­Ponty, 331, 347; Re­nais­sance in Germany, 107, 214 Kisiel, Theodore, 89, 111–112 Kleutgen, Joseph, 31, 34, 37, 38 Kockelmans, Joseph, 10 Koestler, Arthur, 337 Kojève, Alexandre, 10, 80, 234, 238–240 Kolnai, Aurel, 15, 79 Konkordatslehrstühle, 13, 28, 81 Kosicki, Piotr, 7 Koyré, Alexandre, 3, 10, 79, 196, 222; and scholasticism, 80, 191 Kracauer, Siegfried, 117–118 Kraków Circle, 9, 27, 52 Kratochvil, Jozef, 36 Krebs, Engelbert, 86, 87, 88, 91, 106, 125 Kremer, René, 39, 185; and Husserl, 51–52, 69, 81, 194–196, 198, 200, 291 Kristeva, Julia, 343 Kuhlmann, Gerhardt, 215, 218 Külpe, Oswald, 54, 91, 95, 96 Kulturkampf, 25, 85, 124

Laberthonnière, Lucien, 62, 70 Lacoin, Elisabeth (Zaza), 310–311 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 282, 284, 285, 290, 305 Landsberg, Paul-­Ludwig (Paul-­Louis), 137–142, 143, 144, 211, 241, 260–266, 269–272 Lanna, Domenico, 37 Lanz, Henry, 82 Laros, Matthias, 104 Lask, Emil, 94, 95 Lateran Accords, 176, 251, 259 Latin (as means of scientific exchange), 3, 25, 26, 222 Lavelle, Louis, 170, 173, 211, 300, 319; existentialism of, 167, 168–169, 296; and Heidegger, 231; and Italy, 172, 178–179, 181; and Scheler, 245; and Merleau-­ Ponty, 339–340 Leo XIII (Pope), 24, 28–29, 32, 62, 142, 294; Aeterni Patris (1879), 8, 24–25, 30, 34; Immortale Dei (1885), 129; Rerum Novarum (1891), 28 le Roy, Édouard, 10, 70, 80 le Senne, René, 153, 170, 173, 300–301, 305; and Berger, 205, 208; and Derrida, 344–345; existentialism of, 167–169, 172, 182, 212, 227, 296; and Husserl, 203–204; and Italy, 172, 178–179, 180, 181; and Marc, 243; and Ricoeur, 316, 319 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 7, 211, 218, 345; and Marcel, 153, 344; and scholasticism, 9, 347 Liberalism, 117, 126, 128–130, 137, 141, 241, 251, 258, 263–264, 271, 337 Lipps, Theodor, 49, 78, 92–93, 94 Liturgical Movement, 117–118, 133–134, 139–140, 144, 250 Loisy, Alfred, 62–63, 125 Lonergen, Bernard, 183 Losacco, Michele, 193 Love, 6, 220; in Marcel, 158, 161, 346; in Scheler, 121–122, 127, 138, 140, 147, 255–256, 262 Löwith, Karl, 216–217, 226 Łukasiewicz, Jan, 9 Luther, Martin, 107, 109, 144, 220–221, 231, 255, 275, 335 Lvov-­Warsaw School, 9, 41, 52

488

Index

Mager, Alois, 137 Maier, Heinrich, 92 Malcotti, Lucia, 25 Marc, Alexandre, 241–244, 268, 269, 270 Marcel, Gabriel, 19, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 179, 211, 268, 296, 347; and existence, 155; and Husserl, 203; and Jaspers, 158–161, 181; and Merleau-­Ponty, 153, 311–313, 314–315, 319, 322, 324, 332, 344; and Ricoeur, 153, 170, 301, 313, 316–317, 320, 322, 328; and Sartre, 11, 308, 331; Soirées du Vendredi, 10, 153–155, 169, 170, 203; and Thomism, 154–161, 164–165, 172, 181, 182, 227, 243; and Wahl, 170 Maréchal, Joseph, 183, 203, 205 Maria Laach Monastery, 140, 250 Marion, Jean-­Luc, 345, 346, 347 Maritain, Jacques, 171, 197, 241, 260, 261, 296, 310, 326, 330, 340, 347; and Berdyaev, 167; on critical realism, 184, 186, 187–188, 193–194, 206; and Gilson, 165–166; and Heidegger, 163; and Husserl, 68, 192–194, 199, 203; and Le Senne, 168; and Meudon Circle, 154–155, 170, 311–312, 325; and Marcel, 156–165, 181, 203, 205; and Meillassoux, 347–349; and Mounier, 267–269, 275; po­liti­cal position, 252, 272, 334; Seven Lessons on Being, 161–165, 166; and Scheler, 244–245 Martinus Nijhoff (Dutch Publisher), 287 Marty, Anton, 41 Marx, Karl / Marxism, 2, 173–174, 289; ­Esprit reading of, 265, 271, 273, 275; ­existentialist reading of, 333, 337–339 Masaryk, Tomas, 41 Masnovo, Armato, 52, 65, 199 Massis, Henri, 310 Massolo, Arturo, 204 Maurras, Charles, 249, 250 Mazzantini, Carlo, 176, 178, 181, 199, 223–224, 232–233 Meaning (Bedeutung or Sinn): in Berger, 206–207; in Geyser, 50, 73–74; in Heidegger, 94, 99–101, 102, 110–111, 217; in Husserl, 45–46, 59–62, 292; in Merleau-­Ponty, 315, 337–339; in Ricoeur, 323, 333–334

Meillassoux, Quentin, 346, 347–349 Meinong, Alexius, 41 Mercier, Désiré, 26, 31–32, 49, 50, 68, 97, 125, 249, 349; criteriology, 32–36, 101; criticisms of, 63–67, 71, 95, 99; and Husserl, 40, 47–48, 52, 247; and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 26, 32; and the progressive school, 36–39, 42, 51, 53, 70, 71, 82, 91, 92, 98, 189 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 2, 3, 20, 299, 300, 309–310; and Husserl, 293, 313–316, 317–319, 322–326; and Marcel, 153, 311–313, 314–315, 319, 322, 324, 332, 344; po­l iti­cal position, 332–339; religious position, 309, 310–313, 326, 328–332, 334–337, 339–341, 347; and Thomism, 310 Messer, August, 125; and Heidegger, 91, 95; and Husserl, 48–50, 51, 53, 54 Metaphysics, 167, 203, 261; and existentialism, 171, 172, 176–178, 181, 232; Heidegger’s, 94, 102, 181, 219–220, 225–226, 232, 236, 254; and Husserl, 47, 60, 62, 72, 76, 80, 195, 197–198, 200, 201, 204, 208, 294, 316; Jasper’s, 159; Maritain’s, 164–165, 187–188, 348; Marxist, 265, 273; Merleau-­Ponty’s, 329, 331–332, 336; Scheler’s, 122, 123, 142, 146–147, 245–248, 255, 257; Thomist, 6, 145, 183–184, 186, 189–190, 201, 204, 208, 219–220, 222, 244, 272, 336; Zubiri’s, 72 Michalski, Konstanty, 52, 53 Michalski, Krzysztof, 9 Mill, John Stuart, 42–43 Minocchi, Salvatore, 62 Mocchi, Mauro, 4 Modernist controversy, 62–63, 64, 66, 69, 125, 162; and Heidegger, 91–92 Modern Schoolman (American journal), 27, 170, 197 Moran, Dermot, 4 Mounier, Emmanuel, 266–275; and Ricoeur, 232–233; and Merleau-­Ponty, 234 Moyn, Samuel, 7, 252 Münch, Franz Xaver, 116

Index 489

Mussolino, Benito, 174, 175, 249, 251, 253, 255, 259–260, 267 Muth, Carl, 124–125, 129–131, 135, 137, 235, 250; and Scheler, 134, 135 Mystery: in Marcel, 157–158, 161, 312; in Maritain, 163–164, 330; in Ricoeur, 320, 322–323, 331–332, 333 Mysticism, 79, 103, 105–106, 142, 331

Nadler, Käte, 173 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 343 Näpple, Josephine, 290 Nationalism, 23, 137, 138, 249–250; Scheler on, 122, 126, 127 National Socialist Party (Nazis), 3, 4, 6, 126, 131, 132, 141, 240, 260, 265; and Catholic Church, 250–251, 253; and Esprit, 267, 268–269, 274; and the Husserl Archives, 279, 284, 285, 304, 306; and Landsberg, 263, 264; and Stefanini, 257, 259 Natu­ral Theology, 30, 217, 219, 233, 295, 326 Negri, Antonio, 343 Neo-­Scholasticism, 81–83, 123, 133, 142–145, 219–221, 222–227, 236, 238–240, 302, 329–330, 349; and Christian spiritualism, 19, 176–178, 179, 182, 231–233, 346–347; and Heidegger, 87–92, 94–96, 97–99, 101–105, 109–110; international reach, 8, 13, 18, 24–28, 36, 171–173, 197, 298, 346; journals, 13, 25, 27, 244; marginalization of, 13–14; and Munich school of phenomenology, 78–81; and nationalism, 23–24; “new orientation” (Gemelli), 64–67, 68, 88, 97, 101, 103, 105; progressive school, 12–15, 26, 31–39, 47–54, 61–62, 63, 69–71, 83, 90–92, 94–96, 97–99, 104–105, 112, 125, 151–152, 184–186, 189–190, 194–196, 204–206, 209, 234–235, 290–293, 295, 306–307, 325, 328, 348; and science, 30–31, 37, 39; strict school, 62–65, 66, 91, 96, 107, 112, 143, 162, 184–186, 189, 197, 202, 205, 209, 249, 325–328 Neo-­T homism. See Neo-­Scholasticism Neumann, Otto, 299

New Scholasticism (American journal), 27, 69, 198 Nietz­sche, Friedrich: and dialectical theology, 216; and Heidegger, 217, 239, 254; and Jaspers, 180; and Landsberg, 140–142, 260; and Merleau-­Ponty, 334–336; and the Ordre Nouveau, 241–242, 268–269, 270, 275; and Przywara, 244; and Scheler, 122, 125–127, 146–147, 244, 266; and the Youth Movement, 134, 137, 253 Nink, Caspar, 68 Nizan, Paul, 267 Noël, Léon, 37, 184, 193–194, 199, 347; and Christian Philosophy, 13, 14, 109; and Husserl, 13, 51–52, 53, 69, 88, 94, 114, 151, 191, 192, 195–196, 290–291, 292; “immediate realism,” 66–67, 97, 184, 185, 186–188, 189, 190, 202, 206; and the Modernist Controversy, 63; as President of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 28, 281–283, 284–285, 301; students of, 70, 185, 280 Noema, 57–60, 89, 90, 195 Nominalism, 33, 48

Objectivity, 82; in Brentano, 41–42; in ­ethics, 6; in Guzzo, 175–177; in ­Heidegger, 94–96, 97; in Husserl, 40, 44–47, 53, 54, 197, 199, 247; in Gemelli, 52, 66; in Geyser, 49–50; in Le Senne, 168; in Marcel, 155–158, 160, 172, 314; in Mercier, 32–36, 47–48, 51, 64–65, 68; in Mounier, 275; in Pareyson, 181; in Scheler, 119–121, 135, 140, 147; scholastic, 30, 75, 80; in Zubiri, 70–72 Odzrodzenie (Re­nais­sance), 171 Olgiati, Francesco, 65, 189, 190, 249, 250, 255, 347; debate with Carlini, 176–177, 181, 232 Olivier, Dominique, 273 Ontic / ontological distinction, 108, 109, 214–217, 221, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233, 239 Ontology: in Christian existentialism, 155–161, 164–165, 173, 176, 181, 210, 231–233, 314; coding as Catholic,

490

Index

Ontology (continued) 107–108, 109, 113, 212–213, 218–219, 221, 222, 231, 233, 239; in Heidegger, 108, 109, 110–114, 152, 214–227; intelligibility of, 156, 159–161, 163–164, 172, 347; in Maritain, 163–165; in scholasticism, 38, 72, 73, 114, 189, 205–206, 207, 219, 222–223, 229–230, 347; in Wahl, 169, 212–213 Oranienburg Concentration Camp, 265 Ordre Nouveau, 242, 268–270, 274 Ortegat, Paul, 295 Ortega y Gasset, José, 5, 70 Otto, Rudolf, 107, 114 Overbeck, Franz, 107

Pace, Edward Aloysius, 36 Paci, Enzo, 2, 179 Papal Acad­emy (Rome), 27, 64 Pareyson, Luigi, 179–181, 182, 231, 237, 344, 347 Participation, 158, 159, 160, 165, 168, 169, 181, 255, 261, 317, 319, 320, 339 Pascal, Blaise, 331, 336, 341, 347 Pastuszka, Józef, 245 Patočka, Jan, 2, 9, 285–286, 304 Patzig, Günther, 47 Peillaube, Émile, 64 Pelloux, Luigi, 172, 178 Perrin, Marius, 10 Perry, Ralph Barton, 39 Personalism, 223, 241–242, 247, 274–75; Christian, 180–181, 233, 241–243, 252, 256–257, 261–262, 263, 267, 270–272, 332; Nietz­schean, 241, 261, 263, 268–269, 270; Scheler’s, 120–123, 243, 255–256; Wojtyła’s, 6 Pfänder, Alexander, 74, 78 Pfeiffer, Johannes, 230, 238 Phélan, Gérald, 188 Philosophisches Jahrbuch (German journal), 37–38, 65, 66, 81, 95, 97, 297 Philosophy of Spirit (Philosophie de l’Esprit) (book series), 168–169, 172, 319 Pirandello, Luigi, 64 Pius X, 62, 91, 117, 251

Pius XI: Mit brennender Sorge (1937), 251; Quadragesimo Anno (1931); Urbi arcano dei (1922), 250 Pius XII: Humani Generis (1950), 209 Plato, 2, 30, 110, 120, 227, 311; and Husserl, 68, 71, 73, 80, 82 Plotinus, 311 Popu­lar Front (France), 265, 266, 272 Pos, Hendrik J., 297, 302 Positivism, 33–34, 35, 38, 64, 65, 67, 70, 161 Prenter, Regin, 227 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 250 Princi­ple of identity, 154, 163–164, 188, 348 Princi­ple of sufficient reason, 164, 348 Prou­dhon, Pierre-­Joseph, 274 Przywara, Erich, 75, 117–118, 134, 147, 235, 243–244, 250, 349; and Scheler, 143–147, 245; and Heidegger, 104, 219–221; and Husserl, 197 Psychologism: Heidegger’s criticism of, 92–96, 102; Husserl’s criticism of, 42–44, 48, 55, 81, 195, 235; neo-­scholastic criticism of, 49, 51–53, 68, 195, 235 Puech, Charles-­Henri, 10 Pusey, Edward, 294

Rabeau, Gaston, 245 Rahner, Karl, 183 Ranwez, Charles, 190 Realism, 76–77, 80; American neo-­realists, 39; existentialist, 155–157, 169, 182, 203–204, 212, 230, 232, 317; Heidegger’s, 95–96, 99–102, 103, 104, 223–224, 230; immediate, 67, 69, 185, 186–187, 206, 225; Maritain’s, 187–188, 192–193; medieval, 14, 19, 176; methodical, 165–166, 184–186; neo-­scholastic, 66, 69, 72, 77, 81, 118, 163–164, 166, 171, 172, 177, 184–190, 204, 205, 209, 212, 237; phenomenological, 47, 60–61, 79, 118, 195, 200, 203, 235, 247, 294–295, 325; speculative, 346, 347–349 Recherches Philosophiques (French journal), 10, 159–160, 182, 212, 222, 239 Reims Cathedral, 126 Reinach, Adolf, 78, 79, 108

Index 491

Reiner, Hans, 79 Reinhardt, Kurt, 198 Re­sis­tance (French), 242, 265, 272, 308, 313 Revelation: in Christian existentialism, 158, 230; in dialectical theology, 214, 215, 218–219, 220, 221, 228, 229, 326; in scholasticism, 12, 29, 39, 63, 123, 167 Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (French journal), 170 Revue Internationale de Philosophie (Belgian journal), 315 Revue Néo-­Scolastique de Philosophie (Belgian journal, previously Revue Néo- ­Scolastique), 25, 38, 51, 63, 69, 186, 190, 225, 243, 325 Revue Thomiste (French journal), 66, 172 Richardson, William J., 9 Rickert, Heinrich, 2, 55, 87, 90, 94 Ricoeur, Paul, 20, 305, 309; and Husserl, 316–317, 319–324, 325–326; and Marcel, 153, 170, 301, 313, 316–317, 320, 322, 328; po­l iti­cal position, 332–334, 335–336, 338–339; religious position, 309, 310, 326–328, 331–332, 333–334, 341; and Thomism, 311, 325–326 Rivista di filosofia (Italian journal), 83, 235 Rivista di filosofia neo-­scolastica (Italian journal), 25, 30, 37, 38, 52, 54, 64, 68, 172, 176, 189, 190, 199, 223, 244, 251 Robbers, Henricus, 171 Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, 296, 302 Rockmore, Tom, 4 Roland-­Gosselin, Bernard, 186, 193 Rosenzweig, Franz, 214 Roskwitalski, Józef, 198 Rousselot, Pierre, 243 Rubini, Rocco, 4, 174, 237 Rus­sian Orthodoxy, 154, 166, 182

Sacred Heart University (Milan), 28, 36–37, 82, 83, 176, 189, 190, 199, 234–235, 251–253 Saint Paul, 229, 256, 343 Salazar, António de Oliviera, 155 Santayana, George, 39 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 4, 7, 168, 181, 237, 300, 314, 339; Catholic criticism of, 274–275,

296, 329; engagement with Catholics, 10–11, 153, 225, 308, 309, 312–313, 331, 346 Sassen, Ferdinand, 302 Sawicki, Franciszek, 223 Scheler, Maria, 146, 286–287 Scheler, Max, 7, 15, 75, 79–80, 124, 134–136, 137–142, 152, 245–248, 254, 269–270, 286–287, 320, 325, 345; On the Eternal in Man, 18, 121–124, 134, 136, 142, 247; Formalism in Ethics, 6, 119–121, 137, 147, 269; The Genius of the War, 125–127; The Place of Man in the Cosmos, 146–147, 151, 256; Ressentiment, 126–127, 244, 334; and Augustine, 122–123, 143, 256; existentialist reading of, 153, 162, 168–169, 258–260, 260–266, 275; and Husserl, 15, 81, 119–121; neo-­scholastic reading of, 6, 7, 142–145, 146–147, 243–244, 244–245, 254, 263; and scholasticism, 123–124, 142, 145, 235, 271 Schell, Hermann, 90 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 107, 214, 216, 247 Schmitt, Carl, 137 Schneider, Arthur, 85, 86, 92 Schreiber, Christian, 38, 66 Schuschnigg, Kurt, 155, 252 Second Vatican Council, 29 Secularization, 161, 174, 216, 230, 340, 345; Christian existentialist theory of, 176, 229, 231, 233–234, 236, 275; Thomist theory of, 15, 226, 233–234, 239, 331; in Wahl, 169–170, 211, 213 Sentroul, Charles, 36, 37; and Heidegger, 90, 95; and Mercier, 66 Serra, Andrea, 179 Serrus, Charles, 83 Sheehan, Thomas, 91 Shestov, Lev, 82, 166–167, 169, 182 Situation (concept): in Berger, 208; in Jaspers, 159, 169, 180, 230, 238; in Marcel, 11, 156, 160, 180; in Merleau-­ Ponty, 323, 330; in Pareyson, 180–181, 232; in Ricoeur, 323, 328; in Sartre, 11 Skepticism, 34, 44, 118, 175, 200 Socialism, 23, 128, 130, 138, 161, 242, 272, 273–274; Christian, 121, 135, 137, 335–336 Société d’études philosophiques (Marseilles), 157, 178, 205

492

Index

Société Thomiste (France), 8, 193, 196, 223 Sokolowski, Robert, 9, 57 Solidarity, 121, 130, 131, 135, 138, 263 Solipsism, 59, 75, 200 Solovyov, Vladimir, 238 Sombart, Werner, 126 Sorbonne, University of Paris, 13, 153, 165, 168, 170, 296, 301, 309, 344 Spaak, Paul-­Henri, 281 Spanish Civil War, 252, 260, 264, 266 Spencer, Herbert, 32, 42 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 4, 9, 79, 80, 110 Spinoza, Baruch, 2 Stefanini, Luigi: connections to France, 178, 179; and Gentile, 174, 263, 270–271, 273; and Heidegger, 230–231; and ­Scheler, 254–260, 261, 266 Stein, Edith, 7, 69, 78, 79, 108, 119, 282, 286; archives of, 286–287; and Husserl, 15, 48, 74–77, 196, 199–200, 247; and scholasticism, 48, 74–77, 196, 199–200 Steinbock, Anthony, 345 Sternhell, Ze’ev, 267 Stimmen der Zeit (German journal), 37, 43, 220, 250 Stoicism, 140, 270, 274, 275, 316 Stonyhurst Philosophical Series, 24–25 Strasser, Gertrude, 282, 284 Strasser, Otto, 268 Strasser, Stephan, 282, 284, 290, 300 Ströker, Elisabeth, 58 Strzelecki, Jan, 267 Stumpf, Carl, 41, 51, 52, 291 Suárez, Francesco, 38, 73 Switalski, Wladislaus, 37, 54, 104 Szymański, Antoni, 251

Taubes, Jacob, 343 Thévenaz, Pierre, 330 Thiel, Matthias, 81 Thielemans, Henri, 254 Tillich, Paul, 227 Tommasi, Roberto, 4, 223, 233 Tongiorgi, Salvator, 31 Tönnies, Ferdinand: Gemeinschaft /  Gesellschaft distinction, 122, 131

Transcendence: in Heidegger, 213, 223, 224, 228, 229; in Husserl, 40, 58–59, 60, 193, 207, 208, 345; in Italian actualism, 174, 175, 176, 180; in Jaspers, 159, 160, 169, 230, 237, 238; in Landsberg, 141; in Marcel, 161, 170; in Ricoeur, 320, 328; in Scheler, 256; in Wahl, 169–170, 211, 213 Transcendental reduction, 55–60, 79, 81, 98, 191–192, 204, 207–209, 317; in Merleau-­Ponty, 324–325; neo-­scholastic readings of, 62, 71, 76, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, 210; in Ricoeur, 325–326; in Van Breda, 291–293 Transnational Intellectual History, 5, 7 Transparency, 160, 217, 314, 321 Tredici, Giacinto, 37 Twardowski, Kasimir, 41, 44 Tyrrell, George, 62, 125

Uebinger, Johann, 86 UNESCO, 301–306 University of Freiburg: as center of Catholic philosophy, 10, 11, 15, 18, 49, 84, 85, 106, 151; as center of phenomenology, 11, 70, 75, 82, 105, 118, 137, 151, 235, 243, 280, 301; chair in Catholic ­Philosophy, 86–88; Heidegger as rector of, 240, 254 University of Göttingen, 2, 55, 75, 77–79, 118, 119, 246, 247 University of Marburg, 105, 107, 108, 214 University of Munich: as center of Catholic philosophy, 11, 40, 81, 85, 151; as center of phenomenology, 11, 49, 77, 78, 79, 81, 119, 120, 151, 286 University of Pisa, 175, 179 University of Strasbourg, 3, 85, 246, 301 University of Turin, 175, 176, 179, 180, 237, 344

Validity [Gelten], 50, 90, 94, 95, 99 Van Breda, Herman Leo: establishment of Husserl Archives, 8, 20, 280–290, 296–307; and Husserl, 290–296; and Merleau-­Ponty, 293, 299, 300, 316, 325

Index 493

Van Buren, John, 89 Van Gehuchten, Arthur, 31 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, 8; and Heidegger, 223; and Husserl, 199–202, 291, 305; and Scheler, 245 Van Riet, Georges, 65 Varisco, Bernardino, 234 Vattimo, Gianni, 344, 347 Vichy Régime, 241, 267, 272, 308 Vie Intellectuelle (French journal), 244, 245, 265, 312, 314, 334, 336 Vocation, 244, 262–264, 271–272 Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 220 Von Hertling, Georg, 81 Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 15, 78–79, 147, 194, 248, 254 Von Hindenburg, Paul, 118 Von Schaezler Foundation, 89, 151

Winock, Michel, 266, 267, 268, 271 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1 Wittkemper, Karl, 221 Woessner, Martin, 4 Wojtyła, Karol, 6–7, 171, 248 Wolfe, Judith, 108 World War I, 18, 68, 81, 118, 125–128, 244, 246, 249, 283, 310 World War II, 6, 259, 267, 273, 308, 317, 332 Wundt, Wilhelm, 39, 81, 83, 92 Würzburg School, 39, 48, 53, 54, 75 Wust, Peter, 12, 75, 136, 173, 235, 244–245, 248 Wyszynski, Stefan, 171

Wagner de Reyna, Alberto, 223 Wahl, Jean, 233–234, 240, 297; and Christian existentialism, 153, 168–169, 179; and Heidegger, 211–213; and Jaspers, 169–170 Walther, Gerda, 78, 79 Weber, Max, 126

Zahavi, Dan, 2, 47 Zamboni, Giuseppe, 189–190, 199 Zaragüeta, Juan, 36, 70 Žižek, Slavoj, 343 Znak (Polish journal), 9 Zubiri, Xavier, 69–72 Zukunft (German journal), 265, 267

Xirau, Jauquín, 8