Decisions and Transformations : The Phenomenology of Embodiment 9783838274355

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Decisions and Transformations

James Mensch is a full Professor of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague.  He is also a member of the Central European Institute of Philosophy. His main areas of research are phenomenology and its contemporary social and political applications.  He is the author of numerous articles and thirteen books, the most recent being  Selfhood and Appearing, The Intertwining (Brill, 2018), and Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Königshausen & Neumann, 2016).

James Richard Mensch

To say that we are embodied subjects is to affirm that we are both extended and conscious: both a part of the material world and a place where that world comes to presence. The ambiguity inherent in our being both can be put in terms of a double “being in.” Thus, while it is true that the world is in consciousness taken as a place of appearing, it is equally true that, taken as embodied, consciousness is in the world.  How can our selfhood support both descriptions? Starting with Husserl’s late manuscripts on birth and death, James Mensch traces out the effects of this paradox on phenomenology. What does it mean to consider the self as determined by its embodiment? How does this affect our social and political relations, including those marked by violence? How does our embodiment affect our sense of transcendence, including that of the divine? In the course of these inquiries, such questions are shown to transform the very sense of phenomenology.

DECISIONSand TRANSFORMATIONS The Phenomenology of Embodiment

James Richard Mensch

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1435-1

ibidem

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Body and Consciousness, vol. 1

ibidem

James Mensch

Decisions and Transformations The Phenomenology of Embodiment

BODY AND CONSCIOUSNESS Editor: James Richard Mensch Consulting Editor: Donald Phillip Verene ISSN

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James Mensch Decisions and Transformations The Phenomenology of Embodiment ISBN 978-3-8382-1435-1

James Mensch

DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS The Phenomenology of Embodiment

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7435-5 © ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2020 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is dedicated to Josephine Aileen Mensch, my wife, friend, and love of fifty-two years.

Acknowledgements I composed this book by writing articles on its theme and submitting them for publication. Because of this, I am particularly grateful to the reviewers whose suggestions helped me to see the lacunae in my submissions and, thus, improve their content. I am also grateful to the publishing houses, periodicals, and persons who own the rights to these articles for their kind permission to republish all or part of them. In particular, I acknowledge that material from the following articles has been included in this monograph: “The Spatiality of Subjectivity,” Symposium, Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (June, 2016), 20:1, pp. 181-194; “Life and the Reduction to the Lifeworld,” Horizon 6 (2) 2017, pp. 13-29; “Life and Horizon, “Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol. Xl, No. 2, 2018, pp. 7-18; “Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept,” in Kontexte des Leiblichen, eds. Catherin Nielson, Karel Novotný, and Thomas Nenon (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH, 2016), pp. 481-492; “Social Change and Embodiment,” Phainomena XXVI, November 2017, pp. 13114; “Trust and Violence,” Studia Phenomenologica, XIX (2019), pp. 5973; “Violence and the Return of the Religious,” Continental Philosophy Review, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), pp. 1-15; “Economy and Theodicy,” in Philosophy of Evil, From Speculation to Transgression (Filozofia wobec zła. Od spekulacji do transgresji), eds. Marek Drwięga and Radosław Strzelecki (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018), pp. 25-38; “Non-Useless Suffering,” Bogoslovni vestnik/Theological Quarterly 79 (2019) 2, pp. 313-320; and “Embodiment and the Experience of the Divine,” Religious Theory, January 22, 2019, available at: http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2019/01/22/embodiment-andthe-experience-of-the-divine-james-mensch. Grateful acknowledgement is also due to the program Progress Q21, Text and Image in Phenomenology and Semiotics, for supporting my research in Paris and Leuven. Progress Q21 is part of the Institutional Support for Long Term Development of Research Organizations at Charles University’s Faculty of Humanities in Prague.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Josephine Mensch, my wife, without whose careful reading and editing of my texts, this work would not have been possible.

Contents Introduction ......................................................................................... 11 Part I Embodiment and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology Chapter I Birth, Death, and Sleep: Limit Problems and the Paradox of Phenomenology ....................................................... 23 Chapter II The Numerical and the Unique Singularity of the Ego in the C Manuscripts ........................................................... 35 Chapter III The Spatiality of Subjectivity ......................................... 49 Chapter IV Life and the Reduction to the Lifeworld ...................... 63 Chapter V Life and Horizon............................................................... 81 Chapter VI Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept ......................................................................................... 91 Part II Embodiment and the Singularity of Selfhood Chapter VII Self-Identity from the Perspective of the Body ........ 105 Chapter VIII Temporality and Embodied Self-Presence .............. 115 Chapter IX Social Change and Embodiment ................................. 129 Part III Trust and Mistrust Chapter X Belief and Trust, an Analysis of Husserl’s Epoché..... 141 Chapter XI Trust and Violence ........................................................ 149 Chapter XII Violence and the Return of the Religious ................. 163 Part IV Sacrifice and the Presence of the Divine Chapter XIII Suffering and Theodicy.............................................. 179 Chapter XIV Embodiment and the Experience of the Divine ..... 191 Chapter XV Flesh and Forgiveness ................................................. 201 Afterword ........................................................................................... 211 Bibliography ...................................................................................... 219 Indexes ................................................................................................ 273 9

Introduction A reflective regard to the tradition of Western thought reveals the presence of crises. A crisis, (κρίσις) in the Greek sense of the word, points to conditions calling for a decision. The call may come from the instability of the situation, an instability caused by competing demands or ambiguous evidence. It can also arise from discoveries that destabilize the existing boundaries of thought without indicating a way forward. Regardless of its origin, the call is for a decision regarding the direction of inquiry. This was the case in physics when Michelson and Morley showed that the speed of light on earth was unaffected by the earth’s velocity. It was also the situation when Galileo demonstrated that the acceleration of a falling body did not depend on its weight. The response, in each case, was a demand for a change of approach and, with this, for a new source of evidence. For Einstein, this involved the abandonment of the idea that space and time afforded invariant measures. Evidence was now sought from astronomical observations of the bending of light and, later, from newly discovered atomic processes. For Galileo, the shift in direction was even more fundamental. It involved a radical dichotomy in our understanding of the sensuous presence of the world, which was now divided into its primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities designated the measurable aspects of appearing objects, such as their spatial dimensions, weight, and frequency of vibrations. Secondary qualities referred to their colors, odors, sounds, tastes and tactility as provided by our sense organs. The task of science was to understand nature through its numerically measurable qualities. This included explaining its secondary qualities through the primary. Thus, a change in color was to be understood in terms of a change in the light wave’s frequency, and a change of pitch explained by a change in the oscillation of the sound wave. The numerable aspects of reality thus became the primary source of evidence. It was there that the confirmation of the new science was to be sought.1 Similar decision points can also be found in the history of philosophy. Ancient philosophy was shaped by Plato’s and Aristotle’s 11

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decision to privilege final over mechanical causes. At issue was not so much how something was accomplished as the goal of this accomplishment. Socrates opposed the two in explaining his choice not to escape, but rather remain in prison under sentence of death. Mechanically, the explanation for his sitting and talking with his followers had to do with the “contraction or relaxation of the muscles,” the fact that he was able to bend his limbs, and to the “sound and air” that formed themselves into his speech. The true cause, however, was what he thought best—i.e., was best according with the goal of maintaining his integrity.2 Modernity, both in science and philosophy, reversed this decision. Descartes disavowed teleological reasoning and science followed suit. The result was that teleological formulations of the laws of motion, such as the least action principle, were largely disregarded.3 Another, more modern decision can be seen in analytic philosophy’s choice to privilege language over consciousness. Did language structure consciousness and, hence our apprehension of the world or did it conceal the actual nature of consciousness as Henri Bergson thought?4 Analytic philosophy’s decision to see consciousness as thoroughly informed by language meant, for its followers, that to understand our grasp of reality, we had to study language, both in its use and abuse. It, rather than consciousness, was the privileged, objective source of evidence.5 Such examples show that to recognize a decision point is to open up the questions of how to proceed and where to search for confirmatory evidence. This may be expressed in terms of the hermeneutical principle: to understand a statement, one must regard its context—in particular, the questions to which it responds. In times of historical transition, such questions are the basic ones of procedure and evidence. This is also the case in the opening up of a new line of inquiry. To do so is to ask about the decisions that led to the current situation. It is to question whether alternate directions and corresponding sources of evidence were ignored. This is what Husserl did in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Examining the Galilean revolution in science, he focused on the forgotten fact of the lifeworld—i.e., on the methods of inquiry and evidence appropriate to it.

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Husserl’s examination of the lifeworld was part of a new approach in philosophy, one with its own methods of inquiry and sources of evidence. His claim to have founded phenomenology as a “rigorous science” is now more than a hundred years old. Again and again, phenomenology has been renewed by asking about the decision points in his phenomenology. Heidegger, for example, saw such in Husserl’s decision to focus on consciousness as a source of evidence. His alternative was to attend to the disclosures that our daily activities made possible. In his view, such activities are based on our needs and disclose the use value of things.6 This disclosure is an articulation of the world. As a result: “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’”7 The wind appears as the latter when we sail across the lake. In each case, the source of our evidence is not consciousness, but rather our purposeful activity. Motivated by our concerns, it is what determines our focus. Merleau-Ponty also took issue with Husserl’s procedure—in particular with his eidetic method, which organized consciousness according to the essences of its acts. In his view, “The necessities by essence will not be the ‘answer’ philosophy calls for … The ‘answer’ is … in the wild Being where they were, and … continue to be, undivided.”8 For him, the “task” is to decide “in terms of what questioning our brute or wild experience will have taught us.”9 In other words, this wild experience is the source of evidence, and the corresponding method consists in knowing how to question it. Husserl, of course, would dispute such alternatives. In the Bernau Manuscripts, he describes his method as follows: “As in this treatise so generally, we bore and we blast mineshafts in all possible directions. We consider all the logical possibilities to catch sight of which of these present essential possibilities and which yield essential impossibilities and thus we ultimately sort out a consistent system of essential necessities.”10 His method, he claims, is open. It considers all the possible directions, seeing which are supported by the evidence and which are not, which are compatible and which rule others out. Yet, as the examples of Heidegger and MerleauPonty indicate, the notion of evidence is not unambiguous. It, itself, seems to be determined by the direction of inquiry. Given this, the

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issue becomes whether the evidence yielded by different lines of inquiry is of equal value—that is, whether it is richer or poorer, whether it supports a more comprehensive or a more limited understanding of the world that includes us. In some lines of inquiry—notably, those that focus on the primary qualities of experience—consciousness is itself called into question. The secondary, sensuous qualities that form its content lose their claims, becoming “epi-phenomenal.”11 In Husserl’s inquiry, by contrast, the status of the body is at issue. In considering the body to be a “constituted formation,” is his approach faithful the body’s actual relation to consciousness? The difficulty lies in the ambiguous nature of embodied selfhood. We are both extended and conscious: both a part of the material world and a place where that world comes to presence. As Hans Jonas remarked, “neither of the two descriptions can be carried to its end without trespass into the sphere of the other.”12 Such trespass is, in fact, an elimination. To see ourselves as part of the material world invites us to consider consciousness in material terms—i.e., in terms of “the structure and dynamics of physical processes.” But these, as David Chalmers points out, “yield only more structure and dynamics.”13 Chalmers, here, is echoing John Locke’s statement that we can see how a change in “the size, figure, and motion of one body should cause a change in the size, figure and motion of another body.” But “we can by no means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any particles, can possibly produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever.” 14 How do we understand conscious experiences in terms of such structure and dynamics? Locke states that “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.”15 But if this is so, then the consideration of consciousness in material terms tends to eliminate consciousness. This cannot be otherwise, given that such material terms consist of primary qualities, while the secondary constitute the qualitative content of consciousness. A corresponding elimination occurs when we reverse the relation and attempt to consider the material world in terms of consciousness. Given the lack of connection between the two, we seem inevitably to wind up embracing Husserl’s position. If we begin with consciousness, then, as Husserl

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affirms, “the whole spatial-temporal world … has the sense … of a being for a consciousness. It is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences … Beyond this, however, it is nothing at all.”16 Here, we eliminate the material world as an independent principle and assert that “nature exists only as constituting itself in the ordered connections of consciousness.”17 The difficulty with these competing descriptions is not simply their incompatibility, but the fact that we cannot account for either without taking the other into account. Thus, any account of consciousness must consider embodiment—consider this as something more than a constituted formation dependent on consciousness. This cannot be otherwise given the dependence of consciousness on our embodied senses. Not only do they afford us the sensuous data that forms the content of our experiences; they also determine both how we perceive and what we perceive. When, for example, we move a finger along our forearm, the succession of tactile sensations follows the path of our finger. As Husserl writes, the body, here, serves as “the index for psycho-physical stimuli.” It links such sensuous contents “to [our] organic embodiment in its natural objective being.” It also points to “the lawfulness that makes possible the immanent temporal order, the grouping of hyletic data [and, hence] worldly apperception.”18 This index is such that visual data are linked to our eyes, acoustical data to our ears, and so on. As such, the body stands as an ordering principle for the syntheses that consciousness engages in. To reverse this, any account of the material world must assume consciousness. The synthetic connections that give the account its coherence presuppose a synthesizer. The data it joins presuppose a place of their apprehension. The necessity here is founded on the fact that science is based on experience and, as such, presupposes an experiencer. To eliminate the latter is to abstract from all the meanings that scientist have used to grasp the physical world. Because these alternate descriptions both undermine and presuppose each other, we face a crisis in our attempts to grasp ourselves as embodied. How can we bridge our division into material objects and conscious subjects? Is this ontological divide peculiar to us or is it representative of being in general? For Jonas, “the organic

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body signifies the latent crisis of every known ontology and the criterion of any future one which will be able to come forward as a science.”19 It represents a decision point without necessarily pointing to a way forward. For Husserl, as we shall see, this crisis appeared in his late manuscripts on sleep, birth, and death. Such phenomena indicate the dependence of consciousness on our embodiment. Only an embodied consciousness can experience fatigue and the need to sleep. Only it can be born and die. Can we actually treat such embodiment as a constituted formation? This would assume that consciousness, by itself, provides us with the relevant data— the data that we could synthesize so as to understand these events. Yet, as Husserl points out, they are characterized by an absence of the required data. We cannot grasp the moment of our falling asleep, since such a moment signifies the ceasing of our awareness. It is, on the one hand, the “disappearing of the world-present, i.e., of the existence of the worldly things for us.”20 On the other, it is also loss of ourselves. It is “the disappearing of the affected ego in its being affected.”21 The same, he will argue, also applies to the moments of our birth and death. These limits of possible experience indicate that the body, rather than being a constituted formation, is itself constituting. It supplies the data and structures our attempts to make sense of what we experience. The decision point we face is whether we can take account of this within traditional phenomenology. From a Husserlian perspective, the difficulties of doing so stem from his identification of phenomenology with epistemology. Phenomenology, he claims, is “the systematic explanation of the accomplishment of knowing, an explanation in which this becomes thoroughly understandable as an intentional accomplishment.”22 This identification means that phenomenology shares epistemology’s precedence over all other sciences.23 As such, it has to set its own standards for what counts as knowing. It must provide them to secure its analysis of the knowing process. If such standards are set by processes beyond its purview, its claims to explain knowing are relativized. An example Husserl gives will clarify this. The science of evolution studies the relations involved in the struggle for existence and natural selection. What happens when we consider such

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relations as determinative of logical relations, i.e., those which set the standards for the logical consistency of knowledge? For Husserl, this reversal of epistemology’s precedence immediately occasions a skepticism about such standards. As he writes: Thoughts of a biological order intrude. We are reminded of the modern theory of evolution according to which man has evolved through natural selection in the struggle for existence and, with man, his intellect has also naturally evolved and, with his intellect, also all of its characteristic forms—in particular, the logical forms. Accordingly, is it not the case that the logical forms and laws express the accidental peculiarity of the human species, a species which could have been different and will be different in the course of future evolution? Cognition, therefore, is doubtless only human cognition. It is something bound up with human intellectual forms, something incapable of reaching the nature of things themselves, of reaching the things in themselves.24

If we draw out the consequences of this line of thought, then we are led to assert that “even logic alters with the development of the brain.”25 This conclusion immediately undermines itself since it calls into question the very theory upon which it is based. Evolution is not just a descriptive account. It is, concretely regarded, a theory based on logical inference. If the objective validity of such inference is called into question, then so is the theory itself. Husserl’s attempt to avoid such self-undermining scepticism determined his treatment of the body. Discussing his work in the final volume of the Ideas, Husserl writes that “it simply concerns a motivated path which, starting from the problem of the possibility of objective knowledge, wins the necessary insight that the very sense of this problem leads back to the pure ego existing in and for itself, the insight that this ego, as a presupposition for knowledge of the world, cannot be and cannot remain presupposed as a worldly being.”26 This signifies that it “loses that which gives it the value of something real in the naively experienced, pre-given world; it loses the sense of being a soul of an animate organism (Leibes) which exists in a pre-given spatial-temporal nature.”27 The point of such remarks is not just to assert that “this ego must, through the phenomenological reduction and the epoché … be brought, to transcendental purity”—i.e., freed from its relation to the body.28 It is to eliminate the body’s role as determinative of

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consciousness. Phenomenology’s claims to be “genuine epistemology” cannot hold if knowing is determined by bodily functions. Not only are such functions relative to us—and, hence, could be other for other sensate beings; bodily functions, as such, work in secret. We do not directly apprehend the processes of digestion. Neither are the chemical processes of the brain subjects for phenomenological analysis. How, then, are we to investigate the body’s role in constitution? The answer we shall explore in the chapters that follow comes from the body’s ambiguous status as both subject and object. In a certain sense, our approach can be considered as a response to Husserl’s taking the subject as ontologically distinct from the object. According to this distinction, an object is what appears. The subject is that to which objects appear. To make a subject appear is, then, to transform it into an object—in German, to make it into a Gegenstand, literally, into that which “stands against” a subject. But this is to make it relative, not to itself, but to a new subject to whom it appears. In other words, every attempt to make the subject appear reintroduces the subject object split.29 To avoid this impasse, we have to say that the subject is essentially embodied. Its subjectivity consists, not in its being a disembodied ego brought to “transcendental purity,” but rather in its being an extended place of appearing. It is such through its embodied sense organs—eyes, ears, skin, etc. Merleau-Ponty can be understood as describing this place when he writes, “our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things.”30 Doing so, it provides measures “for being, dimensions to which we can refer it.”31 In other words, through our sensate flesh, we can refer to the sensible aspects of being. We can measure it along the axes or dimensions of its sights, sounds, tastes, smells, roughness and smoothness. In providing a place where these qualities can appear, however, the body itself appears. It, itself, is available to our senses. We can see, feel, taste, touch and smell it. In addition, we can, through our sense of proprioception, apprehend the kinesthesia that accompany our movements. It, thus, presents us with not just a place of appearing, but also with something that appears. With it, we encounter something that is both subjective and objective.

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To think of the body in this way is, of course, quite different from regarding it as a place of hidden processes determining the course of appearing. The body’s role in such determination is, here, open to inspection. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, it reveals that just as we can say that, as embodied, we are in the appearing world, so we can equally affirm that this world is in us. In “lining” the world with our senses, we cover it. Enclosing it, we make it within us. This fact is apparent whenever we open and close our eyes, making the world visually appear and disappear, or when we open or stop up our ears, making it acoustically available or fall silent. In such examples the world shows itself to be within us by virtue of our senses—the very senses that make us a place of appearing. Yet, since this place is embodied, we can also say that it is in the world. It is, itself, one of the many appearing objects of the world. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, the flesh that “lines and even envelops” the things of this world appears as “nevertheless surrounded” by them.32 It is within the world it reveals. The conclusion, then, is that “because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another.”33 In what follows, we will take this double relation of “being in” as indicative of the crisis we face. In doing so, we will look for possible ways forward with their corresponding sources of evidence. This will involve our considering appearing as such as structured by this double relation of being in. In search for possible sources of evidence, we will explore what it means to consider the ego or self as determined by embodiment. We will extend this inquiry to include our social and political relations, including those marked by violence. Given the relation between violence and religion, we will also explore the role religion plays in our conception of the divine. All of these investigations will be phenomenological—but in a transformed sense. Husserl’s epoché, for instance, will not be considered from an epistemological perspective—but in terms of its uncovering the embodied trust that makes possible the apprehension of the world. The attempt, here, will be to reset the terms of phenomenology such that an account of embodiment does not lead to a self-undermining skepticism.

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Husserl, throughout his career, called himself a “beginner.” By this, he underscored his repeated attempts found and re-found his phenomenology. In pursuing an alternative within the phenomenological tradition, the same can be said of the present work. This book is one of exploration. Its goal is to discover the decision points within Husserl’s phenomenology in order to pursue possible alternatives and corresponding sources of evidence. Equally, it is an invitation to readers to do likewise in their reading of the tradition. In pursuing this objective, we will begin with Husserl’s consideration of the limit questions of phenomenology—those involving birth, death, and sleep. Such questions open up the decision points faced by phenomenology.

Part I Embodiment and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology

Chapter I Birth, Death, and Sleep: Limit Problems and the Paradox of Phenomenology One of the most striking decision points in Husserl’s phenomenology appears in the passage of the Crisis where he invokes “the paradox of human subjectivity.” This involves our “being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.”1 We confront here two views of humanity: “that of humanity as worldconstituting subjectivity and yet as incorporated in the world itself.”2 Are the two the same or different? If they are the same, then, as Husserl asks: “How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation … ?”3 Husserl, in the Crisis, attempts to resolve this by asserting that “transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world,” are not “human beings.”4 In fact, within them, “nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the ‘phenomenon,’ to the world as a constituted pole.”5 This implies that the world-constituting subjectivity is not incorporated in the world. We don’t have the paradox of the constituted source of the world being a part of the constituted world. Husserl, however, undermines this solution by asserting a few pages later that “each transcendental ego … must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.”6 This means “that each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental ego … insofar as he is the self-objectification … of the corresponding transcendental ego.”7 Given this, the paradox returns in the form of the relation between the transcendental and human subjects. How can we, as humans, both be and not be transcendental subjects? The task of this chapter is to discuss this paradox in terms of the “limit problems” of birth and death. Here, the paradox involves 23

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the fact that, as humans, we are mortal, but as transcendental subjects, we cannot assert this. Thus, for Husserl, the transcendental ego must “necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.” Since human beings are mortal, this implies that the transcendental ego constitutes itself as mortal.8 Yet, the transcendental ego is other than the human ego. As a transcendental ego, Husserl writes, “I must necessarily believe that I will continue to live.” Yet, he adds, “[i]sn’t it a paradox” that I have to believe this “when, in fact, I know that my death is impending.”9 The paradox, then, is that I have to believe both that I can and cannot die. Husserl claims that “dying must be compatible with the inconceivability, the incomprehensibility of the cessation of transcendental being.”10 But can I assert this phenomenologically? The late manuscripts on birth, death, and sleep confront this question repeatedly. Doing so, they address the limits of the phenomenological method, whose salient feature is its attempt to examine our claims in the light of the evidence that we directly access. Can this method make intelligible the relation between a deathless transcendental subjectivity and its mortal, human counterpart? Or does the ambiguity of the relation mean, as we implied, that we are facing a decision point?

Limit Problems Limit problems in phenomenology involve a necessary lack of evidence for their resolution. Take, for example, the problem of when we fall asleep. We experience getting sleepy, but can we say that we experience the moment when we fall asleep or can this “only be conceived as a limit” of what preceded it?11 As Husserl points out, lacking the required data, we can never experience this moment. Hyletic data, he speculates, may continue to be present, but they cease to affect us while we sleep.12 The prominences they display— the contrasts that distinguish the features of the sensible world— lose their force. Their “multiplicity becomes an undifferentiated unity” in our consciousness.13 With this, we lose the “world.” As Husserl expresses this, falling asleep is the “disappearing of the world-present, i.e., of the existence of the worldly things for us.”14 This loss is not just that of the affections that we interpret as coming

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from worldly things. It is also a loss of ourselves. It is “the disappearing of the affected ego in its being affected.”15 Husserl asks, how “could the ego act in this undifferentiated null” of affections?16 Barring any affection, “how would there be any turning towards” the affecting data?17 In the absence of any action, can we even speak of an ego? Behind such questions is the intimate relation between affecting content and the ego that feels and responds to it. According to Husserl: “Content is non-ego; feeling is already egological. The ‘address’ of the content is not a call to something, but rather a feeling being-there of the ego ... The ego is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego; between them there is no room for a turning towards. Rather, the ego and its non-ego are inseparable; the ego is a feeling ego with every content.”18

For Husserl, the two cannot be thought apart. The intimacy of their relation is such that he can say: “What from the side of the hyletic data is called the affection of the ego is, from the side of the ego, called tending, striving towards.”19 This implies that it is not just a lack of affecting data that makes it impossible for us to say when we fall asleep. The impossibility comes from the lack of the ego that would make such a report. Husserl makes the same points about birth and death. The moments of our birth and death, like the moment of our falling asleep, can only be understood as limits. Thus, for Husserl, “In the beginning, at my birth in the natural interpretation, I have nothing worldly, no world for myself. I also have no world-future, in which I could anticipate anything. I do not have a future because I do not have a past.”20 His point is that without a past, I have no basis for any anticipations. I have nothing to “protend” or project forward, since the retentional process, which would offer me the requisite material, has not yet begun.21 Thus, even the most minimal sense of the future—that formally given by the protentional process—is lacking. If the moment of birth can only be conceived as a limit of a life that will gradually become filled with experiences, the moment

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of death stands as the opposite limit. Here, as Husserl says, “the best interpretation of the limit thought” of death is: the lessening of affectivity, increasing incapacity to follow the sensation stimuli, incapability to grasp oneself as a subject of capabilities and as a pole of affections and actions, which have themselves already disappeared—ultimately as the limit of the ceasing of every element of conscious life and, with this, of the ego as the identity-pole of this life and its capacities.22

Again, it is the very lack of data that prevents us from grasping the limit. As in the case of sleep, this lack of affecting data signifies the absence of the self—the “pole of affections and actions”— that would experience the limit. The same points hold with regard to birth. This absence of any first-person experience point to an essential limit of the phenomenological method. It forces Husserl to admit that “the transcendentally pure, inner interpretation of intentional life and the being of the ego does not lead to any conception of a beginning and an end.”23 This incapacity to conceive the beginning or end of consciousness can be put in terms of temporalization. Husserl writes, “a beginning of life (of a conscious life), which is supposed to have a before, a previous time, is not experienceable, not experienced, not remembered. The same holds with regard to death.”24 To experience an event is to experience it as occurring in time. Events are placed in time by having a before and an after. Birth, however, has no experienceable “before”; death has no experienceable “after.” Attempting to conceive such moments, we encounter the paradoxical notion of a one-sided border—a border of which we can experience only one side. We can approach this border as a limit, but to cross it is to face our annihilation. This is why it is “not experienceable, not experienced.” The appeal to the birth and death of Others does not remove this difficulty. Although I see people being born and dying, that is, their entering and leaving the human community, I cannot constitute these as events applying to the continuity of their conscious or mental existence. They neither appear before birth nor return after death to report on such existence. This means, according to Husserl that “I have not primordially and intersubjectively constituted

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being-before-birth [Vor-der-Geburt-Sein], nor have I so constituted a primordial beginning … The beginning of humans is intersubjectively constituted, but not [their] being before the beginning nor, equally, their mental [psychisches] being after death.”25 Even when we move to the intersubjective level, birth and death, then, remain one-sided borders. Again we face the difficulty of placing these events in time. Viewed in terms of what preceded it, the moment of our birth is not temporally experienceable by us since temporal constitution has not yet begun. The same holds, mutandis mutatis, for the moment of death. Given this impasse, it would seem that we can only constitute our birth and death indirectly—that is through Others. We see their entering and leaving the human community and, through empathy, apply this to ourselves. Such constitution, however, remains paradoxical. It can never be directly confirmed. We can experience birth and death neither directly nor intersubjectively as a temporally determined event of another person’s subjective life.

Transcendental Subjectivity: Temporalization and Immortality In spite of this lack of experience, Husserl continually affirms that transcendent subjectivity cannot die. He writes, “I exist apodictically. Death is not an event in the ‘I am’ of the transcendental ego.”26 This can be put in terms of the stream of consciousness. For Husserl, “it appears as a positive necessity that the stream of consciousness have no end.”27 It cannot have an end in the now since, in its protentions, it is always ahead of the now. Similarly, it cannot have a beginning in the now, since, in its retentions, it is always behind the present moment. Such protentions and retentions are an absolute necessity if we are to speak of the streaming of consciousness. Without them, we would be limited to the shifting contents of the now, which would not be taken as streaming towards us from the anticipated future or away from our nowness into the retained past; rather they would appear only to immediately disappear. With this, we have the inference that if the stream, with its protentions and retentions, has no end, then the

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ego, as its pole, also has no end. This point follows from the fact that we exist and act only in the now—the very now that is situated on the border between the advancing, anticipated future and the departing, retained past. The unending quality of the ego also emerges when we assert, with Husserl, “I am. Time is constituted from me.”28 Here, the very time, in which the ego could supposedly end, presupposes the constitutive action and, hence, the existence of the ego. The end of the ego would, impossibly, presuppose its continuance. Furthermore, when we assert that the ego constitutes time, we also have to say, with Husserl, “[t]he ego in its most original originality is not in time.”29 As he also puts this, “in its original functioning”—i.e., in its functioning as a temporal origin—”the functioning pole is never in the temporal field.”30 What is in time is the ego that is the result of such functioning, the ego that has undergone transcendental selftemporalization.31 Given this, we have to ask with Husserl, “Can I ever begin? Doesn’t having a beginning only have a sense as having a beginning in time? Can I have a beginning as a streaming, living present?”32 Since, “the word ‘present’ is unsuitable in this context insofar as it already indicates a modality of time,” the answer must be negative. We can never speak of the transcendental ego’s “beginning” or “end” without committing the category mistake of applying temporal terms to what is, essentially, non-temporal.33 The same reasoning applies when, with Husserl, we assert: “Temporalization is the constitution of existents in their temporal modalities.” If, in temporalizing, the transcendental subject constitutes temporal existents, then the characteristics of the latter cannot apply to it. In particular, the features of birth and death, as applicable to constituted human subjects cannot be applied, without committing a category mistake, to this subject. They are, in fact, only applicable to the subject that is placed in time by such constitution. Husserl calls such constitution a “self-genesis.” Constituting the world, I make myself part of it.34 I become “constituted in the world as a human being.”35 Concretely, I become a human among other humans, all of whom are embodied and mortal. Human birth or death, however, cannot touch the self that generates this world. Just as the temporally constituting ego cannot begin or

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end, neither can the world-constituting ego be born or die. Birth and death can only apply to the constituted, embodied human ego. In Husserl’s words, “Death is not an existing occurrence in the ‘I am” of the transcendental ego, but rather an event in the human world, in the constituted world. Thus my worldly death, my separation from functioning intersubjectivity—the collapse of my body”—all this pertains to constituted, not constituting subjectivity.36 Without the former, i.e., without the “streaming, ‘living’ present,” Husserl writes, “absolutely nothing has being and this includes the Others implicit in [this present] and the world with its human birth and death.”37 Since birth and death, as pertaining to existent individuals, depend on the functioning of this present, we cannot say, without circularity, that this present’s functioning is dependent on them.

The Embodied Ego This exclusion of birth and death from transcendental subjectivity seems to flow directly from Husserl’s account of constitution. Yet, Husserl cannot let the matter rest. What prevents him is the ambiguous role of the body in the functioning of the ego. On the one hand, the presence of the body seems to be dependent on such functioning. It has the status of a constituted phenomenon. In Husserl’s words, “Nature is constituted nature, my corporeal, living body [mein körperlicher Leib] is a constituted living body. This constitution is an ongoing, transcendental occurring in my ego.”38 On the other hand, the body seems to play a crucial role in constitution. It is the conduit for the hyletic data—the sensuous contents that well up in the now. As such, it is, as we earlier cited Husserl, “the index for psycho-physical stimuli.” It links such sensuous contents “to [our] organic embodiment in its natural objective being.” It points to “the lawfulness that makes possible the immanent temporal order, the grouping of hyletic data [and, hence] worldly apperception.”39 This index, as remarked, is such that visual data are linked to our eyes, acoustical data to our ears, and so on. The “immanent temporal order” of a series of touch sensations can be linked, for example, to moving a finger along a forearm, that of a succession of visual data

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to the bodily action of turning our heads, moving forward to get a better look, and so on. Such examples could be multiplied. What they point to is the essential role of the body in world constitution. They imply that without the body such constitution would be impossible. Given this, can we say that the body’s status is simply that of a “constituted phenomenon”? The body’s ambiguous status is, moreover, apparent in its role in the constitution of birth and death. Since I can have no first-person experience of such events, whatever knowledge I have of them must come from Others, i.e., with my externally observing their entering and leaving the intersubjective community.40 As Husserl notes, death is generally preceded by the collapse of the body’s functioning. The dead body that results from such collapse no longer responds to me; it repels my acts of empathetic understanding; I can no longer grasp it as a subject like myself. I, thus, constitute its sense as a non-responsive dead person. In this view, Husserl writes, “[t]he death of Others is the earlier constituted death. The same holds with regard to the birth of Others.”41 In both cases, the constitutional sequence seems to begin with Others and their embodiment. A closer regard, however, shows that the starting point must be my own embodiment. Without this, I could not recognize Others as subjects similar to myself and, hence, transfer the sense of their mortality to myself. Such recognition begins with my observing that the Other’s bodily appearance and behavior is similar to my own. The resultant “pairing” of my own appearing body with the Other’s allows, via “appresentation,” for an associative transfer of sense. Here, I transfer the sense of my governing my body to the Other. I take him as governing his body as I do and, hence, as a subject like myself. Thus, to constitute my death, I must first constitute my own functioning body. Then I must pair it with the appearing body of the Other, thereby recognizing him as a subject like myself. Finally, I have to transfer his demise to my own future. As Husserl describes this sequence, the body is “primordially and continually constituted and, from this basis, [constituted as] the bearer for primordial nature and the co-being of co-present Others, their bodies, etc., and, thus, is constituted as the bearer of the present world,

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which points to a future pertaining to me. But then, via Others taken as other human beings in the world, my death comes into play—this, as an event in world time.”42 In spite of its positioning of my own body as primary, this passage, which I have only partially quoted, does take my body as dependent on the streaming life of the transcendental ego. It begins by asserting that the body that bears nature and Others is constituted “‘as long’ as this conscious life ‘lasts’ and extends itself in streaming and being active.”43 This position, however, becomes ambiguous when we recall Husserl’s claim that the impressional content that fills this life is not provided by consciousness. For Husserl, “[c]onsciousness is nothing without impression.” It requires “the ‘new,’ that which has come into being alien to consciousness, that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.”44 Such spontaneity is responsible for the retentions and protentions of impressions, but not for the impressions themselves.45 Now, if we say that the body, through its senses, is responsible for such impressions, then the streaming itself is dependent on the body. This view of the body is implicit in Husserl’s assertion that the body orders our affections—that, in its five senses, it is an index for “the lawfulness that makes possible the immanent temporal order, the grouping of hyletic data [and] worldly apperception.” The ambiguity regarding the status of the body increases when we try to imagine what a self would be that did not have a body. Such a self, first of all, would not be “human.” It would also not have Others since it would lose the bodily basis for their positing. This can be put in terms of Husserl’s statement, “I am human [Mensch] when my body constitutes itself as disposable by me and, as such, is there for me.”46 This disposability of my body is crucial for my constitution of Others. I interpret them as egos like myself by taking their bodies as disposable by them—i.e., as determined by their mental life just as I take my body’s behavior as determined by my own. All of this becomes impossible if I do not have a body. Moreover, lacking a body, I also lack a surrounding world. I have such a world by virtue of the “worldly apperception” that my body makes possible. This is a world that I can move through and

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manipulate, using its objects for my ends. It is also a world that unfolds perspectivally about a 0-point that is formed between my eyes. Absent this world, what would be the status of my transcendental ego? Husserl writes, “That I remain as the transcendental ego that I am—as the same personal ego—is equivalent to saying that my world remains a world.”47 The question is, “Must I have the transcendental form [Gestalt] of a human ego or, equivalently, must there be a world?”48 I don’t have a world when “the conditions for existence in the world … are suspended.” For Husserl, “these conditions are those of the possibility of worldly apperception and stand under the title of the body.” Bodily death, then, would not just signify that the transcendental ego “would lose ‘embodiment’ [Leiblichkeit].” It would also signify that the ego “would lose its consciousness of the world and leave the world order.” But can this be conceived? As Husserl spells out the difficulty: The entrance into the world order signifies that the ego begins with a primal presence, one where hyletic prominences appear in an ordering and affective force that allow the play of associative, active constitutive genesis to begin and continue … Can the ego have an existent consciousness with a hyletic primal presence without any pre-existing prominences?49

In fact, without the body, there would be no prominences (no peaks of data with their attracting or repelling forces) to affect and awaken the ego. But this would leave us with an unconscious transcendental ego. The only alternative, Husserl writes, would be to imagine “a non-worldly mode of being of the monads.” Death would then be “a transition into a style of being that, in principle, cannot be accessed by worldly knowledge … a style of being that is related to a possible knowledge of a completely new type.” The difficulty, however, is: “What other type of knowledge is possible?” With this, Husserl admits, we are at an impasse. In fact, “the transcendental, regressive inquiry … fails to reach its goal. It only leads to death and birth as transcendental puzzles.” It leaves us with the question: “How do we transcend the world?”50 At the basis of these paradoxes are the divisions that allowed us to pose them. On the one side, we have our being a “subject for the world,” on the other, our being “an object in the world.” The

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first, taken as a transcendental ego, is “world-constituting,” the second, understood as a human subject, is “incorporated in the world.” The first cannot die, the second is mortal. So defined, there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the two. This gap rests on a static definition of terms, one where we distinguish the human from the transcendental ego and declare that “nothing human is to be found” in the latter. The “transcendental puzzles” that arise from these distinctions indicate a decision point. Should we hold on to such static definitions or is another method possible—one that privileges genetic over the static analysis of the ego? By genetic, I mean an analysis that views the ego, not as fixed, but as essentially in process. What would be the corresponding source of evidence for the consideration of the self as a process? Could such consideration remain within traditional Husserlian phenomenology or would it shift its direction? To answer these questions, we must turn to Husserl’s shifting views of the ego. Again, the main source of our inquiry will not be his completed, published works, but rather the late, unpublished manuscripts with their exploratory focus.

Chapter II The Numerical and the Unique Singularity of the Ego in the C Manuscripts The late C manuscripts make a number of apparently contradictory claims regarding the ego—claims that parallel the descriptions of the previous chapter. On the one hand, the ego is asserted to be the origin of temporalization. On the other, it, itself, is declared to be temporally constituted. Thus, Husserl can write: “I am. Time is constituted from me.”1 But he can also assert: “The ego itself is constituted as a temporal unity. As the stationary and remaining ego, it is an already acquired (and, in continual acquisition, a continually acquired) ontical unity: the identical ego of my temporal life.”2 Which is it? Do I constitute time or am I constituted as an identical, temporal entity? A similar opposition appears in his statements about the uniqueness of the ego. He asserts that every ego is unique in having its own streaming life. It is individualized through this life. In his words: “Every ego, whom I experience as other through originally representing him, has his unity and his streaming life, has his immanent-temporal streaming of his material-factual [sachlicher] temporalization,”3 This assertion, however, does not prevent him from adding: “There is, nonetheless, community [of self and others]. … my ego and the other ego do not have any extensive distance in the community of our being with each other. But also my life, my temporalization, has no distance from [that of] the other.”4 When the extensive distance between the egos disappears, they and their temporalizations exist in a non-extended coincidence. How can Husserl make such opposing claims? Is my temporalization the same or different than that of my others? Such competing assertions indicate a decision point, one that can be met by a genetic account of the ego, an account that conceives the ego as a process rather than a thing. For the late Husserl, the contrasting descriptions of the ego correspond to different stages in this process. They refer to distinct

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levels of the ego’s ongoing constitution. By “ongoing” I mean that it is a process continuously proceeding from the pre-individual, pre-ontical level to that of the concrete selfhood that each of us experiences.

The Ego as the Form of Temporal Centering The oppositions just listed find a parallel form in Husserl’s Ideas. In the first volume of this work, Husserl asserts that the ego is “constantly” there. While every cogito can change, can come and go, the ego, he writes, is “something absolutely identical in all actual and possible changes of experiences.” As such, “it cannot in any sense be taken as a real [reelles] component or moment of the experiences.”5 As identical, it cannot be any of the changing contents of experience. It must transcend them.6 Husserl, thus, asserts that it is “a unique— non-constituted—transcendence, a transcendence in immanence.”7 In the second volume of the Ideas, however, he seems to take the opposite position. He writes “As the one identical, numerically singular ego, the ego belongs to ‘its’ stream of experiences, which is constituted as a unity in unending, immanent time. The one pure ego is constituted as a unity with reference to this stream-unity; this means that it can find itself as identical in its course.”8 Is the identical ego constituted or is it not? To resolve this issue, two clarifications have to be made. We, first of all, have to distinguish the constitution of an object from that of the subject. Objective constitution is essentially a matter of synthesis. It occurs when we identify a pattern of experiences and see them as having a common referent. Thus, when we walk into a room, its various objects show different sides to us as we move among them. On a perceptual level, we are confronted by a number of perspectivally linked patterns of appearing. Having learnt how to see, we distinguish them, identifying one, for example, with a lamp, another with a chair, and so on. Doing so, we say, for example, that this series of experiences shows the lamp from different sides. We thus take each of the experiences of the series as an experience of the lamp. In a mostly unconscious, automatic process, we do the same for the other objects in the room.

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Phenomenologically regarded, such objects transcend the multiplicities of experience from which they are constituted. We never identify the lamp, which is showing itself from different sides, with one of our views of it. In fact, since we understand it as something that can afford us further experiences, we take it as transcending the sum of the views that we have already had of it. Nevertheless, it is, in its transcendence, dependent on such views. It only exists for us as their unitary referent. The constitution of the subject is very different than this. As Husserl puts this in the second volume of the Ideas, “pure egos neither need nor are capable of any constitution through ‘multiplicities’ [of experience].”9 To affirm, as he does a page later, that they are constituted with reference to the unity of the stream of experiences must, thus, refer to a different conception of constitution—one which changes the relation of the ego to the contents of our experience. In this new relation, is the ego, in its transcendence of such contents, independent of them? Can it subsist in the absence of such contents—i.e., in the absence of the stream of consciousness that is composed of such contents? Husserl denies this. He writes that the ego, in the change of experiences, “gives up all content.” Yet, it is “related to a stream of experiences, in relation to which it is also dependent.”10 It can be both because it “does not possess a proper general character with a material content.”11 Regarded in itself, it is only “an empty form,” one, however, “that is ‘individualized’ through the stream: this, in the sense of its uniqueness.”12 James Edie sums up nicely this view of the ego when he writes that it is “an impersonal, necessary, universal, eidetic structure,” one that, “is lived in and through each unique consciousness, each ego-life.”13 Its dependence on such life is a dependence on the contents that individualize it. They are what make it the ego of your life, rather than someone else’s. Given this, we cannot say that the ego could exist apart from the stream. Such an existence would be only that of an “empty form.” What exactly is this form when we take it as embedded in the stream? How is it constituted? The C manuscripts identify it as the centering of the stream that makes up the ego’s life. In Husserl’s words, “The ego is the ‘subject’ of consciousness; subject, here, is only another word for the centering that all life possesses as an

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egological life, i.e., as a living in order to experience something, to be conscious of it.”14 As he elsewhere expresses this: “I am I, the center of the egological [Ichlichkeiten].”15 Husserl also identifies this center with the ego pole. He writes: “The central ego is the necessary ego pole of all experience,” the two being equivalent designations of the same eidetic structure.16 We can see how this center or pole both transcends the experiential stream and yet is dependent on it. The center’s transcendence comes from the fact that it does not change with the changing content that it structures. Regardless of what I observe, I am at its center. My “here” marks the spatial 0-point set by the perspectival unfolding of objects. Similarly, my “now” is the temporal 0-point between the past and the future. No matter what the contents are that fill my past and future, I remain at the now, at the central-point between the two temporal dimensions. The respective dependence of these 0-points is equally clear. Without the perspectival appearing of objects, I would lose my position as a spatial point of view. Similarly, without the past and the future, I would not have my place between them. The perceptual process shows the relation between these two 0-points. Perception is not a static process, but rather involves motion and, hence, time. Motion, moreover, is essential in our ability to judge distances. Thus, as we move between objects, those that unfold their perspectives at a faster rate are taken as closer to us. This phenomenon is familiar to anyone who views passing objects from a car or train window. Objects close up whiz by, while more distant objects hardly seem to move. The different rates of their turning—their angular velocity—are, in fact, taken by us as indications of their distance. Thus, the perspectival unfolding of objects does not just place a person at their center, it also marks off their distances from the person. Such unfolding thus provides a crucial component of the data for the constitution of the self as a spatial center. Now, for Husserl, “The transcendence of the spatial world is a second level transcendence.”17 The primary transcendence is that of “the stream of consciousness and its immanent time.”18 This is the stream whose temporal sequencing of contents results in the relative rates of the perspectival unfolding of objects. To access such sequencing, I must retain the contents I have already experienced.

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I must also anticipate or protend the coming contents. Given this, the spatial transcendence of objects depends on the temporal transcendence of the past and the future. It depends on the givenness of the latter and, hence, on the action of retention and protention.

The Constitution of the Ego as the Center or Pole In bringing up retention and protention, we have already indicated how the ego becomes constituted as a temporal 0-point or center. Temporal centering is, in fact, the direct result of the retentional and protentional processes. They provide the ego with its retained and protended environment. According to Husserl, these processes work on the impressional material we receive from outside. As I earlier cited him, “Consciousness is nothing without impression.” It requires “the ‘new,’ that which has come into being alien to consciousness, that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.”19 Thus, retention requires a primal impression in order to have something to retain.20 The same holds for protention since our anticipations depend upon what we have already experienced. Here, as Husserl writes, “the style of the past becomes projected into the future.”21 To grasp this style, we have to retain the past. But for retention to work, we need something to retain, and this is provided by a primal impressional appearing. By virtue of the retentional process, we do not have a momentary, flickering consciousness. The content or hyle that appears does not vanish the moment after its apprehension, but rather is retained. The result of the retentional process is that the material that we receive—for example, the tones of a melody—is preserved as temporally sequenced. It appears as a succession of contents departing further and further into the past. It is our grasp of this succession that allows us to grasp the melody.22 Grasping it, we also anticipate that the coming notes will also fit in with the tensions and releases of the relations of the tones. In all cases, protention and retention work together. Protention, basing itself on what we retain, anticipates a corresponding sequence of contents approaching from the future. With retention, it yields the constitution of the now in

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which we receive the data of sensation—for example, the tones. The now becomes constituted as our temporal 0-point—i.e., as the stationary, streaming boundary between the retained past and the anticipated future. It is stationary as a boundary. It is streaming because the content that occupies it constantly changes. In the C manuscripts, Husserl describes this constitution as follows: A lasting and remaining primal now constitutes itself in this streaming. It constitutes itself as a fixed form for a content which streams through it and as the source point for all constituted modifications. In union with [the constitution of] the fixed form of the primally welling primal now, there is constituted a two-sided continuity of forms that are just as fixed. Thus, in toto, there is constituted a fixed continuum of form in which the primal now is a primal welling middle point for two continua [understood] as branches of the modes of [temporal] modifications: the continuum of what is just past and that of futurities.23

In spite of its somewhat labored prose, Husserl’s position is clear. Temporal centering is constituted through the retentional and protentional processes. The “fixed form” of the temporal center appears as the now through which content streams. It also appears as a “source point.” As such, it exhibits itself as the “primally welling primal now”—i.e., as the point of primal impressional appearing. Both descriptions hold, depending on our perspective. If we focus on the results of the retentional and protentional processes, then the central now appears as a point of passage between the future and the past. If, however, we focus on this now in abstraction from the retained past and protended future, then such passing through appears as a welling up. Since this central now is our ego pole, we can appear to ourselves as the place of primal impressional appearing and as the mid-point of the stream of such appearing. We can take ourselves, depending on our perspective, as both a source point and a point of passage. The perspective that reveals us as a source point occurs when we engage in “the reduction to the living present,” which Husserl defines as “the most radical reduction to that subjectivity in which everything that is valid for me originally accomplishes itself.” This, he writes, is “the reduction to the sphere of primal temporalization, in which the first and primally welling sense of time comes

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forward—time as the living streaming present.” 24 We perform this reduction when we bracket our retentions and protentions, thereby stripping our central nowness of its surrounding temporal environment. It is in terms of this environment that time appears to approach our central nowness, pass through it, and depart into pastness. With the bracketing of the environment, we simply have the appearing in the now of its content-laden moments. The reduction, in other words, takes our temporally located central nowness and exhibits it as “a primally welling primal now”—i.e., as a source point of time.

Temporal Constitution and Unique Singularity Is this “primally welling” now my own or is it something prior to me? Do I, in such welling-up, constitute time or am I temporally constituted by a welling-up that precedes me? Husserl seems to assert both positions. He writes, in a passage that I partially quoted: “I am. Time is constituted from me. The transcendental self-temporalization of the ego in the stationary, primal pre-present.”25 Here, both the “I” and “the stationary, primal pre-present” are asserted to be the origin of time. In fact, we face a double perspective, one that can be resolved by noting the different levels of these two assertions. If we view the welling-up from the perspective of the “I” or ego, then it, individually, appears as the origin of time. If, however, we view it from the level of the “primal pre-present,” then we have to say that the origin is neither individual nor temporal. The key here is Husserl’s definition of individuality. To be an individual is to be temporally determinate—i.e., to exist at a given moment in the flow of time. In Husserl’s words: “Every concrete individual persists in time and is what it is because, constantly becoming, it passes from presence to presence.”26 So defined, individual existence is temporally constituted. As Husserl writes: “Temporalization, this is the constitution of existents in their temporal modalities. An existent: a present existent with the past of the same existent, with the future coming to be of the same. Thus, in an original sense, existent = original, concrete presence. It is persisting presence which ‘includes,’ as non-independent components in the

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stream of presences, both past and future.”27 Given this, in the absence of temporal constitution, we cannot posit individuality. Thus, the phenomena that ultimately constitute time cannot be considered to be individuals. In particular, neither the retentions nor the protentions nor the momentary impressions that make up timeconstituting consciousness can be taken to be existents persisting in the time that they themselves constitute. As Husserl puts this in his lectures on time consciousness, “it makes no sense to speak of something that endures here … Time-constituting phenomena, therefore, … are neither individual objects nor individual processes.”28 The same point holds for “the living streaming present,” whose welling-up is responsible for the content-laden impressions. It is not temporally determinate. In Husserl’s words: It is not at all a ‘stream’ according to the picture of a temporal (or spatialtemporal) whole that has, in the unity of a temporal extension, a continualsuccessive individual existence … The streaming living present is ‘continuous’ being as streaming and yet is not such … in spatial-temporal (worldspatial) being or in ‘immanent’ temporally extended being; thus, not such in any apartness that is termed succession—succession in the sense of an apartness of positions in what properly can be called time.29

Given this, the living present cannot be regarded as individually determinate and, hence, I cannot identify it as my particular living present. As Husserl writes: “When, in self-meditation, I go back to my living streaming present in its full concretion, where it is the primal ground and source for all the things now actually valid for me, it is not for me my living present as opposed to that of other humans, and it is not my present as that of an existent with a body and soul, i.e., that of a real human being.”30 It cannot be since its streaming is not marked by the temporalization that would particularize it as mine. It is this lack of particularization that leads Husserl to assert that egos and their temporalizations exist in a non-extended coincidence. The essential point is that, regarded from the perspective of the primally welling now, “the ego as a pole does not endure.” As such, it cannot be individual. Thus, Husserl concludes: “my ego and the other ego do not have any extensive distance in the

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community of our being with each other.” The same holds for “my life, my temporalization.”31 What we find, instead, is “[m]y ‘coincidence’ with others on the primal constitutive level, my coincidence, so to speak, before there is constituted a world for myself and others as a common world and, ultimately as a world for all of us” 32 Does this mean that Husserl ultimately embraces, in Dan Zahavi’s words, “a panpsychism that abolishes the difference between ego and alter-ego.”33 The point follows only if we conflate Husserl’s levels of description. If we identify the level of temporal determinateness with the pre-individual level, then the distinction between ego and alter-ego disappears. But it does so only because we inappropriately apply the descriptions of one level to the other. If we do not, Husserl’s position is straight-forward. It is that “[m]y being in the living, non-extended primal temporalization, [understood] as the primal phenomenal stream of life, precedes my transcendental being as an identical being in transcendental life, in the extended form of immanent time.”34 On the level of non-extended primal temporalization, I cannot posit my being as temporally determinate and, hence, as individual. I cannot, because I lack the phenomenological evidence to do so. On this level, the temporally determinate data that would allow me such positing are simply missing. This, however, does not mean that on the level of my “identical being in transcendental life,” I cannot posit such individuality and, hence, the distinction between ego and alter ego. What unifies these depictions is that, in the C manuscripts, the “ego” ultimately names a process rather than an entity. The process proceeds from the pre-ontic to the ontic. It begins, according to Husserl, with the “‘primal phenomenon,’ in which everything has its origin that may in any sense be called a phenomenon. This is the stationary-streaming self-present or the self-streaming, present absolute ego in its stationary-streaming life.”35 The initial point of the process is, thus, my coincidence with the primal welling-up; it is “my stationary-streaming primal being.” The level that follows this is that of “my self-temporalized present in the temporalized time of my ego as the [central] present for my past and future.” It is the level where I have been constituted as a temporal 0-point. The next levels are intersubjective. We have, “through repetition in empathy:

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the other stationary-streaming primordiality, the other self-temporalized present, past, etc. and the time of the [other] self as identical in these modalities.” With this, there becomes possible “intersubjective synthesis, the constitution of a simultaneous present,” the end result being “the primal modality of temporal co-existence: All of us in an ontological community, in temporal apartness.”36 In this account, the ultimate reality is simply the ongoing process of temporal constitution. For Husserl, the title for this process is the “ego” in all his various descriptions of it. Husserl’s account, it must be stressed, is not “metaphysical,” but rather phenomenological. His various characterizations of the ego strictly follow the evidence available on each level. He only posits the ego in its individuality and the distinction between ego and alter ego when the evidence allows for this.

The Ego’s Action This dependence of positing on evidence plays a crucial role when we discuss the ego’s action. According to Husserl, I act only in the now. The reduction to the living present leads to the nunc stans— the stationary present in which I act. In his words, it leads to “the primal phenomenon of my ‘I act’ (‘Ich tue’), in which I am a stationary and remaining ego and, indeed, am the actor of the ‘nunc stans.’ I act now and only now, and I ‘continuously’ act.”37 Strictly speaking, this now is not “a modality of time.”38 It is not a present surrounded by a past and the future. It is the now of the “I” or ego regarded as a temporal source point. Viewed in its terms, my action is a function of this welling up. As Husserl describes this: “An act, an egological activity is essentially a primally welling ‘I act.’ As primally welling, it is a stationary and remaining welling up.”39 I mention this since it has consequences for the way we view our actions. Given that their source point is not a modality of time, we cannot view such actions in causal terms. We cannot, in particular, see them as determined by events in the past. On this level, we have to regard them as spontaneous, as completely free. Determination comes with the temporal constitution of the ego and its acts. As Husserl describes this process, the ego’s “action

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is a letting loose from itself. It is a primally welling, creative allowing to depart from itself of that which, itself, streams, namely, the acts.”40 This involves “the letting loose [aus sich entlassen] of retentions—a letting loose that signifies the transformations of the ego” and its acts.”41 With this, the ego has a past and we can speak of the past’s determination of its acts. With the generation of protentions—in Husserl’s words, with the “a primally welling being-directed-ahead towards the just coming”—we can also speak of our act’s teleological determination—their determination in terms of an anticipated future.42 Is, then, the ego’s action, determined or spontaneous? Once again, we face a double perspective. On the level where the ego appears as temporally constituted, we can certainly speak of temporal determination. On the ultimate level, however, all evidence for this is lacking.

Resolution With this, we have a resolution of the “puzzlements” of the previous chapter. They consisted in opposing our being a “subject for the world” and our being “an object in the world.” The first, taken as a transcendental ego, is “world-constituting,” the second, understood as a human subject, is “incorporated in the world.” The first cannot die, the second is mortal. We asked, how can such oppositions be resolved? How can they apply to one and the same ego? The answer is that, in the late manuscripts, the ego names a process rather than a static referent. When we consider it on the primal level, it is not in time. As such, it lacks the time to be born or die. The question of “when” does not apply to it. To assert this is not to make a “metaphysical” assertion—an assertion unsupported by phenomenological experience. Rather, the opposite is the case. When we proceed to the level of the origin of time, we lack any evidence to posit birth or death as temporal events. In fact, since we cannot posit the ego as temporally determinate, we cannot posit it as an individual. Thus, we cannot even say “who” dies. All the factors involving the “when,” the “where,” and the “who” appear only on the constituted level—the level on which the appropriate evidence is present.

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The resolution of the puzzlements is thus clear. It is that the very lack of evidence that frustrated Husserl in his attempts to relate the transcendental to the embodied human subject is what we should expect given that the self is a process rather than a thing. The lack of evidence, in other words, is itself the evidence that points to their relation. The relation is that of different stages in one and the same ongoing constitutive process. This can be put in terms of our sense of ourselves as an actor. On the level of the nunc stans, the contents that lie at the basis of this sense simply well up. We cannot on this level of primal appearing speak of an individual, temporally determinate actor. When, however, the ego becomes constituted as “the identical ego of my temporal life,” action becomes ascribable. We can, then, with Husserl, speak of the ego and its acts. Such an ego, however, is necessarily embodied. As we cited Husserl, “the conditions for existence in the world … are those of the possibility of worldly apperception and stand under the title of the body.”43 His point is that if we are to take the ego as engaging in world-constitution in a concrete sense, we have to move to the level of the process where temporally determined, embodied subjects act to make the world present. Their embodied actions are essential for world-apprehension. At this level, the anonymous impressional data of the primal level appear as originating in our bodily senses and actions. The data become, for example, the bodily proprioception which yield the kinesthesia. As a result, the “primally welling ‘I act’ appears in the context of my bodily “I can”— for example, I can act to turn my head, focus my eyes, move forward, etc. This “I can” includes both my senses and the bodily actions that orients them. It is what allows Husserl to speak of the body as an “index for psycho-physical stimuli.” It is also what allows us to speak of the individuality of our conscious lives and corresponding worlds. In describing these, we do not contradict the claim that “nothing human is to be found” in the transcendental ego. Rather, we are being faithful to the evidence available at the state of the constitutive process that we are investigating. Thus, viewed in terms of the streaming present, the body is simply a constituted formation. Viewed, however, in terms of the results of such streaming, the body plays an essential role in world-constitution. The

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constitution of the body, with its I-can, includes the constitution of the constitutive role it plays. This role is but one stage of an ongoing process. To be faithful to this process, we cannot identify ourselves with the self that appears at a particular stage. We should say, rather, that we are this process itself. To assert this does not necessarily decide the nature of this process. For Husserl, the process is fundamentally temporal; the body, for him, is a temporally constituted formation. Yet, given the facts of birth and death as bodily events, this cannot be the last word. The subjectivity that we individually live, the subjectivity that is born and dies, is necessarily embodied. Here, to assert that the constitution of the body includes the constitutive role it plays signifies that the spatiality implicit in our embodiment enters into the constitution we engage in. With this, we reach a decision point. We can either ignore this inference or we can assert that constitution per se cannot be simply temporal, it must involve spatiality. The radical implication here is that even temporal constitution presupposes space. Space must, as a consequence, be inherent in the very sense of the time we experience. To argue for this is to enter on a path that fundamentally alters the content of our sense of our selfhood. It leads us consider it not as a temporal, but rather as a spatial-temporal process.

Chapter III The Spatiality of Subjectivity The relation of the mind to the body has been called the “hard problem” of consciousness. Ever since Descartes distinguished the mind from the body, declaring the mind to be non-extended and bodies to be extended, the relation of the two has been a puzzle.1 The problem, as Leibniz writes is that “[p]erceptions are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it, he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception.”2 The difficulty is that we lack any concept—in David Chalmer’s phrase, any “explanatory bridge”— that would connect the two.3 The argument of this chapter is that this lack of connection stems from the way that we conceive them. It arises because we identify temporal relations with minds and spatial ones with bodies. To seek the resolution of this problem is to break down this divide. It is, in particular, to understand the spatial aspect of subjectivity.

Outer and Inner Sense The tradition of identifying temporal relations with minds and spatial ones with bodies stretches from Aristotle to Heidegger.4 Kant gives the classic exposition of this divide. He argues that if we want to grasp temporal relations, we have to turn inward, that is, regard our memories and anticipations. This is because outside of us, it is always now; the external perception that directs itself to the world cannot “see” either the past or the future. Neither is present since the past has vanished and the future is yet to come. Thus, at any given moment we only outwardly see spatial relations. As Kant 49

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expresses this insight, “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.”5 Thus, I intuit time in its pastness and futurity through my memories and anticipations; regarding them, however, I cannot speak of their spatial relations. I cannot, for example, say that a memory (as opposed to its object) is a given size or is to the left or to the right of another memory. My memories are not out there in space; they are within me. For Kant, this leads to the conclusion that “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing.”6 Without the consciousness whose relations it characterizes, time loses its reality. Such consciousness is, for Kant, our appearing selfhood; the reality of time is to be found within it. For Kant, this divide is between the two forms of our sensibility. It is a fundamental postulate of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” that neither time nor space pertain to the world in itself. They are simply the two basic, if contingent, ways we organize our representations: time is their organization according to the relation of before and after; space is their organization according to the relation of being simultaneously spread out. Considered in ourselves, we are actually in neither.

The Spatial and Temporal Sense of Being “in” The alternate to Kant’s idealism is that we are actually “in” the spatial world that outer sense presents to us. This is, in fact, what our senses teach us. Through outer perception, I can directly regard my hands, my arms and legs. I can reach across space to touch them. Using a mirror, I can, in fact, see my whole body located as part of the appearing world. It is equally evident, however, that this world is “in” me. I am the one who brings its objects to apprehension. Regarding an object, I synthesize or connect its perceptions, thereby taking them as appearances of one and the same object. Thus, the multiple appearances of, say, a chair, which present first one side and then another of it, are taken by me as appearances of that which appears through them, namely, the chair as a three-dimensional object. Here, being “in” me has a temporal sense. The appearances I synthesize cannot vanish the moment after their apprehension.

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They have to be retained, that is, held in the before and after of time, in order to serve as the material for my synthesis. These two senses of “in” are present in what Merleau-Ponty calls our natural “perceptual faith.” As synthesizing subjects, the world is in us. But as embodied, our flesh is required to provide us with the materials for our synthesis. We apprehend the world through the colors, tastes, sounds, textures, and odors provided by our five senses. As embodied perceivers, we are part of the external world. If we accept both these senses of being “in,” then, according to Merleau-Ponty, we have to assert: “I am in the world and the world is in me.”7 In Kantian terms, the assertion is that “I” am in it spatially, even as it is in me temporally. Given that the “I” that the world is temporally “in” is the same “I” that is spatially “in” the world, the two senses of being “in”—the temporal and the spatial— must be related. Somehow the “I” must be both temporal and spatial: both a place of synthesis and a spatially spread out object. That it must be both is implied in Husserl’s and MerleauPonty's descriptions of one hand touching another. When I touch something other than myself, I experience what Husserl calls a “double sensation.” Thus, touching a cold object, I feel both “the coldness of the surface of a thing and the sensation of cold in the finger.” Similarly, when I press my hand on the table, I have the “sensations of my fingers pressing on it” and also have the sensations of the table itself, its hardness, smoothness, etc.8 In other words, I have not just the experience of the object, but also that of myself as a sensing subject. Now, when one hand touches another, the touched hand becomes the object. The touching hand feels the touched hand’s warmth, smoothness, etc. The touched hand, continues, however, to be experienced as a sensing subject. It is not just touched but feels itself touched. The result is that I experience the touched hand as both sensed object and sensing subject. As Husserl observes, this ability of flesh to be taken as both object and subject gives us our bodily self-presence. This self-presence distinguishes us from the world since, when we touch other objects, we feel their qualities, but we do not feel their being touched.

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Spatiality and the Subject-Object Dichotomy Although our self-presence involves our being both a sensing subject and sensed object, the divide between the two never collapses. What maintains the ongoing subject-object dichotomy in our selfpresence? The traditional answer, which Husserl presents, is essentially Kantian. It is based on the temporal nature of our perceptual synthesis. If to perceive an object requires our picking out an ongoing pattern of perceptions and taking them as perceptions of some object, then such synthesis requires time—at very least the time required for the pattern to show itself. Given this, the object is always experienced with a delay. As such, it distinguishes itself from the subject that acts in the ongoing now. The same holds when, in reflection, we attempt to grasp ourselves. Since such self-perception also requires synthesis, what reflection apprehends, Husserl writes, “is always myself, not as the primordium that I am, but rather as the primordium that I was.”9 The result, according to Husserl, is the self’s ongoing “anonymity.” It is the non-objective status of the presently perceiving ego.10 The subject-object divide is, thus, understood as that between the anonymously synthesizing subject and the objects resulting from its synthesis. This divide is what, in reflection, splits the subject from himself. A second account of this divide, which Husserl did not embrace, can be drawn from his account of touch. It stems from the fact that, on the level of touch, flesh’s relation to itself is not direct, but rather mediated: the touched hand through the touching hand and vice-versa. The point is that we must touch ourselves to grasp ourselves as both a sensed object and a sensing subject. In such selftouch, the hand that positions the sensing hand as an object is not the hand that it touches. The spatial distinction of one hand from the other—and more generally, the spatial extension of our body as it functions in our self-presence—thus maintains the divide in our self-presence. To overcome the divide, we would have to confuse one hand with the other; but this we never do. The implication here is that the self-presence by which we distinguish ourselves from the world is fundamentally spatial. The subjectivity that is such selfpresence is not, as Kant thought, simply temporal; it has a spatial

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character. This implication can be put in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s description of his left hand touching some object, while being touched by his right hand. He writes, “When my right hand touches my left hand while [the left hand] is palpating the things … the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” It “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.” 11 Touched, the touching subject is thrust into the spatial world. How is this possible? The answer is that it is already spatial. Spatiality is inherent in the alterity that characterizes our self-presence. Such spatiality is evident in the fact that the sensing subject— say, the touching hand—is not just a place of temporal relations. It has its localized sensations that are spread across its surface.12 Such sensations are not objective—i.e., part of the external world. They are subjective: they are elements of our subjective syntheses.

The Spatiality of Time How can we decide between these two accounts? Is our self-presence temporal or does it involve space as well? Kant claims that it is temporal since all our representations, including those of outer sense, “belong, in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state,” which, as inner, has only temporal relations.13 As just noted, the temporal character of the synthesis of our representations is responsible for the delay that prevents us from grasping ourselves in the now. The question, however, that neither Kant nor Husserl raise, is: what is responsible for this temporal delay? This question can be framed in terms of a paradox that Aristotle brings up in his discussion of time. Having noted that neither the past nor the future exists, since the past “has been and is not” and the future “is going to be and is not yet,” Aristotle raises the question of the now: if to be is to be now, the now certainly exists; but can we say that the now is a part of time? A part measures the whole, which is made up of its parts. But the present has no extension. In this, it is like a point on a line. Neither nows nor points can be summed up to give a definite quantity.14 The paradox, then, is that the past and the present do not exist and the now that does exist is not part of time. What the paradox points to is the non-self-

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subsistent quality of time. Time must depend on something outside of itself in order to be. Following the tradition that stretches from Augustine to Husserl, we can say that the past and the future exist in our minds. They are present in a modified way through our memories and our anticipations. As for the now, it exists as the changing moment of our present perception.15 Such an explanation, however, does not respond to the central element of the paradox that Aristotle presents: If the moments of time do not have any extension, what prevents them from collapsing into each other? The question here is: What “spaces” them, as it were? What gives them the “outside of each other” that we associate with space? Without such externality, we cannot speak of the “delay” required for synthesis; but without this, the temporal distinction between the subject and object that Husserl draws cannot occur. To answer the question of the “spacing” of the moments of time, we have to turn to the oft-noted fact that our experience of time is dependent on our experience of change. As John Locke observed, we have no sense of time in dreamless sleep. To experience its flow, we have to experience the change or succession of our “ideas” or perceptions.16 Thus, without change, our sense of time freezes. The now ceases to “flow” when the contents occupying it remain the same. It is only when we experience the present moment with an ever new content, that we apprehend it as a streaming present. Given that the movement of time depends on the change of such content, what lies behind this change? What is its essential precondition? The answer is that the alterity that we experience—say, the different positions of the clock’s hands—presupposes space. What we register is other because it occurs in space. In space, it changes its color, its position, its shape, its relation to what surrounds it, and so on. Space, in its extension, that is, in its having “parts outside of parts,” provides the framework for such change. It supplies a necessary condition for the alterity that we register as time. This does not mean that the alterity of contents is itself responsible for separating the different moments of time. Space, rather, is the ultimate reason why the moments with their different contents do not coincide. Thus, what distinguishes the appearances of a moving body are not the moments that they inhabit; it is the

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spatially distinct positions of its path. It is the outside-of-one-another of such positions, the extension of the path, that translates itself into the extension of time. Without this spatial extension, the path would collapse as would the moments presenting the appearances of the motion along it.

Teleological and Linear Causality With this, we can return to the mind-body problem and the question of the “explanatory bridge” between the two. The problem is usually formulated in terms of two different causalities and their corresponding temporalities. The inanimate world has a linear causality, one where the past determines the present, and the present determines the future. We can see it at work in the billiard table where the positions and motions of the billiards at any one moment determine their positions and motions at the next. The animate world has a very different causality and temporality. Here, the leading factor is the future. For us, it is what we want to accomplish. Suppose, for example, I want to build a bookcase. Having this goal, I check to see what my past actions have provided me with. I go to see if I still have the nails, wood and tools I bought a year ago. Finding them, I proceed to build. Causality here is goal-directed. The corresponding teleological temporality begins with my projected future, proceeds by way of my past, which is taken as providing the resources for what I want to accomplish. It ends in my present activity of actualizing this goal through my using the resources—the nails and the wood—that my past actions furnished. The same temporal flow of future, past, present appears in the perceptual process. According to Husserl, the determining factor in this process is the interpretative intention to see a given object.17 What we intend to see determines how we regard what we have seen. It makes us take it as material for our “project” of seeing a specific object. As such, it determines our present act of seeing with its horizon of anticipations.18 Given that what we intend to see as we move to get a better look is not yet fully there, the intended object stands as a goal of our perceptual process. As such, it is something to be realized, that is, something future. What we have seen

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and retained is something past, while the present act of seeing is, of course, now. The teleological temporality of the perceptual process is, thus, also that of the future (in the form of a goal) determining the past (by determining our interpretation of the contents we have received and retained) and, thereby, determining the present act of seeing. Posed in these terms, the mind-body problem requires that we provide an explanatory bridge between these two different types of causality with their corresponding temporalities. The materialists, who reduce mind to matter, as well as the idealists, who make the opposite reduction, assert that this is impossible. How, they ask, can time proceed in two different ways? How can causality have two fundamentally opposed senses? In answer to this question, we have to first observe that if we reduce causality to its empirical basis, then it concerns simply our experience of the prior and posterior. When this sequence is repeated with the same items, we assume that the prior causes the posterior. Thus, in playing billiards, I constantly experience the ball I hit impact another ball, causing it to move. I, thus, naturally take the motion of the first, which I first experience, as the cause of the second ball’s motion, which I subsequently experience. I follow the same procedure when I regard my own actions. Here my intending to do something, like going to the store, is followed by the action. In this case, my intention is prior and the action is posterior. I, thus, naturally take the intention as the cause of the action. It explains “why” I am leaving my apartment. The point is that causality, considered empirically, does not, per se, rule out either form of causality. What does is generally assumed to be the directionality of time. The question of the explanatory bridge is, thus, reduced to that of linking the two different directions of the flow of time: the teleological that begins in the future, the linear that starts in the past. So stated, the question of the bridge concerns the two senses of being “in” that we started with. We are “in” the world as a body among bodies. In terms of our corporal structure, our temporality appears as linear and causal. When we play billiards, we assume the corresponding causality. To play billiards, of course, we also have to internalize the world. The world is in us as an intentional

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object. The temporality of its perception is teleological. So is the goal-directed activity of trying to get a ball into a side pocket. Now, if temporality were, in itself, a self-subsistent entity, the problem of finding a bridge between the two senses of being “in” with their corresponding temporalities would be insoluble. A temporality that embraced both would be self-contradictory. The paradox in the conception of time that we began with, however, shows that time is not self-subsistent. What keeps its moments apart is not to be found within time. It is the outside-itself, the parts outside of parts, of extended space. Such externality is indifferent to the direction of the temporal flow. It can support the sequences that begin with our conception of a goal. It can also support the sequences that begin with the past. The same apartness of space serves as a framework for the goal directed motions of animate beings and the non-teleological movement of insensate material objects. It is behind the actualization accomplished by motion, whatever its nature.

Living Space The fact that motion requires the apartness of space does not mean that such apartness is the same for every type of motion. Similarly, the temporality that is structured by such apartness is not the same. This can be put in terms of space’s relation to time. Following Kant, we can call space the “outer” and time the “inner.” The apartness of time, that is, the distinction of its moments, can, in its dependence on space, be then defined as the presence of the outer in the inner. Such presence is, in fact, the bridge between the two. Now, in the temporality of inanimate objects, this presence of the outer is uniform. This means, as Newton’s first law states, that, in the absence of external forces, a body continues moving in a straight line for ever.19 The time of this uniform motion is, itself, uniform. Its moments flow from the past to the present to the future with perfect regularity. Traditionally, the ideal of such space has been represented by the perfectly smooth surface of the dial of a clock. Time has been correspondingly represented by the uniformity of the motion of the hands about the dial.

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To speak about living space, we must first note that, mathematically, a dimension is simply a variable determining a position. If we say that space has three dimensions, this means that three variables are required to fix a position within it. In this space, the shortest line between two points can be determined by the three variables (the x, y, and z coordinates) of these points. In classical physics, space is three-dimensional, and lines measure distances. In livingspace, however, the shortest distance is determined by the living being’s body. Its muscular structure and size determine how it is able to move between points. Thus, the localized space of an adult human being is different than that of a child. Both are different from that of an insect. This means that the variables determining positions in such spaces and the shortest lines between them vary accordingly. As the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, pointed out, it signifies that the space we live in has as many dimensions as the muscular determinants of our motion.20 This is very different from the space in which an inanimate body moves, such motion being controlled, not internally, but by external forces. In terms of the mind-body problem, this multi-dimensionality of living space implies that we cannot resolve it by limiting ourselves to the threedimensionality of inanimate space. The space in which the animate and the inanimate interact must be extended to include the variables characterizing animate space. This, of course, affects the presence of the outer in the inner that makes possible the extension of time. The time that such apartness structures has be understood in terms of the motion of animate existence. Such motion has many forms, depending on the age, sex, and species of the animate organism. 21 Underlying them all is the motion of the metabolic process that characterizes life itself. Such motion points to the special character of the apartness of living space. Metabolism—Stoffwechsel in German—is the organism’s exchange of materials with its environment. The goal of this exchange is the maintenance of the organism, that is, its bodily continuance. As Hans Jonas writes, this signifies that an organism’s “being” is a result of its “doing.” As such its being is inherently future-directed. If to be alive depends upon the intake of new material, the now of such being-alive stretches beyond the present to what comes next.

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Here, the “will be”—the intake of new material—determines the “is” as represented by the organism’s present activity. Insofar as the organism exists by directing itself beyond its present condition, it is ahead of itself: it “has” a future.22 In other words, the living being, as the necessity for exchange, has a teleological structure, one that involves a future-directed, self-affirmation. Now, the space of such self-affirmation, as traced by the organism’s paths, is neither linear nor uniform. As opposed to the uniform space of inanimate objects, it is, as it were, folded in on itself. It is the space the self-directed motion of the organism—the metabolic motion that has as its goal its own continuance. The same point holds for the temporality that this space structures. It is neither linear nor uniform. It proceeds teleologically and does not flow equitably. To determine it, we need the multi-dimensionality, the folded-in quality, of the living space that gives its apartness. As teleologically structured, this is the space of our perception, the space in which the world is “in” us. It is also the space in which we carry out our various projects. It structures the teleological temporality of our perception and action.

Complexity and the Explanatory Bridge I said above that the presence of the outer in the inner is the “bridge” between space and time. This affects how we conceive the relation between minds and bodies. This relation, traditionally, has been framed by our identifying temporal relations with minds and spatial ones with bodies. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty and others have pointed out, the divide between the two can only be overcome by undermining this distinction, by, in fact, grasping the spatial nature of subjectivity. My claim is that we can do this by examining the presence of space in time, in Kant’s terms, the presence of the outer in the inner, a presence that shows itself in the apartness of time’s moments. This presence is the “bridge” between the two. As such, it gives us a framework that embraces both the inanimate and the animate. A key point here is that, because it includes the animate, this framework has many more variables—dimensions in the mathematical sense—than those required to describe the motion and temporality of inanimate objects. This does not mean that the

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animate and the inanimate are opposed, that, to use David Chalmer’s phrase, there is no “explanatory bridge” between them. It only signifies that we cannot reduce the sentient to the non-sentient without the loss of the variables that would account for sentient, animate existence. To attempt to do this would be like trying to use Euclidian geometry to explain the multi-dimensional reality of a gravitational field. No one would say that Einsteinian and Euclidean space are unconnected, that there is no “explanatory bridge” between them. The space Einstein described becomes Euclidian in the absence of gravity. It is not opposed to, but only more complex than, Euclidian space. The same holds with regard to ourselves in comparison with inorganic, non-sentient matter. We are more complex, and we have to understand this complexity in terms that include, but are not limited to, those that described the inorganic. We can do this, as I have argued, by positing the presence of space in time. Such positing is what allows us to grasp the spatial dimension of our subjectivity. It gives us a way of grasping our living temporality that does not oppose it to our spatiality. More precisely, it allows us to think of ourselves as both spatial and temporal without reducing one aspect of our selfhood to the other. We can conceive of ourselves as a spatial-temporal process without reducing this to a material-causal process that excludes our consciousness. As the Introduction noted, Husserl confronted science’s exclusion of consciousness in his Crisis. He framed this issue in terms of our relation to the world—of our being both a subject for the world and an object in it. Galilean science privileged the latter at the expense of the former. While its success in predicting and controlling the material world was undeniable, its later development lead to the denial of consciousness. How could such a successful method deny the existence of the consciousness that formulated and employed it? The crisis of the sciences consisted in its inability to provide a response. This led Husserl to suspend Galilean science in order to analyze the choices that led to it. The suspension left him with the “lifeworld”—the sensuous world directly accessible to consciousness. To proceed in our own inquires, we have to examine

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this response and its implications for the process that we have identified with our selfhood. At issue with be the nature of ourselves as a spatial-temporal process.

Chapter IV Life and the Reduction to the Lifeworld Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology bears a telling subtitle. He calls it An Introduction. What we confront in his final work is yet another way of introducing transcendental phenomenology. The approach this time is through an analysis of the crisis of science and the attempt to resolve it by the reduction to the lifeworld. Ultimately, however, the goal of Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology remains the same. It is the vision of an ultimately constituting consciousness, which he first expressed some twenty years before. Thus, in 1913, he asserted in the Ideas that the entire spatial-temporal world is, “according to its sense, merely intentional being. ... It is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences ... beyond this, however, it is nothing at all.”1 This means that “the existence of nature is only as constituting itself in the actual connections of consciousness.”2 The same doctrine appears in the Crisis, when Husserl asserts that “the world, which continually exists for us in the flowing change of modes of givenness, is a universal spiritual acquisition. It has developed … as a product of sense, as a product of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity.”3 The question of this chapter is whether the reduction to the lifeworld can reach this goal. Since the world, for Husserl, is the product of an ultimate subjectivity, the latter cannot be part of the world.4 But, as we shall see, the inherent sense of the reduction that Husserl practices in the Crisis leaves us with the sensuous consciousness of embodied living beings. Its residuum is the subjectivity of beings that live from the world and are part of it. As such, the reduction to the lifeworld presents phenomenology with a puzzle and a decision point: what, exactly, is the relation of the lifeworld to the self-professed goal of constitutive phenomenology? The response leads to a further transformation of phenomenology, one affecting the sense of ourselves as a process.

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The Crisis of Reason In Husserl’s view, the crisis of science involves the rationality that first made its definite appearance with the Greeks. Based on experience and deductive reasoning, its conclusions claimed a universal validity—a validity that had nothing to do with a person’s social situation. For Husserl, “the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such,” begins with the “Greek primal establishment” of this conception of rationality.5 The telos referred to is that of a “scientific,” rational understanding of the world, one that leaves nothing out and is available to everyone. This goal sets the path that distinguishes the European spirit. The break in this tradition comes with Galileo’s transformation of science and the rationality associated with it. It is no longer taken as a rationality that seeks to understand being as such, applying its methods to both consciousness and the world. Assuming the form of what Husserl terms “objectivism,” it undercuts itself. It does this because it can no longer find a place for consciousness. It thus undermines its own possibility since, as science, it presupposes the scientists who observe the world and formulate its objective laws. Such observation and formulation are conscious activities. Yet science assumes, since Galileo’s time, a view of reality that excludes consciousness. The upshot is not just a crisis in the European sciences. It is a crisis—a decision point—in the European humanity that defines itself in terms of rationality. The transformation of rationality into a form that excludes those that practice it affects the self-understanding of Europeans. It undercuts the goal that has guided them since the time of the Greeks. In the Crisis, Husserl traces this transformation back to Galileo’s separation of the primary and secondary qualities of reality. As previously noted, the secondary are those given by our five senses. They are the tastes, textures, sounds, sights and smells of the world. The primary are the qualities that can be measured and numbered—for example, the lengths, areas, and volumes of things as well as their weights, positions and speeds. The relation between these two types of qualities refers historically to Aristotle’s distinction between primary and secondary senses of being. For Aristotle,

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“being,” in the primary sense of the word, is substance. This is an individual being that can exist on its own. In a secondary sense, being consists of the qualities that are attributed to substances. In his view, the qualities that characterize substances can only exist by inhering in some individual thing. Such qualities are both primary and secondary in Galileo’s sense. They included, for example, both an object’s speed and its color. Galilean science transforms this division: It distinguishes qualities into those that can be measured and those that cannot. It then applies Aristotle’s ontological distinction to this division of qualities. In the new science, what has ontological independence is not substance in Aristotle’s sense, but rather its primary, measurable qualities. They, rather than the secondary qualities, can exist on their own. Since primary qualities are those that are capable of being expressed mathematically, the result, Husserl writes, is a transformation of the meaning of nature. In his words, “through Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature itself is idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics; nature itself becomes … a mathematical manifold.”6 Its primary reality, in other words, is mathematical. It consists in the mathematical formulas that express its measurable relations. The point of this transformation, Husserl notes, is to “overcome the relativity of subjective interpretations, which [relativity] is, after all, essential to the empirically intuited world.”7 Each of us, in other words, has his own subjective presentations. He sees things through his particular perspectives, interprets them through the lens of his personal history, his prejudices and so on. But, there can be no dispute with regard to what can be counted and numerically measured. Thus, Galileo’s insight, Husserl writes, is that, by limiting reason to such aspects, we can “attain an identical, nonrelative truth of which everyone who can understand and use this method can convince himself. Here, then, we recognize something that truly is.”8 The difficulty with this method concerns consciousness. Far from being a mathematical manifold, it cannot, in its sensuous presence, be numerically measured. One chair, for example, may be so many meters from another chair, but we cannot make the same claim about our perceptions of the chairs. Our perceptions, in fact,

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have no definite size. But if the consciousness that consists of such perceptions cannot be measured and expressed mathematically, we cannot, according to this reasoning, say that it is “something that truly is.” To put this in Aristotelean terms, we are forced to say that consciousness has no reality in a primary sense. What would have reality in this sense would be the primary qualities of the brain processes that underlie its functioning.9

The Reduction to the Lifeworld Husserl considers the results of this method to be catastrophic. He writes, “If the intuited world of our life is merely subjective, then all the truths of pre-and extra-scientific life, which have to do with its factual being, are deprived of value.”10 How, then, can we face the social and political crises that are confronting Europe? What aid can reason, reduced to mathematical reasoning, offer us? For Husserl, the only way out is to reopen the question of reason—this, by bracketing the science that limits its truth claims to the numerical aspects of reality. What is required, then, is “an epoché of all participation in the cognitions of the objective sciences, an epoché of any critical position-taking which is interested in their truth or falsity, even any position on their guiding idea of an objective knowledge of the world.” This is, he adds, “an epoché in regard to all objective theoretical interests, all aims and activities belonging to us as objective scientists.”11 The result of this suspension is to “place oneself completely upon the ground of this straightforwardly intuited world.” It is to return to the “lifeworld.” 12 What exactly is the world that we return to? Insofar as science distinguishes primary from secondary qualities, the epoché suspends this distinction. The world we return to is, then, the world of directly intuited qualities. Now, for Husserl, the lifeworld of such qualities continues to have its own inherent rationality. In all its “relative features,” it has, he asserts, “a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. We can attend to it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all.”13 The way we do so is to focus on the “how” of appearing. In

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Husserl’s words, we “establish a consistent universal interest in the ‘how’ of the manners of givenness and in the onta themselves, not straightforwardly, but rather as objects in respect to their ‘how.’”14 Thus, we notice that the world’s spatial-temporal objects appear perspectivally. Their size increases as we approach them and so on. In all this, we regard the world “with our interest exclusively and constantly directed toward how, throughout the alteration of relative validities, of subjective appearances and opinions, the coherent, universal validity [of the] world — the world — comes into being for us.”15 Such remarks indicate the path that Husserl will follow. Beginning with the “how” of appearing, he will proceed to examine the objects that appear through their various manners of givenness—the ultimate “object,” here, being the world itself.16 He will also proceed in the opposite, noetic direction and examine the syntheses of consciousness through which subjective appearances are grasped together so as present particular objects. The ultimate goal here is, as noted, to see the world “as a product of sense, as a product of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity.”17 Can Husserl actually take this path from the lifeworld to this ultimate subjectivity? Is the world of directly intuitable qualities such that it can lead in this direction? As Descartes observes in his Meditations, such qualities are often deceptive. He writes that he sees “nothing to make it impossible that I was so constructed by nature that I should be mistaken even in the things which seem to me most true.”18 Thus, it seems most true “that in an object which is hot there is some quality similar to my idea of heat; that in a white, or black, or green object there is the same whiteness, or blackness, or greenness which I perceive; that in a bitter or sweet object there is the same taste or the same flavor, and so on for the other senses.”19 None of this, however, is true. These apparent qualities have their origin, not in the objects apprehended, but in the particular structure of our human senses. The purpose of these senses, however, is not truth, but rather survival. In Descartes’ words, his bodily senses are there “only to indicate to my mind which objects are useful or harmful” to his embodied state.20 As such, the information they provide is strictly relative to it. Like Galileo, Descartes moves to the primary qualities of nature in order to

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escape this relativity. He does so by limiting himself to the numerable aspects of reality. Thus, no matter what my senses are, as long as they allow me to distinguish elements, I can number them. What I do number pertains to the objects themselves; the same holds for the mathematical formulae relating what I number. The point of this procedure is an abstraction from our embodiment. It enacts, on a practical level, Descartes’s famous mind-body distinction. Thus, limiting myself to what I can measure and number, none of the features that make me into a particular embodied person, be they those of my race, gender, birth or personal history, enter into my judgments. As long as I follow correct scientific procedures, my conclusions will be the same whether I am Chinese or Canadian, female or male, young or old, had a happy or unhappy childhood, and so on. When, however, I suspend this procedure, I also suspend this separation. The lifeworld I thereby return to is, thus, that of my embodied consciousness. This is the consciousness that, by virtue of its sense organs, internalizes the world. It is also the consciousness whose embodiment thrusts it into the world. It is, then, the consciousness that has to assert, with Merleau-Ponty, “I am in the world and the world is in me.”21 Husserl, in the Crisis, would object that the world that includes me is a constituted sense. It is the result of the actions of an ultimately functioning subjectivity, one that is independent of the world. But, can we reach this once we return to the world of directly intuitable qualities? Can we think of subjectivity apart from them? Such qualities form the sensuous interiority of a living being. They give it a radical individuality. Thus, the warmth you feel as you face the sun, the taste of a fresh peach as you bite into it, and so on are not public objects. They mark the sphere of the personal and private. The subject of the lifeworld cannot be abstracted from such qualities. Without them, it would lose its individuality. It would become only an “empty form.” This, however, implies that this subject depends on the world that offers it these qualities. It “lives from” such qualities, as Levinas writes.22 Such dependence, however, signifies that, considered in its concreteness, it offers no basis for the move to the ultimately constituting subjectivity. The subject

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of the lifeworld is tied by its affective life to the world. It is, irremediably, the subjectivity of an individual living being. This, perhaps, is the reason why Husserl in the C-manuscripts invoked a very different reduction to uncover the origin of the constitutive process. The origin, as we saw, was the living present that exists on a level prior to individuality. The question is whether we can speak of this level as that of “a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity.” Can we combine the insight of the C-manuscripts with the project of the Crisis? In the latter, the point of asserting a universal subjectivity is to establish an apriori—a set of laws pertaining to the “how” of appearing. Such a “how” involves such things as perspectival patterns of appearing, patterns that allow us to posit individual referents. These patterns, however, are only available to embodied subjects. Only they can move and, through such motion, allow a surrounding world to unfold perspectivally. This recalls the point that our capacities for world-apperception are, as Husserl states, a function of our embodiment. If we accept this, then to assert an ultimately constituting subjectivity correlated to such apperception is to involve ourselves in a confusion of levels. The constitution appropriate to world apperception is carried out, not by an ultimate, but rather by an individual, embodied subject. We cannot reduce this subject to a prior level—i.e., to a pre-individual, pre-temporal, streaming present—without suspending the subject of world-apprehension.

Merleau-Ponty’s Apriori of Flesh All this raises the question of rationality. The reason why Husserl returns to the lifeworld is to present an alternative to the “universal ‘objective’ apriori” of the objective sciences—an apriori that makes consciousness impossible. His claim is that “the ‘objective’ apriori is grounded in the ‘subjective-relative’ apriori of the lifeworld.”23 Can we still speak of an apriori of the lifeworld, once we see the latter as the world of living beings? Is there an apriori—not of some disembodied ultimate subjectivity, but rather the subjectivity individualized by embodiment? This is a question that, in varied forms,

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has occupied phenomenologists since Husserl’s time. Here, we will consider only the positions of Merleau-Ponty and Patočka.24 The apriori, for Merleau-Ponty, is taken to be that of “flesh” or the living body. It involves the fact that selfhood, as embodied, has to be understood as both immanent and transcendent—that is, as both subject and object. To show this, Merleau-Ponty uses Husserl’s example of the touching of hands. My right hand when it touches an object functions as a subject. This means that, in its touch sensations, it serves as the immanent place of the appearance of the touched. The same, hand, however, can also be touched. As such, it becomes a transcendent object—i.e., a part of the appearing world. Merleau-Ponty calls the relation that exists between the hands an “intertwining” or “chiasm.” Three elements, commentators agree, characterize the apriori that is based on this. There is, first of all, the fact that perception must be embodied. As embodied, the perceiver, like his object, is perceivable. There is, then, as Ted Toadvine notes, “an ontological continuity or kinship between the sentient and the sensible.”25 The second element is the fact that, although each hand can function as either a subject or an object, it cannot simultaneously function as both. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, “the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand.”26 There is “a sort of dehiscence” or bursting open that “opens my body in two,” splitting it “between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching.”27 As M.C. Dillon has remarked, this non-coincidence is essential to perception. Given that perceiving something is distinct from being it, “there must be a distancing of it.”28 The third and most significant element of Merleau-Ponty’s apriori is the reversibility that we find in hand touching hand. The hands can exchange roles. Each can, alternately, assume the role of the touching or the touched hand. This reversibility extends to the relation of the sensible to the visible. Thus, generally speaking, I can touch what I see and see what I touch. A colored surface, for example, has a texture that can be felt; and the solidity that allows it to be touched also renders it visible. This does not make visibility the same as tangibility. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “There is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the

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tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one.”29 As with hand touching hand, a gap remains between the two. As commentators have pointed out, Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to see the chiasm as the form of the lifeworld suffer from an overriding difficulty. This involves the asymmetry that appears once we pass beyond the hand touching hand example. Thus, while I can touch worldly things because I myself am a worldly thing, this does not mean that our relation is symmetrical. I can feel my hand being touched when I touch it with my other hand, but I cannot feel the table being touched when I touch it with my hand.30 Similarly, a painter may see the trees that he paints, but it does not follow that they see the painter.31 The difficulty with such asymmetry is that the intertwining, for Merleau-Ponty, is not just a relation designating our relation to the world. It has an ontological import. It is crucial for his attempt to given an ontological basis to his apriori of appearing. This becomes apparent in his treatment of flesh. For him, flesh involves our embodiment. It expresses “a relation of the visible with itself that traverses me and constitutes me as a seer.”32 But as such, it involves more than this. It “is the formative medium of the object and the subject,” which means that “we must think of it … as an element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being.”33 What is emblematic is the “reversibility of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the touched.”34 It is this that allows our selfhood to straddle the divide between subject and object, being both immanent and transcendent. The fact that it can be both is supposed to integrate consciousness with the world. It is at the heart of the non-dualistic ontology advanced under the title of flesh. Such an ontology is crucial if we are to move from the subjective-relative apriori of the lifeworld—the world of flesh or embodied consciousness—to an objective apriori. The difficulty is that while such reversibility characterizes my body’s relation to itself, it does not characterize the world as such. Yet Merleau-Ponty, in moving from describing our body to an account of being, is compelled to claim that the body is an “exemplar sensible.”35 He conceives it as an example of sensibles in general. This, however, implies that the sensible is, like flesh, also sensing.

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This is the implication of Merleau-Ponty’s statement, “When we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. Rather, we mean that carnal being … is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant.”36 Our body exhibits the reversibility between the sentient and the sensed. In its case, the sensed is also sentient. But we cannot say that the visible world, though sensed, is inherently sentient. To say this would be to claim, for example, that the forest that I regard also regards me. The commentator, Renaud Barbaras remarks that the “predetermination of the subject as flesh is absolutely ruinous” when we try “to comprehend how the subject ... can be simultaneously situated on both sides of the world”—i.e., stand before it as a perceiver and within it as perceived.37 Thus, “there is my flesh, i.e., my seeing body, and there is the flesh of the world, which precisely corresponds to the inscription of my flesh in the depths of the world … but it is impossible to comprehend how the same flesh can both be facing the world [as sentient] and be at its heart, how the subject can, in the same sense, belong to the world and make it appear.”38 The appeal to flesh is no help here since, as Merleau-Ponty recognizes in a note to his manuscript, “the flesh of the world does not sense like my flesh—it is sensible but not sensing.”39 Given this, we cannot make the move from our flesh to the flesh of the world considered as a “style of being.”40

Patočka’s Apriori of Motion It is because of this that Barbaras considers Patočka to have made a decisive advance over the thought of Merleau-Ponty. The advance consists in Patočka’s attempt to think of the apriori of the lifeworld, not in terms of flesh, but rather as an apriori of motion. In Barbaras’ view, “this approach according to movement … constitutes the sole satisfactory version of what Merleau-Ponty was trying to think at the end of his life under the title of the intertwining or chiasm. In other words, the mutual enveloping of the subject and the world can only be satisfactorily thought in terms of movement.”41 This is

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because movement, as opposed to “flesh,” is common to animate and inanimate nature. In other words, while it is “impossible to comprehend how the same flesh can both be facing the world [as sentient] and be at its heart,” this does not hold for motion. This praise, however, is combined with his question whether motion can really account for subjectivity, i.e., position it as distinct from the world. As Barbaras puts this, “nothing in this movement calls for the arising of the subject that we are. It is impossible to proceed backwards on the road that has led us to the primary movement, proceeding from this to the acts by which we make the world appear.” Thus, we know that “our existence is movement, but we cannot explain the singularity of this movement since it presupposes a separation” of ourselves. Is Patočka’s account of motion incapable of explaining the arising of the subject? To answer this, we must first outline his position on appearing as such. Patočka considers appearing as “something completely original.” This means, he writes, that “manifesting in itself, in that which makes it manifesting, is not reducible, cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting.”42 It cannot, in other words, be explained by the beings that appear; it cannot be deduced from them or their properties. This holds both for subjects and objects, taken as appearing entities. In Patočka’s words, “showing itself is not any of these things that show themselves, whether it is a psychic or physical object.”43 What then is this original appearing? What is the apriori that characterizes it? Patočka refers to it as “a field of self-showing, a field that must have its own definite structure if the thing itself is to present itself and appear.”44 The description of this structure is similar to that of Husserl’s apriori of the lifeworld. For Patočka, as for Husserl, if a spatial-temporal object is to appear, its appearing must be structured perspectivally. A similar necessity holds for the horizonal character of experience with its structures of near and far, presence and absence. The objects that we encounter have their internal horizons—the sets of appearances that are required to determine their features ever more closely. They also have their external horizons of appearances, which link them together as we move between them. Such horizons are a structural feature required if

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objects are to appear as part of a field of things—and, ultimately, if they are to appear as part of the world. A crucial element in the structure of appearing is, of course, the subject—understood as that to whom things appear. Thus, if things appear perspectivally, they must be related to a definite view-point. The same holds for the horizonal structures of appearing. Given that these structures consist of connected sets of perspectivally ordered appearances, they also require a subject occupying a view-point. Patočka asserts that this requirement for a subject is “a fundamental law of appearing,” according to which “there is always the duality between what appears and the one to whom this appearing appears.” This means that “appearing is appearing only in this duality.”45 In other words, if something is to appear, there must, apriori, be a subject to whom this thing appears. As the above examples indicate, appearing as such consists in a collection of possibilities coordinated in an if-then manner. It is here that Patočka begins to differ from Husserl. For Patočka, what is fundamental is not the experience of the individual subject. It is the world as such. In his words, “[t]he original possibilities (the world) are simply the field where the living being exists, the field that is co-original with [this world].” They determine the world “as a field of appearing.” 46 As for “my totality of possibilities,” this is just “a selection” made from this. 47 While the former possibilities signify appearing as such, understood as a set of “legalities,” the selection designates appearing to a particular subject. On the level of appearing as such, we thus have, “the impersonal order of the totality of possibilities, possibilities not pertaining to any being in particular.” Its legalities form the original apriori. On the level of appearing to me, we have “my totality of possibilities as a selection made from the sphere of the first.”48 Thus, the “impersonal order” of appearing as such involves pure possibility. It forms “a simple field of specific legalities.”49 The human totality of possibilities understands these legalities in relation to us. Here, the apriori is that of our possible experience. To speak of possibilities does not give us any actual appearing. Something must be added if the formal structure of possibilities is to characterize the appearing of a given world. This, according to

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Patočka, is motion. Through its motion, an entity affects its environment. This affecting is its appearing in the sense that it causes the entity to stand out and, thus, to distinguish itself from its environment. For Patočka, then, “movement … first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself in its own original manner.”50 Thus, an oscillating set of charged particles affects its environment through an expanding series of electro-magnetic waves. These waves, encountering a sentient creature with appropriate eyes, also affect its vision by initiating corresponding motions in its perceptual systems. As a result, the charged particles appear as a source of light. In this example, motion occurs between existent objects, a light bulb and a sentient creature. What is unique about Patočka’s position is that motion is not just behind appearing; it is also at the root of being. For him, “movement is what gives things the being that they are; movement is a fundamental ontological factor.”51 This signifies that “movement … is not itself a reality in the same sense as determinate realities.”52 It is, rather, the realization of such entities—this, regardless of their determinations. As Patočka expresses this, “Movement is what makes a being what it is. Movement unifies, maintains cohesion, synthesizes the being’s determinations. The persistence and succession of the determinations of a substrate, etc., are movements.”53 Thus, behind the being of light is the oscillation of charged particles as well as the movement of the electromagnetic waves that this sets up. Similarly, behind the being of the perceiving creature is the movement excited in its perceptual systems. Supporting this, of course, are all the organic movements that maintain the creature as a living entity. The necessity for this doctrine follows from Patočka’s assertion that appearing as such “cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting.” If appearing as such is prior to entities, the movement that realizes appearing must equally be prior. In other words, by taking movement as prior to the moving being, Patočka can describe appearing in terms of movement without reducing appearing to the beings that appear, i.e. without explaining it in terms of such beings. The upshot is that all the if … then correlations that formed the “legalities” of the apriori of appearing become interpretable in terms of motion. The totality of linked possibilities that

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characterized appearing as such are those of the totality of coordinated motions. Those possibilities pertaining to our experience are a subset of the latter.

The Arising of the Subject How are we to explain the arising of the subject within this framework? What is the movement that distinguishes the sentient being from the sensible? The answer to Barbaras’s criticism can be found in the motion that distinguishes animate from inanimate existence. Here, I shall rely on Hans Jonas’ description of metabolism. Living creatures, he observes, are both composed of matter and yet differ from it. Since the matter composing them “is forever vanishing downstream,” they must constantly take in new matter to replace this. Thus, an organism is “independent of the sameness of this matter” but “is dependent on the exchange of it.”54 The underlying motion of all life is, then, that of metabolism (Stoffwechsel). To be, living beings must actively replace the matter they have lost. This means, Jonas writes, “organisms are entities whose being is their own doing ... the being that they earn from this doing is not a possession they then own in separation from the activity by which it was generated, but is the continuation of that very activity itself.”55 The underlying goal of this activity is, in other words, not particular objects, but the activity itself as the actualization of their being alive. This implies that, in living organisms, “need” is more than a need for this or that object. It is, rather, an ontological condition. In Jonas’ words: “This necessity (for exchange) we call ‘need,’ which has a place only where existence is unassured and [is] its own continual task.”56 In fact, such need expresses an organism’s relation to the future. Thus, a living entity has a future insofar as its being is its doing, i.e., stretches beyond the now of its organic state to what comes next. Here, its “will be”—the intake of new material—determines the “is” as represented by its present activity. As such, it drives the motion that actualizes the organism’s existence. This teleological motion places the organism in the world as a material object. Yet, it makes it more than a material component. It turns the organism into a goal, one that it has to actualize. Such actualization, as

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involving motion, both differentiates the organism and discloses it. The living being appears as present in the world, as affecting its environment. Affecting it, it stands out from it. This standing out involves what is not present in the world—namely the organism as a goal, i.e., as future. The same actualization discloses the world as it relates to the organism’s goal, which is itself. Acting to fulfill its needs, it reveals its environment as predator and prey, sexual partner, competitor, etc. Here, it both belongs to the world and makes it appear. To expand this picture, we have to speak of the motion of evolution, the motion that over millennia continually adapts living beings to their changing environments. Such beings are what Patočka calls “concrete subjects.” Biologically, they “stand in causal connections with other worldly things, and this connection is a specific one: it concentrates the effects [of the other things] in specific, highly differentiated, acting organs [those of the senses and the brain], and thereby actualizes the possibility of letting a perspectival world appear, a world that appears to someone.”57 Does this mean that appearing can be understood in terms of such causality? Is it subject to the relativism that Husserl feared? Not according to Patočka. He writes, “Causality in no way signifies the creation of the appearing as such, but rather the adaptation of the organic unity to the structure of appearing, which co-determines the world and in a certain partial sense grounds it.”58 Put in terms of the motion of evolution, one can say that the evolution of organic beings takes account of the “legalities” that compose the underlying structure of appearing. Their evolution involves their adapting to this structure when such adaptation offers a survival advantage. The evolution of sensory organs and central nervous systems, thus, provides them with the causally determined apparatus that makes the structure of appearing applicable to their organic functioning. The motion of evolution, in other words, actualizes a specific set of possibilities of appearing—one that results in the creature’s appearing world. It is in terms of such a world that the creature distinguishes itself as a goal. The fact that each creature has its world does not mean that these worlds are unrelated. Natural selection, Darwin writes, “can

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act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”59 The latter is the goal of the selection. Its point is the organism itself. That said, one has to acknowledge that the notion of this “being which she tends” and its benefit becomes highly ambiguous once we observe, with Darwin, “how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.”60 If, as Darwin suggests, every being is ultimately defined by every other, the “being” tended by “nature” can only be life itself understood as the whole web of relations and entities. With this, we can say that the appearing worlds of sentient creatures are ultimately related through the web of life. Like the individual creature engaging in metabolism, such life chooses itself. Its goal is its own continuance. To speak of rationality in these terms is to return to the field of appearing and its interrelated possibilities. Patočka writes in this regard, “Phenomenology intuitively investigates the basic structures that allow the world as such to appear.” These are the structures that make possible the knowing faculties that allow us to posit, to prove or to reject hypotheses. According to Patočka, “What phenomenology accomplishes here would be a new science of an intuitively accessible apriori, a contribution to metaphysics as the science of the formation of world structures, and [would be] a basis for the objective sciences.”61 As with Husserl, the goal is to base the objective apriori of the sciences on the apriori of the lifeworld. For Patočka, however, this lifeworld is that of living beings or “concrete subjects.” What realizes the apriori is not some ultimately functioning subjectivity, but life itself. More precisely, it is motion that is definitive of it—the motion that actualizes both being and appearing. Viewed in this light, Patočka can be seen as achieving Husserl’s goal of formulating an apriori of the lifeworld. The achievement, however, is a transformation of the sense of phenomenology insofar as the apriori is now defined in terms of motion. It is this fact that allows us to naturalize phenomenology—to interpret it in terms of the evolutionary process. It also clarifies the sense of the

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self as a spatial-temporal process. This can be put in terms of the fact that the constitution of the body, with its I-can, includes the constitution of the constitutive role it plays. What the proposed naturalization of phenomenology invites us to do is to consider this constitutive role in evolutionary terms. It implies that the spatial-temporal process that characterizes our embodied selfhood is evolutionarily situated. It also implies that the horizon that situates it is evolutionarily determined. Here, the phenomenological concept of horizon, itself, becomes naturalized.

Chapter V Life and Horizon The concept of horizon has a certain paradoxical, aporetic quality. On the one hand the term signifies a limit, a border. The word comes from the Greek, ὁρίζων (horízōn), which is taken from ὅρος (hóros), signifying a boundary. Thus, we can speak of the horizon as the border between the earth and the sky. This border is the limit of what we can see. As we advance, it recedes before us. It appears as a border that can never be crossed. It is, paradoxically, a onesided border—a border that we can never, as from some sort of aerial view, regard from both sides. In this, it shares the aporetic quality that death exhibits. Death, as we saw, also exhibits itself as a border, a threshold that we cannot cross. This threshold is constantly present to us. Living, we approach it, but we cannot, as long as we are alive, cross it. As Derrida writes, “Indeed, concerning the threshold of death, we are engaged here toward a certain possibility of the impossible.”1 Death is the ultimate expression of the “I cannot.” Like the horizon, it remains a one-sided border. What does this comparison say about the idea of horizon? Is it a coincidence, or does it point to something essential in its conception? Certain things suggest an essential connection as, for example, the fact that only living beings can die. Death, in other words, is only possible in the context of life. It is in terms of this context that death assumes its quality of a border. There is also the fact that living beings are embodied and, as such, are capable of motility. Because of this, they are open to experiencing the ongoing advance of the horizon and, with this, its quality of being a one-sided border. That the notion of such a border occurs in the context of life points to the tie between life and horizon. The previous chapter brought up the conception of horizon as an element of the apriori that both Husserl and Patočka shared. In the present, I will consider how this conception becomes naturalized when we interpret it from a Darwinian perspective. 81

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Horizon and Facticity In phenomenology, the concept of horizon signifies a series of experiences that have been connected and, in their connections, determine the further experiences which can join this series. Thus, in the appearing of a spatial-temporal object, the experiences which we have grasped form the actually experienced portion of a larger horizon. This horizon is composed of the experiences which can connect with the perspectival views we have already experienced. If they fit in with them, they join with our previous experiences so as to more closely determine the object’s sense. If they don’t, then they make us correct our interpretation of this sense. This sense is not just visual. The horizon that determines it includes our experiences of the object’s tactile, auditory, and other sensuous qualities. It also includes the experience we have of its relations to other objects, for example, when we use it as a tool. An object’s horizon is, we said, not just “internal,” i.e., directed to the specification of its particular features; it is also “external.” Husserl writes regarding the latter, The individual—relative to consciousness—is nothing for itself; perception of a thing is its perception in a perceptual field. And just as the individual thing has a sense in perception only through an open horizon of “possible perceptions,” ... so once again the thing has a horizon: an “external horizon” in relation to the “internal”; it has this precisely as a thing of a field of things; and this finally points to the totality, “the world as a perceptual world.”2

The experiences forming this external horizon relate the sense of the object to the senses of the objects composing its surrounding world. My perceptual field includes them. When I move from one object to another, the series of my experiences makes the second object occupy the foreground of my visual field. By virtue of such external horizons, an object acquires its sense as an individual member of the objects of the world. It appears as a numerical (or countable) singular, i.e., as one of many different objects. It also becomes classifiable. Objects with similar senses have the same general internal horizons. Their relations to other objects as given by their external horizons are also similar. Burning matches, for example, all shed light and warmth on their environment.

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The most general sense of objects is that they are objects of the world. This signifies that we experience them as part of our unfolding experience of the world. Husserl writes regarding this: “Things, objects ... are ‘given’ ... but in principle only in such a way that we are conscious of them as things or objects within the world-horizon. Each one is something, something of the world of which we are constantly conscious as a horizon.”3 This world-horizon is the totality of the internal and external horizons through which we grasp objects and their relations. Its correlate is the world considered as the totality of objects. Each worldly object is a one-among-many, but the world, taken as a whole, is simply one. It is not a numerical, but rather a unique singular. In Husserl’s words, “the world does not exist like an entity, an object, but exists in a singularity for which the plural is senseless.”4 This means that there is a “fundamental distinction in the way in which we are conscious of the world and the way in which we are conscious of the thing.”5 We are “constantly consciousness” of the world “as a horizon.” We can only think of the world as the unending totality of the unfolding experience that, in its connections, allows us to posit individual objects. Left unresolved in this view of horizon is the existence of the connections that allow us to posit objects and, ultimately, the world as the totality of objects. For Husserl, such connections are simply a fact. He writes: The factual (das Factische) is the course of consciousness. This holds for every case, whether or not this consciousness be sufficient for the constitution of an exact nature, i.e., our nature, and whether or not it be, as well, one which requires this … Prior, then, to transcendental phenomenology, it is, therefore, a fact that the course of consciousness is so structured that within it a nature as a “rational” unity can constitute itself.6

Implicit in calling the course of consciousness a fact is the idea of its contingency. Facts could be otherwise and so could be the experience that allows us to posit the world. As Husserl puts this point: “The existence of the world is a correlate of certain multiplicities of experience marked out by certain essential formations. But it is not a matter of insight that actual experience could proceed only in such forms of connections. This cannot be inferred purely from

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the essence of perception per se.”7 The essence of perception, which designates the possibility of perceptual synthesis, is actualized when experiences occur in a certain order—for example, the order of perspectival givenness, where one side of an object gives way to another as we move around it. In the absence of this order, the synthesis that yields the perceptual presence of a three-dimensional object cannot occur. This factual dependence thus opens up the possibility that experience could proceed in a way that makes positing impossible. Thus, when Husserl asks, “Must there always exist an ego and a physical nature? Cannot consciousness collapse in a tumult of formations?” his answer is affirmative.8 For him, “the being (the actual existence) of nature is an open pretension on every level.”9 It depends on the factual course of experience.10 What is responsible for this factual course? Husserl writes: “Because the rationality that facticity actualizes is not such as the essence [of nature] demands, in all this there lies a wonderful teleology.”11 In other words, because the essence cannot demand that perception give us an actual, “rational” world, the necessity must lie in such a world taken as a goal or telos inherent in constitution. Husserl embraces this solution in the Crisis and the unpublished manuscripts associated with it. He writes that “each transcendental ego has something innate. Within itself, it innately bears the teleological ground of its streaming, constituting, transcendental life.”12 This ground, which is also a goal, determines the factual course of its consciousness and, hence, its “constituting, transcendental life.” As “immanent” within subjects, “as the form of their individual being, as the form of all the forms in which subjectivity exists,” this ground determines both “the universal being of transcendental subjectivity” and the world that such subjectivity posits.13 Given this, “teleology can be exhibited as that which ultimately makes possible and thereby actualizes all being in its totality.”14 For Husserl, then the teleological directedness of consciousness towards the constitution of a stable world is the reason why neither the subject nor its world collapses into a “tumult of formations.” In what sense is this position phenomenological? In asking this, we once again come to a decision point. We face a situation where the way forward is left undetermined. If we take

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phenomenology as a descriptive science of the actually existing formations of consciousness, then its descriptions, like such formations, presuppose the factual course of consciousness. In attempting to account for such a factual course, we thus go beyond such phenomenology. What we face, Husserl writes, is “the problematic of the irrationality of the transcendental fact, which appears in the constitution of the factual world and factual mental life.” Husserl attempts to resolve this by appealing to teleology. This path forward involves “metaphysics in a new sense.”15

Life and Horizon We need not embrace such metaphysics to solve this problematic. There is another path available. The factual course of consciousness can also be taken as determined by nature, taken in a Darwinian sense. Doing so, we broaden the concept of horizon. We extend it to all sentient life. For Darwin, nature is determined by natural selection, the result being a “web of complex relations” that binds different species together. This web, he writes, is such “that the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential and yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence or from which it has to escape or on which it preys.”16 In Darwin’s view, the individual features that make up a living being’s structure, from the shape of its legs to the type of eyes it has, are actually a set of indices. Each points to the specific features of the environment in which it functions, and which, for the purposes of survival, its evolutionary history has internalized as part of its structure.17 This holds not just for nature’s shaping the physical features of organisms, but also for its action on their sensate, conscious lives. An animal’s senses are determined by its need to function in a given environment. The interrelation of this environment with those of species composing it extends in a horizonal manner to the whole of life. As our last chapter noted, the “being” that nature tends can be understood as life itself understood as a web of relations. This becomes the shifting telos determining individual lives.

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If we accept Darwin’s position, there is a horizonality built into life. Ontologically, that is, in terms of each species’ being, this horizon is expressed by the interrelation of the life forms and their environment. The horizon of each species includes both the physical environment in which it functions, as well the other species that function in this environment. Thus, the individual’s ontological horizon includes those whom it feeds upon and those who prey upon it. It also includes those who compete with it for food or mates, as well as those, if it is a social species, with whom it must cooperate if it is to survive. Each of the members of the species with whom it comes into relation has its own horizon, one that extends beyond the original species’ horizon. Ultimately, this horizonality extends to the web of life itself. In this web, each species directly shapes the species that form its environment. Mediately, it shapes all the others. Such shaping also includes its physical environment. Thus, the oxygen we breathe is present through the chemical actions of plants; the carbon dioxide that plants require is provided through animal respiration. Similar assertions can be made of the quality of the soil, and so on. Given that an animal’s senses are determined by its need to function in a given environment, we can say that its phenomenological horizon is founded on the ontological one of animate and inanimate entities. As determined by the latter, each of its senses has its own horizon. The horizon of a bat’s sense of hearing, for example, is determined by the darkness of the sky and the insects it feeds on at night. It is also determined by its ability to fly, to issue high pitched sounds, and to locate insects through the echoes it receives. Its auditory horizon, as it hunts on the wing, unfolds according to these factors. The same can be said of its other senses. They are all determined by the web of life (and the nonliving material that is part of this). Similar assertions hold for the other animals in this web. Each has its own perceptual horizons. Such horizons are also tied to its bodily structure as determined by its environment. They, too, are linked to the organisms with whom they compete or cooperate, pursue or fall prey to. The totality of such linked horizons forms, we can say, the horizon of experiential horizons. The human horizon is just a part of this. Husserl’s world horizon is also part of

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a greater whole insofar as it consists of experiences available to human subjects. Viewed in the context of life, Husserl’s ultimate horizon thus cannot be taken as the phenomenological expression of the world as a totality—the uniquely singular world. The totality of experiences that define such a world exceeds the human. With this, we can return to the question of the factual course of our experiences. The defining factor, here, must be the web of life. As Nietzsche expresses this insight: “we have senses for only a selection of perceptions—those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves.”18 The same holds for the other animals. In each case, the factual course of a species’ perceptions is determined in their order and their kind by its functioning in its environment. Its particular senses determine the kind of perceptions it has. Its bodily motility determines their order. Thus, out of the multitude of information its animate and inanimate environment offers, it attends only to those that match its needs.19 If it did not, it would not survive: the processes of natural selection would result in its extinction. The teleology inherent in this is directed to life as whole, life as affirming itself in its changing parts. The goal of such teleology is, in Darwin’s terms, simply the “being” that “Nature” tends. It is ultimately life itself, understood in terms of the web of relations that binds it together.

Motion and Horizon Implicit in the assertion that our bodily motion determines the order of our perceptions is the fact that motion is what actualizes our perceptual horizon. As we move, our experience unfolds horizonally. Motion, then, is at the basis of the appearing of our world. According to Patočka, it is also, as we saw, at the basis of its existence. Three points are essential to understanding his position. The first is that his conception of motion has the same goal as Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of flesh. It is intended to underpin a non-dualistic ontology. In Patočka’s words: “What is distinctive about our attempt is our interpretation of movement; we understand it independently of the dichotomy between subject and object.”20 Its independence comes from the fact that motion is not itself an entity. It is the

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actualization of entities—be they embodied subjects or objects. The second point, then, is that movement is the very existence of what exists. It is its actuality or being in act. This insight can be put in terms of the etymological sense of the term “existence,” which is that of standing out—ex and istimi in the Greek. Things stand out, that is, ex-ist, by affecting their environment, such affection occurring through their motion. On the most basic level, living beings do this through engaging in metabolism, i.e., by exchanging material with what surrounds them. Inanimate objects do this through such motions as the vibration of atoms, the movement of electrons, the flux of subatomic particles, and so on. Without such motions, entities could not distinguish themselves from their environments; they could not affect them. Environmentally, then, without movement, they are indistinguishable from non-entities. If we accept this, then we have our third point. We can say with Patočka, “movement is ... what founds the identity between being and appearing. Being is being manifest.”21 This follows because the movement that makes something stand out or exist also makes it present to its environment. It appears in affecting it, and it affects it through its motion. Whether or not Patočka’s conception can apply to existence as a whole, it finds a ready application to the Darwinian conception of life. This is because “the web of complex relations” that characterize life is not static, but continually evolves. This evolution is the result of what we called the motion of evolution. Such motion actualizes the species. In doing so, it results in the ways that the individuals composing them presently affect each other and, hence, in the ways that they “stand out” or exist for one another. In endowing them with senses and bodily motility, it also actualizes their perceptual horizons and, hence, the appearing for each of its world. With this, we have the actualization of the world-horizon in the extended sense of including all their interrelated experiential horizons. When we apply Patočka’s conception to life, two conclusions thus follow. The first is that the web of life is itself actualized as motion. Each of the individuals that compose it has been shaped by the motion of evolution. Such motion is a primary example of Patočka’s dictum that, ontologically understood, motion “no longer presupposes constituted being but rather constitutes it.”22 For

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Patočka, this dictum holds generally. In living beings, such constituting motion consists of such things as an animal’s metabolic processes, the flow of blood in its veins, the movements of respiration, of digestion, in short, all the organic movements that characterize its being alive. It also includes its bodily motility, which includes the motility of its senses, such as its focusing its eyes, sniffing the air, turning towards sounds and so on. All these things, and more, are, in Patočka’s words, “movements tied to the fundamental functions of organisms.” In humans, he adds, movement includes “language, the movement that, by its composition and decomposition, seizes upon or lets escape the real relations between things and their qualifications.” Given our capacity for imitation, our movement also includes the motions of “artistic mimesis,” for example, those of singing, dancing, drawing, etc.23 All these movements, and many others besides, go into making a person be what he or she is. The second conclusion is that this actualization is one with the appearing that occurs through the associated horizons. It is responsible for the bat’s perceptual world, as it hunts on the wing. It also results in the world that humans encounter.

The One-Sided Border With this, we have the reason why both life and experience are confronted by borders that they can never cross. The border of what we do experience (its horizon) always advances before us. We can never catch up with it. The same holds with regard to our death, which, as long as we are alive, is always ahead of us. Both follow from the fact that the ongoing quality of our experiential horizon is tied to the motion that is essential to life. When the motion that actualizes our life and its associated horizon of experience ceases— when, on the basic level, metabolism stops—we lose our basis for both being and appearing. Given this, we can never cross the boundary of the horizon. The horizon must always advance since its stasis is one with the end of our existence. The actual, underlying one-sided border is, thus, implicit in motion itself understood as the ground of both being and appearing.

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Derrida’s paradox of the “possibility of the impossible,” i.e., of the one-sided border, thus, points beyond itself to Patočka’s reformulation of phenomenology. It also indicates the biological basis of both the factual course of consciousness and the horizons that this course actualizes. In this, it shows us our interconnectedness— in both a phenomenological and ontological sense—with the rest of nature. In interpreting this in a Darwinian sense, we have specified a possible response to the question of the factual course of experience. Like Husserl’s turn to the teleological, we have gone beyond phenomenology. Our turn is towards the naturalization of phenomenology. While such a turn, like Husserl’s, is open to criticism, it does reflect our present situation, which is defined by the environmental dangers we face. So taken, it can be understood as a sign of and an obligation to the natural world that sustains us. To continue this analysis, we must turn to the subject. Our focus will no longer be on the subject as a process, but rather on the stage of this process that we live in our embodied functioning. To consider its naturalization, we have to think of the subject not just as a place of appearing, but also as placed. To do so is to take it in relation to what surrounds it—in relation to the environment in which it “stands out.” At issue will not be just the place of the subject, but place as such. This will include its role in actualization. The attempt here will be to think of actualization both as brought about by motion and as an environmental concept.

Chapter VI Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept As Hans-Rainer Sepp writes in the Introduction to his Outline of Oikological Philosophy, phenomenology transforms the question of the “what” into that of the “how.” What an experienced object is— that is, its objective sense—is investigated in terms of how we experience it—that is, in terms of the acts of consciousness that bring it to presence. Phenomenology, he adds, does not consider the “where, the place from which every relation first becomes possible and, on occasion, actual.”1 What exactly is this “where”? How are we to locate it? If we take place as an ultimate referent, then there seems to be no place to place it. The attempt to do so involves us in an infinite regress of seeking a place for a place, and seeking a further place for this placing place, and so on. A body, then, must define its place through its own action. But how does it do this? This chapter will find an answer in Aristotle, one that will be deepened by reengaging with Patočka. It will go on to consider the place of living creatures—i.e., place as defined by the process of being-alive. As part of this, we will consider the place of the subject. Throughout, place will be understood as an environmental concept. It will involve the relation of a thing to what surrounds it, but avoid the regress of seeking a place for a place.

Place and Manifestation Professor Sepp suggests that we think of place in terms of the being of a house (Haussein).2 When we do so, two aspects of place immediately appear. A place, like a house, encloses; its boundary distinguishes the inside from the outside. But a house also has windows and doors. Thought in these terms, there must be a permeability of the border or limit defining the place. The inside can influence the outside. One way to conceive of this is in terms of Aristotle’s 91

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definition of place. He writes that “except for local motion, there would be no place as a subject matter for investigation.”3 This is because place, as he defines it, is “the first unmoved boundary of what surrounds [an entity].”4 His insight is that place answers the question “where?” but where something is depends on its motion. Thus, if I am seated writing at my desk, I am in my chair. If I walk about my study, its walls are my first unmoved boundary. Similarly, when I pace around my apartment, the appropriate answer to the question “where” is that I am in the apartment. These examples show that the entity, itself, determines through its motion its first unmoving boundary and, hence, what constitutes the limits of its place.5 In defining place, not in terms of a further place, but rather in relation to a body’s action, we can conceive of it environmentally without falling into a regress. So conceived, place is not fixed, but varies with the body’s action. In the examples, it stretches from a chair to the apartment. To speak of the permeability of this boundary, we must recall what is presupposed when we say that something is present, i.e., manifests itself. For a thing to be present, it must distinguish itself from its background. It must, we said, stand out from it. This points to the link between presence and existence. The etymological sense of the word “existence” comes from the Greek words for “standing” and “out,” istimi and ex. Now, things stand out, that is, ex-ist, by affecting their environment, such affection occurring through their motion. Thus, the movement that makes something stand out or exist also makes it present to its environment. It appears in affecting it, and it affects it through its motion. For Patočka, this identity of existing and appearing implies a corresponding definition of actualization. The motion that founds their identity actualizes the entity that appears. As Patočka expresses this, “Movement is what makes a being what it is. Movement unifies, maintains cohesion, synthesizes the being’s determinations. The persistence and succession of the determinations of a substrate, etc., are movements.”6 Thus, a plant grows and develops through the movements of taking in and shaping materials from its environment. Similarly, on an inorganic level, the movements of subatomic particles actualize the atoms; the movements and resulting bonding of the atoms bring

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about the chemical elements, and so on through the structures of the material world. Such movements don’t just actualize entities, they affect their environments. The entities that they actualize stand out or exist. The motion that actualizes them makes them present to their environments. This is why Patočka writes, “movement is the foundation of all manifestation.”7 Implicit in the above is the attempt to think of actualization as an environmental concept. What is actualized is both the being and the appearing of the thing in terms of its environment. Patočka developed this position through his study of Aristotle. The point of this study, however, is not historical. He engages in it as part of his attempt to develop an asubjective phenomenology.8 Viewed asubjectively, appearing, taken as presence to something, is not, in the first instance, a category of consciousness; it is simply a thing’s effect on its environment. A weight, for example, appears (is present) to a pillow by depressing it. The hollow it makes manifests its presence. This presence is its place as a weight affecting the pillow. This can be put in terms of Hans Rainer Sepp’s association of place and house. A house encloses and yet, with its windows and doors, is permeable. The example of the weight on the pillow illustrates both the enclosure of the space occupied by the weight and the permeability of such enclosure insofar as the weight is an actual weight in its pressing down on the pillow. The relation of place, like that of actualization, is environmental. Place, being, and appearing have to be thought of as relations of the thing to what surrounds it.

Place as a Concept of Life Living beings stand out or exist by engaging in metabolism, i.e., by exchanging material with what surrounds them. Engaging in this exchange, living beings are both composed of matter and yet different from it. They cannot be identified with the matter composing them since, as Hans Jonas remined us, this “is forever vanishing downstream.” This very fact, however, means that, to continue to be, they have to take in new matter to replace what they have lost. Thus, an organism, Jonas writes, is “independent of the sameness of this matter” but “is dependent on the exchange of it.”9 Both

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necessities position metabolism as the fundamental motion of life. It is behind the organism’s actualization. Through it, the organism is both present to its environment and distinguishes itself, i.e., stands out, from it by affecting it. Now, this standing-out is also a standing-in the environment. By taking in material, the organism becomes part of the material environment. This taking in of material is the internalization of the material environment; it makes the organism part of it, i.e., a material part among other material parts. It is also, however, the organism’s standing out by affecting its environment. The organism, then, combines the opposites of being part of an environment and distinguishing itself from this. Both are the results of the metabolic process that actualizes it. When we speak of presence to something in terms of affecting it, such presence indicates, in fact, a double relationship. An organism affects and, hence, is present to its environment; reciprocally, the environment, which includes other organisms, affects and is present to the organism. Now, in the case of sentient animals, this presence of the environment embodies a pragmatic sense. The environment is seen in terms of the features useful for survival and propagation. Thus, the living environment is present to the organism as, for example, predator or prey, sexual partner or competitor. The inorganic environment is present to it as water to drink, a cave to find shelter, and so forth. To reverse this, the organism is present to its living environment through its own actions of predation, sexual display, etc. The organism’s actions also affect its nonliving environment. The air in the atmosphere, for example, is a result, in part, of the respiration of living creatures. This respiration is part of their presence to it. When we limit ourselves to living creatures, we can speak of a double disclosure and, correspondingly, of a double actualization. Through its motion, the animal discloses and actualizes the features of the environment that are useful to it. The environment, in turn, discloses and actualizes the animal through its affecting it. Thus, the deer chewing on the grass discloses the grass as food to be eaten. Eating it, he actualizes it as food. To reverse this, grass exhibits and actualizes, in its being eaten, the deer as an actual herbivore. Similarly, the wolf through his predation discloses and actualizes

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the deer as prey, while the deer reveals the wolf as a predator in its flight from the latter. As these examples illustrate, things affect and are present to each other through their motion. This motion actualizes the things receiving this motion and, if the latter are sentient, this actualization includes the moving objects’ appearing to them. Thus, the grass being chewed is present to the deer in the release of its elements. Actualizing the deer as a herbivore, the grass being chewed actualizes its own appearing as food. This double disclosure and actualization is a result of the evolutionary processes that shaped life. As Darwin discovered, an organism evolves in relation to its shifting environment. A change in its environment requires, if the organism is to survive, a corresponding change in the way that the organism responds to this. Thus, the wolf evolves to hunt specific types of prey, and the prey it hunts evolves to escape its predation. A change in one term of this relation requires a corresponding change in the other. The environment of an organism includes, of course, the physical world. As the example of the atmosphere shows, the physical world is also affected by the activities of the organisms inhabiting it, the very organisms that the environment, in turn, affects and causes to evolve. There is, then, an evolutionary history not just of nature, but of presence and disclosure. The appearing of the world is not fixed, but is part of evolutionary history. This concept of double actualization allows us to answer the question of the place of life. We can approach it by asking about the place of color: Is color in the eye or is it in the colored object that we see? What prevents us from choosing between the answers is the fact that neither the seeing eye nor the colored object can be without the other. The seeing eye actualizes the object’s appearing and, hence, its being as a colored object.10 But this object, in turn, actualizes the eye’s being as an eye seeing color. In the first instance, this double actualization seems to place color in both the eye and the colored object. But the two actualizations, in their mutual dependence, are actually only a single actualization. This actualization is that of the place, the “where” of color. The same point holds with regard to the place of life. The place involves both the individual organism and its environment in their mutual dependence.

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How far does this place, this “where,” extend? Darwin writes at length about what he calls “the web of complex relations” that binds different species together. The web, he says, is such “that the structure of every organic being is related in the most essential and yet often hidden manner to that of all the other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence or from which it has to escape or on which it preys.”11 For Darwin, the individual features that make up a particular organism’s structure, from the shape of its legs to the type of eyes it has, are actually a set of indices. Each points to the specific features of the environment in which it functions.12 Natural selection, working through this environment, acts, he says, “on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.”13 Thus, once we bear “in mind,” according to Darwin, “how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life,” 14 we have to say that the actualization of the organism has an indefinite boundary. So has the place of the organism as determined by its actualization. To represent this place, we cannot think of it as a point on a map, but rather as the map itself. Such a map would exhibit the mutual relations that are required for its actualization. The place of the organism as the place of its actualization would be the web of relations illustrated by the map.

The Place of Subjectivity When we ask about the place of the subject, the obvious answer is that, as embodied, the subject is in the world. The world, however, is present to our consciousness. It exists in our conscious apprehension of it. Thus, as we cited Merleau-Ponty, each us has to say, “I am in the world and the world is in me.” As paradoxical as it seems, we are compelled, he asserts, to hold “on to both ends of the chain.” 15 This is because neither side is intelligible without the other. Thus, I can only speak about the world in terms of my conscious apprehension of it. But such apprehension requires my bodily senses and activities, and I cannot speak of these except in terms of the world. My embodiment makes them (and, hence, myself) part of the

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world—the very world that I can examine using the techniques of the natural and human sciences. Given this, the place of the subject has to involve both the world and consciousness. Its place involves an intertwining, where each side affects and is placed in the other. This mutual placing also comes forward when we speak of our actuality, that is, our being in act or functioning as subjects. Aristotle’s description of the student-teacher relationship can be used to illustrate this mutual placing. For Aristotle, as for Patočka, a thing is present where it is at work. This is the place where it stands out or exists by acting to affect its environment. Given this, we have to say that the teacher exists, is present, where he is at work. His place is where he is functioning and, thereby, affecting his environment. Functioning as a teacher, he is, thus, in the student.16 Now, as Aristotle points out, the teacher’s actualization is one with the student’s actualization. His being an actual teacher occurs in union with the student’s being an actual learner.17 Now, for Aristotle, the student is essentially the passive partner in this relationship. The teacher acts to actualize the student’s potentiality to learn.18 Doing so, he is at work in the student. One can also say, however, that the student, through his questioning, actualizes the teacher’s potentiality to teach. As such, the student, prompting the teacher through his remarks, is at work in the teacher. The single actualization of the student and the teacher is thus correlated to their being in one another. The same holds with regard to the embodied subject’s relation to its world. Through its actions, the subject affects the world. Affecting it, the subject exists—stands out—within it. The world, however, also acts on the subject, affecting it. As such, it also exists in the embodied subject. In this mutual placing, there is only a single actualization. The world actualizes the subject in its potentiality to be a place where the world can appear. This subject actualizes the world in its potentiality to appear to sentient life. What we find here is the same pattern that we encountered in speaking of the relation of color to the seeing eye. As before, we have to say that the two actualizations, in their mutual dependence, intertwine to form a single actualization. The place of this actualization includes this intertwining of place within place.

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As the Introduction mentions, Merleau-Ponty uses a striking metaphor to describe the placing of the world in us. Using the word tapisser, which signifies to cover, drape, line or wallpaper, he writes that “our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things.”19 Thus, we “line” the world with visual qualities through our eyes, with tactile qualities through our sensitive skin, and so on. Doing so, our embodied subjectivity provides measures “for being, dimensions to which we can refer it.”20 Such dimensions are its sensuous aspects, for example, its colors and sounds. Our flesh, through its embodied senses, is the place of their disclosure, which means that such qualities are in the place provided by our embodied senses. The world that is present through our embodiment is, however, the very world that our embodiment thrusts us into. This means, Merleau-Ponty writes, “my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched … they see and touch the visible, the tangible from within” the visible and tangible world.21 Similarly, the flesh that “lines and even envelops” the things of this world is “nevertheless surrounded” by them.22 It is within the world it reveals. We envelop the world not only through our senses but also through our activities. They, too, function as a place of disclosure. This means that they give us a further sense of the way that the world is in us. Such activities can be straightforwardly pragmatic, such as boiling water in a kettle to make tea. They can also be more complex actions like teaching. The corresponding appearing of the world here includes the water we set boiling and the student that is learning. On the one hand, the place of our actuality is where we are active. This is where we exist or stand out. We are there in our action of boiling the water or teaching the student. On the other hand, the water’s boiling and student’s learning are in us. Our actions disclose them. They exist and appear, not in our flesh, but in the actions that actualize the water’s potentiality to boil or the student’s potentiality to learn. Such actualization includes the sense that our actions, if successful, impose upon them. Thus, the water has the sense of water boiling for my tea and the student has the sense of a person learning the material I am teaching. Their existing in these actions is one with our actualization as engaging in them.

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Thus, the boiling water’s existing in and through my action of boiling it is one with my actualization as the person boiling it. Similarly, the learning student existing through my teaching exists in union with my actualization as a teacher. The place of this actualization is where I am active. It is in what I actualize. The intertwining of places and actualizations signifies that we have to do with only a single reality. Given this, the thought of the world as it is in itself, the world whose reality is independent of ourselves, is as incoherent as the thought of a single organism, an organism thought apart from the web of life through which it functions. The actuality of the water boiling in my kettle is unthinkable apart from my action; similarly the actuality of a student learning involves the actuality of teaching. In all such cases, there is a single actualization and a single, intertwined place.

Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept What is the self or subject viewed in term of this single actualization? How are we to illustrate it as a place (a “house”) for being and appearing. Insofar as the embodied subject is a living being, its place is not representable as a point on a map. It has to be described as a map depicting all the intertwined relations involved in this single actualization. The dimensions illustrated by this map thus include all the measures “for being, dimensions to which we can refer it,” which are brought up by Merleau-Ponty. Not all such dimensions are, in fact measurable. Limiting ourselves to those that are, we can still gain a sense of the complexity of this map by considering the mathematical dimensions or variables that are required to specify the distances on this map. Given that actualization involves motion and motion involves crossing distances, such dimensions “for being” are also those of actualization. They are dimensions for positions and our actually moving between them. Now, in threedimensional Cartesian space, three variables are required to fix a position. In this space, the shortest line measuring the distance between two points can be determined by the three variables (the x, y, and z coordinates) of these points. For an embodied subject, however, the shortest distance is determined by its body. Its muscular

100 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS structure and size determine how it is able to move between points. Thus, the localized space of an adult human being is different than that of a child. Both are different from that of a bird. This means that the variables determining the shortest lines between positions in such spaces vary accordingly. As the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, pointed out, it signifies that our “motor space” has as many dimensions as the muscular determinants of our motion. All of the dimensions of this “motor space” must be represented in the map depicting the place of the subject. What is the relation of consciousness to this place? To speak of consciousness, we have to discuss time. This is because, as an earlier chapter noted, there is no measurable space in the experiences that fill our consciousness. Thus, we cannot say that an experience has a certain size or that one experience is a given distance from another. The house we regard may be so many meters high and so many meters distant from the next one, but such predicates do not pertain to our experiences considered in themselves. They have only temporal relations: They succeed one another, endure, and share durations. If we want to regard space, we cannot focus on our inner experience, we have to look outward. Doing so, however, we lose our sense of time. While we can inwardly recall what is past or anticipate what is to come, we cannot sensibly see what is past or what is to come. In outer perception, we are limited to the spatial relations grasped in the now. These are the relations that science investigates. It reduces time to the spatial positions of the hands on clocks. Using the numbers gained from clocks, it understands motion through the a-temporal expressions of mathematical formulae. Thus, the experience of the constant movement of an object, which subjectively involves our memories of its just past positions and our anticipations of those it is about to advance to, is expressed by the static relation, velocity equals distance divided by time (v=d/t). Similarly, a change of motion becomes acceleration understood as distance divided by time squared (a=d/t2). A more complicated motion with a changing acceleration is dealt with by a more complicated, yet equally timeless formula. These formulae do not yield motion, but rather snapshots of it. When we enter specific numbers

RETHINKING SUBJECTIVITY 101 into their variables, they give us the object’s position at the instant determined by these numbers. As is obvious, both time and space are required for the map depicting the embodied subject. Distances in this map are determined by its bodily structure. The latter, in determining distances, references the time required to cross them. Not only does the lived experience of distance require time, our experience of time, taken as a measure of our motion, requires space. Without space, there are no distances to cross and, hence, no motion to be measured. Space, as it were, extends or “spaces” time considered as a measure. If we attempt to conceive of time apart from space, then its moments become non-extended units. As non-extended, however, these units collapse into each other. This dependence of extended time on space is actually the dependence of our consciousness on the spatial world that embodies it. This spatial world, however, has no sense apart from consciousness. The latter gives it its intelligible sense. The scientific formula for motion, d/t, gives us only individual snapshots of motion. We, however, experience, not frozen images, but motion. We require this conscious experience to give sense to the formula. With this, we have an answer to the question of relation of consciousness to the embodied subject conceived as a place. If we abstract space from this place, we are left only with the temporal relations that characterize consciousness. If, alternatively, we abstract time from it, only the spatial relations formalized by science remain. Both are abstractions when we think of the subject as an environmental concept. Conceived as such, it involves the intertwining of both space and time. Neither can be thought apart since the definition of each involves the other. Given this, consciousness, in its temporal relations, is just an aspect of the subject. To use a phrase of Heidegger’s, the subject can be considered as a “house of being.” It becomes a place where actualization and appearing occur together. Such a place, however, is not a position, but rather an indefinitely extended map.

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102 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS With this conclusion, we seem to have reached an end to our inquiry. We began by considering the subject or self in terms of the late Husserl’s remarks on the nature of the ego. We ended by taking the subject as a map. Yet a doubt remains, one that makes us ask how far this conclusion captures our embodied reality. In speaking of our actualization as determined by a web of relations—a web taken as evolutionarily determined—have we been faithful to the selfhood that each of us lives, the selfhood that is properly our own? Considered as a place, the self or subject is a map depicting the relations that enmesh it. Such a place, however, is embodied. It is anchored in our flesh. Without this, we cannot act. We cannot, through our individual and collective actions, extend ourselves as a place appearing. The flesh that serves as a basis for these actions is, however, uniquely our own. It cannot be shared. It is not, like some currency, a means of exchange. One cannot, as Shakespeare reminds us, insure a debt by pledging a pound of one’s flesh.23 No one can eat, drink, or sleep for another person. Not only are such organic functions non-transferable, so is our experience of them. The taste of a fresh peach as it dissolves in one’s mouth, the experience of falling asleep, etc. are not public objects. Each of us directly experiences embodiment in only one example. What does this phenomenological fact say about our reality? Again, we face a decision point—one that leads us to a choice in the direction of our enquiry. We can either remain on a conceptual level or seek to integrate this with an account of the privacy of our embodiment. In choosing the latter, we will face a new puzzle. As we shall see, the embodiment that uniquely defines us escapes, in its privacy, all attempts at conceptualization. In accepting this, our phenomenological inquiries will again undergo a transformation.

Part II Embodiment and the Singularity of Selfhood

Chapter VII Self-Identity from the Perspective of the Body One of the persistent puzzles of philosophy concerns our self-identity. We assume that we persist in time as the same self. In Hume’s words, “we feel [the self’s] existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.” Yet, what is the basis for this view? As Hume asks, “from what impression could this idea be derived?” “[T]here is,” he remarks, “no impression constant and invariable” that we can point to. In fact, the “self or person is not any one impression.”1 Regarding it, we find only a multitude of changing contents. Given this, the notion of a perfect self-identity, he concludes, must be a “fiction.”2 Husserl, in affirming our self-identity, takes the opposite tract. In his view, the self cannot be some lasting content. To identify it with such is to make it objective rather than subjective. These two categories, as the Introduction noted, are very different: Objects are things that appear; subjects or egos are those to whom they appear. Objects—as the German word, Gegenstand, indicates—stand against us. We are the subjects against which they stand. Thus, rather than being some objective, lasting content of consciousness, the self is the place where contents appear. It has its identity as such a place. Husserl thus avoids Hume’s problem of identifying the self with “any one impression.” Doing so, however, he falls into the opposite difficulty. Having acknowledged the shifting character of our experiences, he affirms that the self or ego is “something absolutely identical in all actual and possible changes of experiences.” As identical, he adds, “it cannot in any sense be taken as an immanent [reelles] component or moment of the experiences.”3 In fact, it must transcend these; in Husserl’s words, it must be “a transcendence in immanence.”4 The problem lies in defining this transcendence—that is, giving it a positive character. According to Husserl, the ego or self “gives up all content” in the change of experiences.5 This means that it “does not 105

106 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS possess a proper general character with a material content.”6 But, in the absence of such content, how can we know or describe it? Husserl, we recall, calls it “an empty form,” one that is made unique by the particular content that fills it. But this implies that, in the absence of such content, there is nothing to make it “stand out,” nothing to distinguish it from other egos. Husserl, in fact, calls the ego that stands over against objects “anonymous.” The suspicion thus arises that while we may claim that we know that the anonymous self is, aside from the bare fact of its existence, we cannot say what, in particular, it is.7 Faced with these difficulties, it seems natural to follow Merleau-Ponty and turn to the body as the anchor of our self-identity. The advantage here is that our embodiment persists through our changing perceptions. Through its sense organs—eyes, ears, skin, etc.—the body is the place of appearing. Yet, it is not, like Husserl’s self or subject, devoid of all content. It is, itself, available to our senses. We can see, feel, taste, touch and smell it. In addition, we can through our sense of proprioception, apprehend the kinesthesia that accompany our movements. It, thus, presents us with not just a place of appearing, but also with something that appears. With it, we encounter something that is both subjective and objective. Does my body, in its persistence of being my body, solve the problem of self-identity? Is it a place of appearing that, unlike Husserl’s ego, is not “anonymous,” but rather has “a proper general character with a material content”? To explore this possibility, we will examine the body’s role in our sense of possessing a unique identity. We will also draw out the consequences of its being both subject and object for our attempts to grasp who and what we are.

The Uniqueness of the Embodied Self Husserl remarks that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not have an appearing body.”8 As visually present, his body would not distinguish itself from other appearing objects. To distinguish it as my own, I need the sense of touch. When I touch other objects, I feel their tactile qualities—their hardness, softness, etc. I do not, however, feel their being touched. Only my body

SELF-IDENTITY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BODY 107 affords me this possibility. Thus, touching my forearm, my hand feels its warmth, the hair on it, and so on. But my forearm also feels the hand that touches it—it feels, for example, its qualities of roughness or smoothness. Without this ability, I would be like the patient that the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, describes who, on waking, attempts to make room for herself by shoving her own leg out of bed.9 Unable to feel herself being touched, she reacts to and moves her body part like a foreign object. My ability to feel myself being touched thus marks out the boundaries of my embodied self. I am the only object whose being touched I can experience directly.10 Behind this uniqueness is the fact that I am, qua embodied, both subject and object. The touching hand, for example, functions as a subject. It has its localized sensations that spread across the surface that is in contact with an object. When it is touched by the other hand, then it, itself, assumes the position of an object. It is now seen to afford localized sensations to the hand that touches it. As Merleau-Ponty describes this, “When my right hand touches my left hand while [the left hand] is palpating the things, … the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.” It “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.”11 Thus, the touching hand that functioned as a subject assumes the position of an object. Unlike other objects, however, it can feel itself being touched. Doing so, it does not just declare itself to be within the boundary of my body; it also reasserts itself as a subject. It experiences the “double sensation” of both feeling itself being touched and feeling the qualities of the hand that touches it. Open to both, it is an object that is a subject in the sense of being a place of appearing. The uniqueness that characterizes me as both subject and object persists as long as I am capable of self-touch and, hence, of the aforementioned “double sensation.” As such, it underlies the sense of my persisting self-identity. Part of my identity involves my sense of being able to move my body directly. I do not move my body as a foreign object. The kinesthesia afforded by my sense of proprioception give me the sense of its being moved. Thus, the moved arm is sensed as both mover and moved. As such, I have a sense of moving it immediately. As Husserl writes: “the body as a field of

108 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS localization is ... the precondition for the fact that it is taken as ... an organ of the will,” that is, as “the one and only object which, for the will of my pure ego, is moveable immediately and spontaneously.”12 The immediacy comes from my being both subject and object. As the former, I am the actor. As the latter, I am acted upon. Crucial here is the body as “a field of localization” of sensations. The kinesthesia localized in the arm that I move play a double role. Again there is the “double sensation” that we saw in the hand’s both feeling itself being touched and feeling the touched hand. Behind this double sensation is a two-fold interpretation of the same sensations. When, for example, I press my hand against the table, “the same sensation of pressure,” Husserl writes, “is at one time taken as a perception of the table’s surface (of a small part of it, properly speaking) and at another time, with a different direction of attention and another level of interpretation, it results in sensations of my fingers pressing on it.” The same holds when I touch a cold object and feel both “the coldness of the surface of a thing and the sensation of cold in the finger.”13 It also applies when I move my arm. The same sensations give me both the sense of moving it and the sense of its being moved. The ease by which I shift from one to the other allows me to conflate the two and see my movement as spontaneous. Since it is based on the functioning of our body, the uniqueness of our persisting self-identity implies its privacy. The kinesthesia that allow me to take my body as immediately moveable are private. I cannot experience another person’s sense of moving himself, nor he my own. As felt and moved by me, my body is thus a unique singular. Only I experience it and I do so in only one example. This uniqueness should not surprise us. It characterizes, we said, our organic functioning. Thus, our proprioception, like our sensing in general, is marked by the privacy of such functioning. Just as no one can experience your kinesthesia, so no one can breathe for you, eat for you, sleep for you or perform for you any of your bodily functions. This is the truth behind Heidegger’s remark that each of us must die our own death.14 No one can do this for another person. Death, as the cessation of our organic functioning, is as private as this functioning itself.

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The Anonymity of Bodily Self-Identity There is here a certain analogue to Husserl’s anonymity of the functioning ego. For Husserl, the ego that stands over against what appears cannot, as such, itself appear. In giving up all content, it offers nothing to appear. By virtue of the double sensation that the body affords us, the body escapes such anonymity. The finger that senses the cold object is not anonymous. As I cited Husserl, along with “the coldness of the surface of a thing,” it also exhibits itself through the sensation of cold in the finger. There is, nevertheless, a certain anonymity on the conceptual level, one that follows from its uniqueness. As unique, its ontological status is not that of being one among many possible instances, each of which is essentially substitutable for another—like, for example, the apples that we see in a store. Having many instances of this fruit, we can draw from them a number of common features and express them with common meanings. This, however, is not possible with the lived body. It is experienced, as noted, in only one example. Ontologically, it exists, not as one among many, i.e., as a countable singular, but rather as uniquely one. So regarded, it cannot be defined in Aristotle’s sense. We cannot understand it in terms of species and genus. We can only sense it.15 It is, in fact, anonymous in the sense of not being expressible by the common meanings of our language, which, by definition, apply to more than one object. One can, of course, reply to this that the body is, in fact, definable. Definitions of its functioning occur in all the medical textbooks. Far from being unspeakable, that is, inexpressible by the meanings of language, it is, in fact, a frequent topic of our conversations as we compare our own appearing body with those of others. All of this is true, but it does not affect our embodiment as lived. As lived—that is, as internally experienced—it is incapable of being objectively presented. The sense of cold in my finger, for example, is something that only I can perceive. It is not a public object. What is public are things that, through the appropriate, “objectifying” interpretation of my sense data, do appear. Thus both my body and those of others are visible. As such, they can be contrasted and compared. I can draw from them their common features and describe

110 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS them using common concepts. What escapes this is my body understood as a place of appearing: the body that I experience as I sense myself and other objects. This can be put in terms of Husserl’s conception of the anonymity of the ego. Husserl writes, “the actively functioning ‘I do,’ ‘I discover,’ is constantly anonymous.”16 This implies, according to Rudolph Bernet, that “the invisible absolute consciousness must borrow its visibility from that which it makes visible.”17 It has to grasp itself in terms of the world that its functioning makes present. The same holds for the body as a place of appearing. Objectively, it can only appear as part of what its outer perception makes apparent. Subjectively, of course, it does sense itself. It feels its thirst, its hunger. It enjoys the sense of warmth as it basks in the sun. But this appearing remains irremediably private. The same holds for the persisting self-identity that our body in its uniqueness affords us. It is something that we can claim, but not conceptualize. It can never appear as a public object.

The Alterity of Bodily Self-Identity The privacy of the subjective sense of self-identity is such that it excludes all others. I never, in my functioning, confuse my identity with someone else’s. This, however, does not mean that this functioning does not, itself, harbor alterity. The alterity comes from the fact that the embodied self is both subject and object. The two, however, can never be grasped together. As I cited Husserl, there is always “a different direction of attention and another level of interpretation” when I move from interpreting the same sensations as pertaining to myself—for example, the coldness in the finger—and take them as pertaining to the object I touch with my finger. The same holds when I touch myself. As hand touches hand, I can attend to one hand as a sentient subject, but then I lose it as a sensed object. I cannot grasp it simultaneously as both.18 As we cited Merleau-Ponty in part: “If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection … always miscarries … the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand.”19 As

SELF-IDENTITY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BODY 111 he elsewhere writes, what we face here is “an ambiguous set-up in which the two hands can alternate in the function of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched.’”20 There is “a sort of dehiscence” or bursting open that “opens my body in two,” splitting it “between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching.”21 This “dehiscence” is caused by the switch of interpretations. In attending to “my body touching,” I take the sensations I experience as pertaining to me—that is, to myself as a place of appearing. When I turn my attention to “my body touched,” I take these sensations as pertaining to myself as an object that appears.22 The fact that we cannot do both at the same time constantly bedevils our attempts to pin down what we mean by our self-identity. Is our identity subjective, as Husserl thought, or is it, as Hume believed, something objective? As the former, it is essentially private. Each of us must admit that, as a place of appearing, we experience the world from a single, private perspective. No one can see out of our eyes or share the sensations we experience when biting into a fresh peach. We encounter this limitation every time we search for words to express our experiences. The common meanings that they convey somehow miss the uniqueness of our experience. The situation is different when we focus on ourselves as appearing objects. As appearing, our bodies can be compared with those of Others. The common features that they share can be conceptualized and expressed in language. So can their organic functioning, which can be studied and displayed in medical text books. Pursuing this line, we can see our identity in terms of the brain, the nervous system and other functioning organs. We can speak of our identity in terms of our physiological integrity. This objective view of our selfhood can be expanded to include our public presence. For example, a person’s identity can be taken to encompass his or her relations with Others. Here, we focus on the person’s words and deeds taken as public objects. With this, we can speak of narrative identity—the identity of the story line of a person’s life. What aids us in this endeavor is the fact that we rely on language to share what we experience. Clothing what we see with linguistic expressions, our private perceptions assume the commonality of the language used to describe them. Here, the temptation is to forget that the

112 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS objects of our discourse are common precisely as linguistic entities. The spoken and written expressions of objects are what are present to us in common rather than any particular visual presence. Commonality, here, is a matter of shared meanings, which, as such, always apply to more than one object. What prevents us from applying this objective view to embodied individuals is the privacy of their organic functioning. In spite of our ability to study and describe the functioning, say, of the stomach, it remains a fact that no one can eat for another. The fact that someone else has had his breakfast does not assuage my hunger. The same holds for someone else seeing for me, i.e., experiencing the qualia that make vision actual. Her description of what she sees cannot really compensate for my lack of vision. Such examples point to the fact that our entrance into the world involves the privacy of our embodiment. The language that we employ fails when we attempt to conceptualize or define this aspect of our identity. Concretely considered, both the objective and subjective views of our identity are one-sided. Our uniqueness comes from our being both subject and object, both private and public, both a place of appearing and an appearing object. Thus, the fact that we can both touch ourselves and feel ourselves being touched is what sets originally the boundaries of our embodied selfhood. We are the only object that we encounter that can feel itself being touched. This ability to sense ourselves is also behind the uniqueness of our body as an organ of our will—i.e., of our body to appear alternately as an actor and as something acted upon. As was noted, the same sensations give us the sense of moving it and the sense of its being moved. Since, however, this depends on a shift in our interpretation, our sense of moving directly is not an original apprehension, but rather based on the conflation of these two senses. Conflation is required since one sense points to us as a subject, while the other takes us as an object. Our uniqueness involves both, but we can focus on one only at a time. When we focus on ourselves as subjects, we escape objective representation. This becomes possible, when we attend to ourselves as objects. We cannot, however, combine the subjective and objective to form a unified view of our bodily action.

SELF-IDENTITY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BODY 113 All this points to the paradox of self-identity when we understand it in terms of embodiment. So understood, it involves our being both a subject and an object. The uniqueness of our persisting self-identity is built upon this fact; yet we cannot grasp both together. Innumerable philosophic conundrums are built upon this impasse. We cannot, for example, see how the mind or consciousness can relate to the body. Taking it as the place of appearing—the place of qualia or experienced sense qualities—we are unable to see how it can be integrated with the body understood objectively— i.e., understood in terms of the physical functioning of its sense organisms and nervous system. Similarly, we cannot see how our body can function as an organ of our will. Objectively, the notion of the will’s originally initiating an action makes no sense. Objectively, every event is causally linked to a previous event, which itself is initiated by a previous event. Subjectively, however, we experience our bodies as “immediately and spontaneously” moved by our will. Such problems are built into our flesh. At their root is the paradoxical fact of our self-identity. Our self-identity is based on alterity that both makes us what we are and makes it impossible to grasp ourselves in a unified concept. This impossibility structures our apprehension of time and, hence, of the world. In giving a temporal cast to our intertwining with the world, it adds to our understanding of both self and world. To see this, we next turn to the way our embodied self-presence determines our temporalization.

Chapter VIII Temporality and Embodied Self-Presence Augustine famously remarked that “in our conversation, no word is more familiarly used or more easily recognized than ‘time.’ … I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.” 1 Nowhere is this clearer than when we try to understand it through metaphors. Take, for example, the common simile, time is like a river. This is supposed to explain the passage of time. Yet, if I flow with the river, I do not sense its passage. Passage requires a point that is passed; and if I am to have a sense of it, I must be at this point. As such, I am supposed to have a sense of time coming towards me and departing from me. Yet, if time is like a river, it neither comes to be nor expires. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “the water which will flow by tomorrow is at this moment at its source, the water which has just passed is now a little further downstream in the valley. What is past or future for me is present in the world.”2 Here, both the water that is to come and the water that has passed me are simultaneous. When I regard the river as a whole, there is no sense of expiration. The same point holds when, instead of being at the bank of the river, the observer is situated on a boat flowing with the river. In this case, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “we may say that he is moving downstream towards his future, but the future lies in the new landscapes which await him at the estuary, and the course of time is no longer the stream itself: it is the landscape as it rolls by for the moving observer.”3 The difficulty, once again, is that the landscape that takes on the figure of time is simultaneous. Simultaneity, however, is a feature of space. To think of time in terms of a river is, in fact, to think of it in terms of space. Can we not, then, think of time in terms of itself? Here, the thought of time becomes that of expiration. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, “It is nothing but a general flight out of itself.”4 Passage,

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116 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS thought of in such terms, is taken as coming to be and passing away. As Merleau-Ponty quotes Paul Claudel, “Time is the means offered to all that is destined to be, to come into existence in order that it may no longer be.”5 The future “that is destined to be” comes to be and then passes away. When, however, does this happen? At the present moment? But this would mean that its coming to be is simultaneous with its passing away. As Aristotle expresses this difficulty, the now cannot have “ceased to be in itself,” for then it existed. But equally, it cannot have “ceased to be in some other now”—that is, in a past or future now—for in this second now it did not exist and, hence, could not have ceased to exist.6 The above arguments seem to indicate that we cannot think of time either in terms of space or in terms of itself. Yet before we confront them, we, like Augustine, are certain of our sense of time, which is that of passage. The sense of passage, however, demands that we think of time both as extended—that is, as including the past and the future—and as now, the latter being conceived as the point of expiration. The question is: how are we to think these together? The impasse these arguments leave us with indicates that something is missing—something presupposed by both, which would allow us to think of expiration and temporal extension together. This chapter will use Merleau-Ponty’s insights to argue that what is missing is the body. Its self-presence is behind these two aspects of time.

Augustine’s and Husserl’s Answer to our Question For Augustine, the problem of temporal extension and expiration shows itself in the fact that time, understood as an extended magnitude, includes the past and the future. Yet neither the past nor the future can be said to exist. In Aristotle’s words, the past “no long is,” while the future “is not yet.”7 Thus, the only part of time that does seem to exist is the present. The present’s existence, however, is one of continual expiration. It cannot remain now and be a part of time. As Augustine put this, “if [the present] were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity.” Its being, thus, includes its perishing—that is, its

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 117 becoming part of the non-being of the past. This makes Augustine ask: “how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is not to be?”8 His solution is to collapse time into a present that extends beyond the perishing moment. In his words, “there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things.”9 While perception gives us the second, the first and the third are given by our memories and expectations. Time, taken as an extended magnitude, exists “in the mind” as containing these and “nowhere else.” Thus, we measure time by comparing our memories. When I say that one spoken syllable is twice as long as another, “it cannot be the syllables themselves that I measure, since they no longer exist.” I measure “something which remains fixed in my memory.”10 As for expiration, I avoid the alternative of having the now cease in itself or cease in some other time when it did not exist. Expiration is framed in terms of the extended presence that is available to us through expectation, perception, and memory. In Augustine’s words, it is experienced by the mind as the “future, which it expects, passes through the present, to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers.”11 Expiration, in other words, does not involve arising and perishing, but rather the conversion of one form of existence—that of the presence of present things in perception—into another—that of the presence of past things in memory. One of Husserl’s time diagrams gives a good representation of Augustine’s insight.12 The vertical lines represent the extended time that we grasp through our short-term memories and anticipations.

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The dotted vertical lines above the horizontal line represent the anticipated future, the distance from the horizontal line indicating the distance of this future from the present. Similarly, the solid vertical lines below the horizontal line indicate the retained past, the distance from the horizontal line representing the distance of this past from the present. As time moves forward (from E1 to E), the first vertical line is to be imagined as moving to the right to occupy the place of the second vertical line. In this movement, its points of intersection with the diagonals sink down. This sinking down represents the approach of the anticipated future to the present and (in the case of E23 and E24) the departure from the present—i.e., the increasing pastness—of the retained past. As for the present moment itself, it is represented by the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal line. As time moves forward, it is always different. As defined by a given retained past and anticipated (or “protended”) future, its otherness can be understood as its expiration. Augustine’s and Husserl’s solution to the difficulty we began with is, thus, clear. They take time as extended—that is, as including the past and the future—by appealing to what we retain and what we anticipate. They also take it as a point of expiration by seeing the now of our apprehension as the shifting boundary between the past and future. Since the past and future, as represented by the vertical line are all co-present, in some sense we return to the simultaneity of space and to the metaphor of time being like a river. Since, however, the now of our apprehension is constantly shifting,

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 119 we also take account of the insight that time—i.e., the now—“is nothing but a general flight out of itself.”

The Dual Perspective This solution seems to answer the question we began with. It offers a way to think the expiration and the extension of time together. There are, however, hidden premises in it. The solution, for example, involves two different perspectives, with two different views of the “place” of time. Thus, if our perspective is that of the now of apprehension, we have to say that time is in this now. It is from this now that we regard what we perceive, retain, and anticipate. If, however, we regard this now in terms of the moments apprehended, we have to say that, as positioned between the past and future, this now is in time. It is in it as the limit of both. Here, beingin, viewed from the perspective of the simultaneous temporal field represented by the vertical of Husserl’s diagram, has a spatial sense. By contrast, the being-in that starts with the living now of our apprehension has a temporal cast. Rather than being fixed, this now, as a point of expiration, is constantly other. This duality parallels the relation of the self to the world. It returns us to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion, “I am in the world and the world is in me.” Each of us “holds on to both ends of the chain.”13 Thus, we believe that the world is in ourselves since we apprehend the world. We are, in our ongoing now, the point of its apprehension; we exist as the living “place” of its presence. But we also claim that we are in the world. Each of us is but one of the entities composing it. Like the duality of the now with regard to time, the two senses of being-in are not the same. As correlated to the living now of our apprehension, the being-in of the world in us has a temporal sense. By contrast, when we regard the now of our apprehension in terms of the simultaneous presence of what is apprehended, our being-in the world has a spatial sense A good way to see this is in terms of Kant’s account of the syntheses (or acts of connection) through which we apprehend the world. Kant remarks, “if I were to lose from my thought the preceding presentations [Vorstellungen] ... and not reproduce them

120 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS when I advance to those which follow, a complete presentation [Vorstellung] would never arise.”14 His point is that I have to retain what I have perceived and continually connect it to what I am presently perceiving in order to grasp enduring objects. Without this, I would only have a flickering, disconnected consciousness. Here, the sense of being-in has a temporal cast. The world is in us by virtue of the temporal syntheses by which we connect our memories and anticipations to our present perceptions. We are the “place” of the world’s presence through the syntheses that, in our ongoing now, we constantly engage in.15 By contrast, the assertion that we are in the world is understood spatially. Regarding the world, we perceive that we are but one of its perceivable, spatially extended objects. In fact, as Kant noted, when we externally perceive the world, we grasp, at any given moment, only spatial relations: We sensuously see neither the past nor the future but only what is simultaneously present. For Kant, this leads to the conclusion that “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing.”16 To perceive time, we require our memories and anticipations. Thus, external perception, in abstracting from these, exhibits our being in the world as spatial. This exhibition corresponds to the sense of time as a river, i.e., to the reduction of time to the simultaneity of space.

Presence and Embodiment Augustine’s and Husserl’s solution assumes as a premise the forward advance of time—the movement in Husserl’s time diagram from E1 to E. This movement is one with the conversion of the expected future to the present and then to the retained past. We experience it as the now’s otherness or expiration. Kant also assumes this advance in speaking of new presentations and the necessity to preserve those that have passed. For all three, then, a now that remains between a fixed past and future is static. It is not a living, but rather a frozen now. Constant expiration is, thus, necessary for the sense of temporal passage. But, how are we to understand this expiration, this constant otherness of the now, that is correlated to the advance of time? What is its relation to the two senses of being-in

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 121 that characterize the now’s connection to extended time? To answer these questions, we have to return to Augustine’s description of the now as the “present of present things.” The now, so regarded, is relative to what we apprehend. It is our registering its presence. In fact, there are not, here, two presences, that of the now and that of the object, which we could somehow contrast and compare. Qua presence, nothing distinguishes the two. Given this, we have to say that the presence of the now is the presence of what we register. Regarded phenomenologically, that is, in terms of our apprehension, this single presence has to satisfy three conditions. The first is that it must be constant. This corresponds to the fact that it is always now for us. We perceive and act only in the now. As we cited Husserl, I “am the actor of the ‘nunc stans.’ I act now and only now, and I ‘continuously’ act” in the present.17 Nowness, in other words, frames our engagement with the world. Even when we remember or anticipate, we do so in our ongoing nowness. The second condition is the uniqueness of our now. The now in which we apprehend the world is immediately ours. We directly experience its presence. While another person may also experience such presence, I do not experience her experience. Her point of apprehension is not my own. The now in which I act is thus uniquely singular. Rather than being one among many, it is experienced in only one example. The same point holds, when we compare it to the multitude of retained and anticipated nows. The moments that I retain have an increasing pastness; those that I anticipate are taken as advancing from the future. But the now in which I act does not change. As stationary, it exhibits itself in only one example. The third condition stands in apparent contradiction to the first. It is the fact that the now is not just stationary, but also streaming. In Husserl’s words, “The streaming living present is ‘continuous’ being as streaming.”18 To fix this present is to lose it. Its constant nowness is constantly other. It exhibits a self-alterity that somehow permits it to be other and yet remain present. Its constant presence exhibits an inherent lability. What is the presence we register that corresponds to these conditions? The first condition requires that it be constant. What we apprehend must never depart from us. The objects we regard,

122 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS however, come and go. What does not depart is the body with the sense organs that allow us to apprehend objects. This apprehension is necessarily a self-apprehension. This follows not just because, as embodied, we are part of the world. The world’s presence is necessarily our body’s presence since the presence of its objects presupposes our embodiment. Thus, the constancy of the now is the constancy of our embodiment. When we turn to the unique singularity of the now through which we apprehend the world, we find that this can be traced to the uniqueness of our bodily presence. Such uniqueness, we noted, comes from the fact that we experience our embodiment in only one example. As such, it escapes all conceptualization. We can only directly sense it.19 The bodily presence that we sense is the presence of our now. The unique singularity of the now is also that of our bodily presence. What about the fact that this now’s constant presence is constantly other? Can we trace its lability to our body’s presence? Since the body is that through which things become present, the presence of the body is, by definition, a self-presence. Such self-presence signifies that the body is both sentient and sensed. It is able to sense itself as a sensed object. We see this in the phenomenon of touch. A touching hand is sentient. This means that, in its touch sensations, it functions as the place of the appearance of the touched. The same, hand, however, can also be touched. As such, it becomes an object— i.e., part of the appearing world. This is because the embodiment that allows it to be touched thrusts it into the world: it makes the internalized place of touch sensations part of the tangible world. Lability enters into our bodily presence because when we apprehend our body as a sensible object, we lose it as a sentient subject—and vice versa. There is, in other words, never a merging of the two. We can never directly apprehend both together so that the one could be identified with the other. Thus, each time we touch a touching hand, we turn it into an object. Doing so, we lose it as touching—that is as sentient. Our two hands, as we cited MerleauPonty, “can alternate in the function of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched,’” but neither hand can simultaneously assume both aspects.20 Every time, we attempt this, a gap between them opens. This gap is the disruption of the now that registers the body’s

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 123 presence. The self-alterity of the body as sentient and sensed is also that of the now that is its presence.

The Alterity of Being in the World This self-alterity affects our relation to the world. The body as sentient is the place where the world comes to presence. It “envelops” the world since its embodied senses provide the venue for its appearing. The same embodiment, however, makes it part of the world. As a result, we have to affirm with Merleau-Ponty, “the world and I are within one another.”21 This being-in, however, is never a merging. The focus on one aspect of being-in makes us lose the other. Thus, to the point that we focus on ourselves as a place of appearing, we lose what appears as part of the external world. When we concentrate on the latter, we lose our sense of ourselves as a sentient place of appearing. For Merleau-Ponty, the world’s being-in us is expressed in terms of the senses that line the world by covering it over with colors through the eyes, odors through the nose, and so on. For enduring objects to be in us, we must, in our sentient embodiment, also be capable of connecting the experiences our senses afford us. Given this, the lability of being-in can also be expressed in terms of Kant’s claim that “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.”22 For Kant, as was noted, external perception provides us only with spatial relations. We cannot, in any sensuous sense, see the past or the future. Thus, the world we see is always now. To move beyond this instant and regard the past and the future, we must, turn inward and through “inner perception” regard the memories and anticipations that with our perceptions form the material for our temporal syntheses. When we regard this material, however, we lose our sense of measurable space. The chair I regard may be so many feet high, but I cannot put a measuring stick to my present perception to determine its size. How large it appears depends on my approach to it.23 Now, internal perception, in focusing on the temporal aspects of reality, attends to the being of the world in us. External perception, in revealing space, focuses on our being in the world. Since the two

124 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS never merge, our grasp of reality in its spatial-temporality involves a constant alteration of internal and external perception. The selfalterity that characterizes the now, thus, also characterizes our perceptual life. The necessity here may be expressed in terms of the fact that to perceive something is not to be it. Given this, a split must open up between the two: the sentient and the sensible can never be merged.24 The sense of being-in appropriate to the one cannot be identified with the sense that fits the other. This lack of identification exhibits itself in the distinction between inner and outer perception. It is also present in the two senses of being-in that show themselves in time—that of time being in the now and that of the now being in time. All of these point back to the bodily self-presence that manifests itself in nowness. Its lability is behind the subject-object split demanded by perception.

Being-In and Expiration The conclusions that follow from the above are best seen in terms of the steps of the argument. It began with the insight that our sense of time’s passage requires that we think of time both as extended— that is, as including the past and the future—and as now, the latter being conceived as the point of expiration. The question was: how are to think them together? Augustine’s and Husserl’s solution was to conceive expiration in relation to extended time. Understanding the latter in terms of our expectations and memories, they took the now as the shifting boundary between the two. In making the past and future co-present with the now, they solved the problem of the now’s expiration: Expiration was not seen as a perishing, but rather the conversion of one form of presence into another. Their solution, however, implied a dual perspective. We can adopt the perspective of the changing now from which we regard time. Taking it as the place of the apprehension of its moments, we can say that time is in the now. Yet, we can also regard this now in terms of the moments that situate it. We then say that the now is in time. How can these two senses of being-in be combined? The perspective that asserts that the now is in time understands time as a series of co-present

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 125 moments. Assuming the simultaneous presence of the retained and anticipated moments, its understanding is spatial. By contrast, the perspective that asserts that time is in the now has a temporal understanding. How can our grasp of time be both temporal and spatial? How can it embrace both the temporal alterity of the now and the now’s situation in the time that is taken as simultaneous—that is, understood spatially? The answer is that our grasp of time is in terms of our bodily self-presence. The duality of being-in that this presence exhibits is behind the duality of time that registers this presence. Thus, the presence of the body as sentient, i.e., the body as the place of the world’s apprehension, is registered as the now that is the place of time’s moments. Similarly, the presence of the body as in the world—i.e., as included in its simultaneous presence—is registered as the now that is placed in time: the now situated in and located by the simultaneous presence of its moments. It is this presence that is behind the simile that time is like a river.25 As for the lability of the now, this registers the lability of the body’s self-presence. It can be present to itself as sentient or as sensed, but its presence as the first is the collapse of the second, and vice versa. We experience this collapse as expiration, that is, as the motion of time. This last conclusion may be compared with the standard view, which is that our experience of the passage of time is dependent on our experience of change. As John Locke expresses this, “we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of ideas that take their turns in our understandings. When that succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases with it.”26 The “ideas” Locke refers to are our changing perceptions. His point is that without the experience of change, we have no sense of time. In other words, in a static universe, the now freezes. On one level, this is obviously the case. Yet, it is also true that we cannot experience change and, hence, the passage of time without the constant alteration of inner and outer perception. Thus, to register a body’s motion, I must attend to the different locations it occupies. Doing so, I regard it in terms of its spatial relations to myself. I assume, basing myself on outer perception, that we are both objects located in a spatially extended world. Yet, if this registering is to result in the

126 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS perception of motion, I must remember the positions the moving body has occupied. This requires my turning inward. It demands that I regard myself not as sensed, but as sensible. Here, I attend to my fading retentions of the different positions of the body.27 According to Husserl, I take the degree of such fading as indicating the relative pastness of the positions I retain.28 In the apprehension of motion, both are required. The result is a constant alternation of inner and external perception, of the regard to my presence as sentient and sensed. This constant alternation is experienced as the alterity of the now. I sense it as the expiration that is correlated to the advance of time. Behind it is the lability of my body’s self-presence.

Disclosure and Intertwining This lability is also one of disclosure. When we say that the world is in our embodied selfhood, we mean that through our senses and our temporal syntheses, we are the place of its appearing. Similarly, to assert that our embodied selfhood is in the world is to a take the world as the place of this selfhood’s disclosure. Thus, the eyes that I see with can be examined by an optometrist, the functioning of my brain can be revealed through a PET scan. Similarly, the activities I engage in to disclose the world—such as moving forward to get a better look—can be studied as part of the world. This reciprocal being-in, we have stressed, is such that one side cannot be reduced to the other. We cannot reduce the world’s being in us to our being in the world. To do so would be to reduce the world’s appearing to the physical operations of our senses and our brains. It would make our consciousness epiphenomenal if not non-existent.29 The same point holds in the reverse direction. When we turn inward to regard ourselves as a place of appearing, we lose the sense of space, which is the essential characteristic of external reality. The disclosure that focuses on one form of being-in, thus, conceals the other. In fact, we cannot think of one side or the other by itself. To limit ourselves to our being in the world, that is, to take ourselves as one appearing object among others, is to forget that appearing always presupposes appearing to someone. It implies that to whom the world appears— this being the embodied self, taken as the place of its appearance.

TEMPORALITY AND EMBODIED SELF-PRESENCE 127 To reverse this, we cannot think of such a place without thinking of the world it is in. The self’s very embodiment requires this. The same points hold with regard to space and time, understood as the relations we grasp through external and internal perception. We can neither reduce one to the other nor think of them in terms of themselves. Just as the seer requires the seen, so the temporal relations disclosed by inner perception require the spatial relations disclosed by outer perception. To attempt to think of time by itself—i.e., in terms of expiration—is to fall into paradoxes of the now. It is to face again the question of when it expires. Augustine and Husserl avoid this by assuming the simultaneous, subjective presence of time’s moments. Such simultaneity is a feature of space. We must, in fact, assume space if we are to conceive of time’s moments as co-present. Failing to do so, we face the conundrum that Aristotle raises when he notes that the now, as the division between the past and the present, cannot be extended. But, as non-extended, it cannot be a part of time since “a part is a measure of the whole, whereas the present is not such a measure.” Given this, we cannot say that time is “composed of nows.”30 If it were, then all its nonextended parts would collapse together. In fact, to separate them, we have to go outside of time. We must think of time in terms of the “parts outside of parts” that define space. Concretely we do this in the alteration of inner and outer perceptions that allows us to grasp motion. What separates the moments are the spatially distinct positions of the moving body that we register as we regard its motion. A similar dependence shows itself when we try to regard space in terms of itself. Its apprehension also requires the alternation of inner and outer perception through which we grasp motion. This allows us to speak of space in the context of motion, i.e., to speak of its distances in terms of the time it takes to traverse them. Thus, we understand astronomical distances in terms of the time it takes light to cross them. Similarly, we say that a distant town is so many hours away by car; it takes us so many minutes to walk to place, etc. This dependence of lived space on time is equally apparent in the fact that we use angular velocity to grasp relative distances. Looking out of a car window, we take the objects that

128 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS rapidly pass us by as closer than the objects in the landscape that hardly seem to move. Absent such temporal measures, we do not have the concrete space we inhabit, but only geometry. We have the mathematical representation of space, but not the space that we live in. The relation of space and time is, thus, the same as that of our selfhood to the world. It is, as we earlier argued, that of an intertwining. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, it involves a “reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.”31 Each depends on the other and discloses the other. But this disclosure cannot be a reduction. It is, rather, both an intertwining and lability. It is a dual beingin that can only be grasped from one side or the other. At its root is our bodily self-presence as both sentient and sensed. The two are intertwined, but never merged. There is, in such self-presence a constant opening up of the gap between them, a continuous expiration of one view in favor of the other. The relations of self and world, time and space are here set by our body’s unique character of being both a subject and an object. It is this character that structures our perceptual life. This conclusion is faithful to the selfhood that each of us lives, the selfhood that is properly our own. Yet it does not go far enough. Our selfhood is not just that of being an individual perceiver or even that of engaging in collective disclosure. It is, as Aristotle reminds us, social and political. How does the uniqueness and lability of our individual selfhood affect our social relations? Such relations are not just those of perceivers, but also of actors. Crucially, they concern our ability to effect social change. What is the role played in this by the uniqueness of our embodiment? To answer these questions, we must begin by analyzing social change in general.

Chapter IX Social Change and Embodiment From our earliest existence as cave dwellers to our present, technologically conditioned life in cities, social change has been a more or less constant feature. Civilizations rise and fall; various technological revolutions alter our patterns of living; changes in production affect the relations between classes. In the West, for example, economies based on slavery in the Roman Empire gave way to feudal and then to capitalist social organizations. With the latter came the increasing division of labor and the bureaucratization of social institutions that Weber pointed to. There are also, of course, the factors of contacts between civilizations, colonization, natural disasters and environmental changes. All these and more have been proposed as engines of social change. There is, however, one constant feature in all the relations that society has assumed. This is the embodiment that individualizes us. The context of such individualization is, of course, society. Not only are we born into families with extended kinship relations, we are by nature social animals. As Aristotle expressed this, a single individual “may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts” (Politics, 1253 a 5).1 Apart from the board and the other pieces, the piece has no sense. This is because humans have to cooperate. Our embodiment brings with it needs for food, shelter, clothing and so on. Yet we are, individually, incapable of fulfilling all these needs. We must work together; and to do this, we have to communicate. The language we use throws a semantic net over our world. We encounter our environment through the prism of the meanings conveyed by language. Such meanings have the status of a one-in-many: they express the features that are common to different objects. Yet the very embodiment, whose needs drive this process, cannot be common. To review our conclusions in this regard is to recall that its uniqueness appears in the fact that no one can eat for you, sleep for you, breathe for you, or perform for you any of your bodily 129

130 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS functions. In its non-substitutability, our body bears witness to Aristotle’s remark that the particular can be sensed but not defined.2 Definition, proceeding through genus and differentiating species, works with what is common. But my body, as mine, is the flesh that individualizes me, making me this particular person and not anybody else. As such, it escapes the semantic net of language. There is, here, a certain contradiction in our being. We are social, communicative beings and, as such, exist within a semantic context. As embodied, however, we escape this context. This contradiction, I am going to argue, is a feature driving social change. Social change, in the sense of newness, presupposes embodiment’s disturbance of our sematic context.

Sense and Pragmatic Disclosure The basis of our semantic context is formed, according to Heidegger, by the link between language and the projects by which we attempt to meet our needs. In our practical activities, we understand things in terms of such projects. Here, their sense is utilitarian: things are grasped in terms of their “what is it for” and “inorder-to.”3 Thus, as Heidegger writes, “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’”4 The focus is on the uses to which we can put the forest, mountain, river, and wind. For example, it is because we want to sail across a lake that the wind exhibits itself as wind in the sails. As we gain more skill in making our way in the world, the world itself becomes more practically meaningful. We “understand” it in the sense of knowing the purposes of its elements. According to Heidegger, “interpretation,” defined as the “considering ... of something as something” articulates this understanding. It makes explicit the purposes of the objects I encounter. In his words, interpretation “appresents the what-it-is-for of a thing and so brings out the reference of the ‘in-order-to,’” i.e., its use in a particular project.5 As a result, the world becomes articulated in the evidence it provides us. Language expresses this articulation. It conveys the senses of the objects we employ. In other words, the semantic context provided by language is rooted in pragmatic

SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMBODIMENT 131 disclosure. The commonality of meanings is based on the commonality of interpretations of the what-is-it-for or purposes of things. Our being-in-the-world is, thus, both practical and semantic. It involves both knowing how to make our way in the world by understanding how to employ things and being able to share this linguistically. Our social identities arise from this pragmatic and semantic context. We are known, individually, as the authors of our actions and our words. When asked who we are, we often answer with the name of our profession. We respond, I am a lawyer, a teacher, and so on. Each of these professions points to a world with its own rules for meaningful behavior, the behavior that discloses this world. The same holds for our explicitly collective identities and corresponding actions. Take, for example, the identity of the members of a native hunting party. The collective activities of its members, which include their efforts to track their quarry, to dispatch it and carry it home, disclose the world of the hunt, the very world in which they have not just their individual, but also their collective identity. Similarly, the members of a string quartet disclose the world of the music that they inhabit as they play together. This collective disclosure is correlated to their collective identity as members of the quartet.

Social Change and the Semantic Context Heidegger often speaks about the possibilities that we realize from our actions as if these possibilities came from ourselves. He writes, for example, “As existent, Dasein is free for specific possibilities of its own self. It is its own most peculiar able-to-be.”6 Exercising this freedom, Dasein projects as practical goals the possibilities that it finds in itself. It is clear, however, that this freedom is limited. Insofar as Dasein exists as being-in-the-world, it cannot act apart from the world and its resources. Patočka draws out the implications of this when he writes, “Against Heidegger, there is no primary projection of possibilities. The world is not the project of [our] liberty, but simply that which makes possible finite freedom.”7 The focus, here, is on our dependence on the world. Thus, Patočka asserts, “I do not create these possibilities, but the possibilities create me. They

132 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS come to me from outside, from the world that is a framework where the things show themselves as means and I show myself as the one who realizes the ends served by such means.”8 His point is that our freedom to disclose the world is tied to the world’s ability to offer us the means for our projects. In his words, “I would not have the possibilities [for disclosing things] if the means for such possibilities, for my goals, did not exist, which means that I could not appear to myself, ‘open myself,’ understand myself [without such means], just as things could not show themselves, if my action [of disclosing them] did not exist.” 9 Disclosure here is limited by the world. Such limitation is what makes it a genuine disclosure of the world in which Dasein acts. Since the possibilities that it actualizes come from the world, their actualization exhibits this world. Given that our semantic context is, at its basis, pragmatic, a change in the world also changes this context. Natural disasters are an extreme example of such change. Thus, a volcanic explosion on the island of Santorini brought about the collapse of Minoan civilization and, with this, extensive transformations of early antiquity in the Mediterranean. There are also the discoveries by travelers and the expeditions carried out by different civilizations with the consequent importation of new products and the stimulation of trade. On the negative side, cultural change can be initiated by invasions where others take over the natives’ resources. Thus, the fencing of land and its use for agricultural purposes largely destroyed the native cultures (and social identities) of the North American aboriginals, which were based on hunting. We can add to this list the changes in the possibilities of the world afforded by technological progress. All these and more affected the context of pragmatic disclosure. They changed the “what is it for” and “in order to” of peoples’ engagement with the world. As such, they shifted their semantic context, thus resulting in social change.

Reason and Freedom There is another factor that is essential to understanding social change. Humans possess reason. The Greek term, logos, signifies not just “reason” or “plan,” but also “speech.” As the latter, it

SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMBODIMENT 133 indicates our ability to communicate through language. All of these significations are present in the question of reason—the question that asks for the grounds or reasons for what we observe. The question asks, “Why are things the way we perceive them to be rather than some other way?” Applied to nature, it asks after causes. It problematizes the natural world by inquiring into why it runs the way it does. Why, for example, does water boil (and not freeze) when we apply heat to it? Why do stars move in a circle about the earth? What is the cause of the seasons? The search, here, is for the causes of what appears. Such causes can be taken as divine. One can, for example, assert that God brings the rain. They can also be provided by science. We can point to the tilting of the earth’s axis to explain the seasons, the rotation of the earth to account for the movement of the stars, and so on. When the question of reason is applied to ourselves, the effect is different. Here, it problematizes, not the world, but rather our being-in-the-world. Posing it, we ask why we individually and collectively act the way we do. Why, for example, do we organize our society in this particular way—with these particular customs, laws, and institutions—and not in some other fashion. In this questioning of our social and political practices, the focus is on our choices in fashioning our human world. This world is not seen as the result of natural, unchanging causes. Rather, the premise of such questioning, as Patočka writes, is “that reality is not rigid.” The questioning demands that we act “recognizing [the] plasticity of reality.”10 Thus, what is revealed is our freedom. Our social and cultural world, rather than being ruled by fixed causes, appears as a result of our choices. We must, therefore, take responsibility for this appearing. This, Patočka believed, is what Socrates disclosed in his constant questioning of those whom he encountered in Athens’ Agora. The effect of such questioning was to shake the certainties of his interlocutors. Directed to the political order, his questioning opened up his community to its freedom, i.e., to the fact that the decisions facing it are ultimately its own. In the back and forth of political debate that this type of questioning creates, it opens up the public space for political action and, hence, for the social change based on this.

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The Social Origin of Freedom What, precisely, is the freedom of choice that such questioning presupposes? Where do the choices come from that form its content? On one level, they come from the world, i.e., from the possibilities that it offers us. These set the limits for our finite freedom since we can only work with the resources offered by our surroundings. Within these limits, the origin is those projects—those uses of the world—that we can realize. As is obvious, we were not born with a knowledge of these projects. We learned our projects from others. The same holds for the language describing their use of objects. Thus, our parents, in teaching us how to eat at the table, did not begin by first naming the objects we used—”spoon,” “fork,” “plate,” “knife,” and so on. They guided our initial practice with a constant commentary. Later, as we learned different uses of these implements, their senses expanded accordingly. We learned, for example, that besides its use at the table, a spoon can also mean something to ladle sugar with, to measure with, to stir with, and, in my case, something with which to dig in the garden. Our sense of the word expanded with the use of the object that it named. This process continues through life as we learn from others how to make our way in the world. Generally speaking, whatever we see others do tends to be regarded (whether favorably or unfavorably) as a human capacity. As such, we regard it as one of our human possibilities. Thus, we learned that a knife can be used to cut or kill. Although we have never used it against another person, we recognize that we could employ it in this way. Of course, given our finitude, we cannot, even if we wanted to, realize all possibilities we have learned from others. This signifies that we are always capable of more than we show. We thus appear free in the sense that we exceed what can be known and predicted from our past—i.e., from those possibilities we have already actualized.11 With this, we have the social origin of our freedom. In terms of its content, which is formed by the possibilities we are aware of, the origin is the plurality of society. It is the variable multiplicity of the people we directly encounter or learn about. They provide us with more possibilities than we can ever realize and, hence, with

SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMBODIMENT 135 the necessity of having to choose between them. Choice, here, is grounded in both our openness to others and our finitude. Our finitude forces us to choose from among the possibilities that we learn from others.

Embodiment and Newness This account explains freedom in terms of the availability of the choices open to us. It has, however, a serious deficit when we seek to explain social change. If the choices confronting us come from others, then such choices have already been realized. But if this is so, then how does newness—in the sense of new options—come into the world? The answer lies in the uniqueness that characterizes our embodied finitude. We are by nature social animals, which means that we cannot exist independently. Yet it is also true that each of us is a “world” in the sense that each, individually, brings the world to appearance. Thus, we cannot see out of one another’s eyes. The world in its sensuous presence is always individual. Given that the body that we employ in our pragmatic activities and their corresponding disclosures is our own, such disclosures also have an individual cast. Our activities may be similar, but they can never be completely identical. The same holds for our collective activities. No matter, for example, how closely the actions of the members of a string quartet are coordinated, the collectivity of their performance does not obviate the uniqueness of the roles of its members. Part of the pleasure in hearing a good quartet is listening to the interplay between the individual and the collective. The relation between the two, however, need not always be harmonious. Think, for example, of the disruptive force of Eros. Society attempts to regulate it through marriage. It takes the joining of couples as a social institution. It connects it with the practice of rearing children, taking care of aged parents, and other social obligations. Yet, from Paris’s abduction of Helen, to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet—the erotic relation constantly shows itself as capable of breaking through the conventions that attempt to stabilize our collective existence in society. At the root of this disruption is the embodied

136 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS nature of erotic attachment. Just as no one can eat for you or sleep for you, so no one can fall in love for you. The individuality of the act is one with the individuality of our flesh. Such individuality disrupts or breaks through our collective identity and practices. Hannah Arendt writes that “the very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth.” In her view, “men are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners.”12 Arendt’s focus is on the newness brought about by birth. This is a consequence of the fact that “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”13 Behind this fact is the bodily uniqueness of being born—something that, by definition, no one can do for another. Natality initiates newness because it both stems from and issues in bodily individuality. This individuality expresses itself in the tension of our being-in-the-world. On the one hand, we are incapable of existing alone. Our human existence as social animals expresses itself in language—in the common words that we employ to express our use of things. This use is, by and large, social. On the other hand, we are embodied, and such embodiment, in its particularity, can be felt, but not defined. It falls, as it were, through the semantic net that our language casts over the world. We feel this contradiction as we struggle to express ourselves. This struggle witnesses our attempt to express the unique, to make speakable the unspoken basis of our lives. This disturbance of the speakable results in the new. It recasts the semantic net. It unsettles the pragmatic activites and disclosures that are at the basis of our thought. Aristotle asserts that outside of society, an individual is either a god or a beast.14 In fact, inside of it, we contain the tension of the two. Collectively, we are capable of godlike powers. The language that links us together vastly extends our abilities to reason and infer. It allows us to hold concepts stable and compare their relations. Through it, we can communicate and preserve our insights. Reason, however, is not newness. It has no respect for embodied individuals. As Levinas writes with regard to this: “when the I is identified with reason … it loses its very ipseity … Reason makes human society possible; but a society whose members would be only reasons

SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMBODIMENT 137 would vanish as a society … Reason has no plural; how could numerous reasons be distinguished?”15 For society to exist, we require the embodiment that we share with the other animals or “beasts.” Within society, then, we combine both aspects. We exist together in the disturbance of what cannot be shared. This disturbance is a persistent, ongoing cause of newness and, hence, of the social change embodying the new. Natality is the repeated entrance of such newness into the world.

_________________ In speaking of pragmatic disclosure, we naturally assumed our sharing a common world with Others. We also took for granted the embodiment that our actions presupposed. What is the basis for such assumptions? For Husserl, it is provided by our conscious experiences. Such experiences allow me to posit my embodied being and, pairing this with the bodily being and behavior of appearing Others, recognize them as subjects like myself. I do this when I regard them as acting as I do in similar situations and, in an “analogizing appresentation,” assume that they do so by virtue of possessing similar thoughts and intentions. For Husserl, the way to obtain such evidence is through the practice of the epoché—a process of suspending one’s judgements (including the judgement that there are Others) so as to regard with unprejudiced eyes the evidence we have for them. This focus on evidence is the chief decision point shaping phenomenology. For Husserl, this evidence is provided by turning inward and reflectively regarding the experiences that give consciousness its content. The more basic the evidence, the more basic the level of the constitution (the active and passive synthesis) that employs it. We have already questioned this reasoning in speaking of the body’s role in the constitutive process—a role that made it as much a constituting as a constituted factor of our selfhood. It is now time to examine this role with regard to our recognizing Others. By this, we do not mean the body’s role in the complicated analysis that Husserl develops in the Cartesian Meditations, but rather something

138 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS more fundamental: namely, the part the body plays in the performance of the epoché. Does the epoché uncover the evidence behind the positing of our embodied being, including our being together with similarly embodied Others? Or does it unconsciously assume the relations that bind us together? Part III pursues this question and its implications. At issue will be the basis of our having a common world. Do we possess this through the evidence we have for Others or through a bodily attitude or orientation that shapes such evidence?

Part III Trust and Mistrust

Chapter X Belief and Trust, an Analysis of Husserl’s Epoché We have already encountered a version of the epoché in the chapter on the reduction to the lifeworld. There, the epoché consisted in the suspension of the scientific attitude. In Husserl’s words, this suspension included “all the objective theoretical interests, all the aims and activities belonging to us as objective scientists.”1 Behind this, however, lies an even more radical epoché—one that suspends the “natural attitude” we have regarding the world. This, according to Husserl, is the stance where, at “[e]very moment in waking consciousness … I find myself in relation to the one and the same world … It is continuously ‘on hand’ for me, and I am myself a member of it.”2 Here, every assumption of the existence of some particular entity has, as a backdrop, the existence of the world itself. This is because, “I find [its] ‘actuality’ … to be there in advance … As an actuality, ‘the’ world is always there.” This existence includes my own. The world is “the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I myself belong.”3 For Husserl, then, the natural attitude is that of a believing in the existence of an all-inclusive world. This is what the epoché brackets. When I perform the epoché, my experience of the world continues. In Husserl’s words, the world “goes on appearing, as it appeared before; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world.”4

Belief and the Problem of Others How are we to understand the suspension of this belief? For Husserl, the point of the suspension is primarily epistemological. We bracket or put out of effect our belief in the world in order to regard the evidence for such belief. This evidence consists of the experiences that form our consciousness. As Roman Ingarten points out, 141

142 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS the necessity here is that of avoiding a petitio principii.5 This is the logical fallacy of assuming, as part of one’s argument, the conclusion that one wants to prove. We commit it whenever we assume the validity of a thesis as part of the evidence brought forward for this validity. We avoid it when we bracket this thesis, that is, make no use of it in our attempts to justify it. The thesis here is that of “the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I myself belong.” When we suspend this thesis, do we have anything left? According to the natural attitude, I can no more doubt the existence of the world than I can my own existence. This follows because, according to this attitude, my existence is part of the world. Admitting this, Husserl writes, “for good reason we limit the universality of this ἐποχή [epoché]. For were it as comprehensive as it in general can be, then there would not remain any region for unmodified judgments, not to speak of a science.” The epoché, then, suspends “this entire natural world that is constantly ‘there for us.’”6 It does, not, however, suspend our belief in the existence of the experiences that form the basis for our taking the world as existent. The epoché thus assumes “that consciousness in itself has a being of its own that is not affected in its own absolute essence by the phenomenological suspension.” It “remains as a ‘phenomenological residuum’”—one “that can indeed become the field of a new science—phenomenology.”7 This new science, as the Introduction noted, is epistemological. It is “the systematic explanation of the accomplishment of knowing, an explanation where this becomes thoroughly understandable as an intentional accomplishment” of consciousness.8 Its chief focus is on objective knowledge. How do we come to make objective claims? What is the evidence for them? As Kant recognized, such claims involve Others. An assertion is objective when both I and Others agree upon it.9 To reverse this, if we claim that something is objectively the case, we also claim that everyone regarding it will come to the same conclusion.10 If, with Husserl, we accept this equivalence, we can see how, in Fink’s words, we have formulated “the objectivity of objects by the character—if one will—of intersubjectivity.” The formulation is such “that one cannot establish between objectivity and intersubjectivity a

BELIEF AND TRUST 143 relationship such that one or the other is prior; rather, objectivity and intersubjectivity are indeed co-original.”11 For Husserl, such co-originality signifies that the objective world is, by definition, an intersubjective world. He writes: “Considered as objective, the sense of the being of the world and, in particular, the sense of nature includes ... thereness-for-everyone, thereness as always co-intended by us whenever we speak of objective actuality.” What we have, in fact, is an equivalence between the two “worlds,” since for Husserl, the intersubjective world is also an objective world. It is “a world for everyone, accessible to everyone in its objects.”12 Given this, the problem of securing the possibility of objective knowledge must embrace Others. Viewed through the framework of the epoché, it seems to involve not just the perceptual evidence I have, but also that afforded by Others. Can I, however, access this? My embodiment signifies that I can only see out of my own eyes. When I perform the epoché, I am limited to my own consciousness. Since objective knowledge presupposes Others, I cannot, without committing a petitio principii, assume their existence. I must, then bracket this. I have to suspend any and all positings that assume that Others are there for me. I am required, Husserl writes, to “disregard all constitutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity.”13 Within this “solipsistic limitation,” I thus have to prove not just the presence of Others, but also that they grasp the world as I do. The point follows from the fact that the common world, with its shared senses, presupposes a common way of constituting it. Such a world, as Husserl writes, is “essentially related ... to constituting intersubjectivity whose individual subjects are equipped with mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems.” It presupposes “a harmony of the monads”—i.e., of individual, concrete subjects. More precisely expressed, it requires “a harmony in the genesis [of objective senses] that is occurring in the individuals.”14 The question is: how can one establish this? In Husserl’s words, “How do I get out of my island of consciousness? How can what appears in my consciousness as the experience of evidence win objective significance?”15 The evidence required seems to exceed the evidence available to me. In fact, having performed the

144 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS epoché, “am I not,” he asks, “become a solus ipse; and do I not remain such as long as I carry out a consistent self-explication under the name of phenomenology? Should not a phenomenology, which desired to solve the problems of objective being and to present itself as philosophy, be branded, therefore, as a transcendental solipsism?” As he elsewhere put this difficulty, it concerns the objection by which we first let ourselves be guided, the objection against our phenomenology insofar as it claims to be transcendental philosophy and, thus, claims to solve the problems of the possibility of objective knowledge. It is that it is incapable of this, beginning as it does with the transcendental ego of the phenomenological reduction and being restricted to this ego. Without wishing to admit it, it falls into transcendental solipsism; and the whole step leading to other subjectivity and to genuine objectivity is only possible through an unconfessed metaphysics.16

By an “unconfessed metaphysics,” he means something that exceeds experience, something that cannot be supported by direct perceptual evidence.

Belief and Trust The point in bringing up this difficulty is not to go through the intricate analysis through which Husserl attempts to resolve it. It is to ask whether such analysis is at all necessary. This question arises when we recall what we normally do when we begin to doubt our perceptions. Generally, we ask Others if they see what we do. If they agree, we take what we see, not as an illusion, but as real, that is, as actually there. Given that this procedure occurs within the natural attitude, such a stance assumes the correlation of objectivity and intersubjectivity. What is real is what is objectively present— this being what can be confirmed by Others. Such confirmation is not a matter of our sharing perceptual experience by seeing out of each other’s eyes. It is based on our accepting the reports of Others regarding their experience. If we trust what they say, then we also trust our experience. This means that the belief in the world that forms the natural attitude is essentially trust. It is a trust in the world (Weltvertrauen) based on our trust in Others’ being honest about what they see.

BELIEF AND TRUST 145 This conclusion is what should have been expected given our analysis of pragmatic disclosure. This analysis shows that the senses of the world are not simply a matter of the “mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems” that result in perceptual presence. They are the outcome of practices, those that give the sense of “timber” to a forest of trees, of “water power” to a river, and so on. Here, the commonality of the world is the commonality of our pragmatic activities and their corresponding disclosures. We learn these activities from earliest childhood. They involve such things as learning to dress oneself, to tie one’s shoes, to ride a bicycle, to use a hammer, to read, to write, etc.—the list includes the whole assemblage of practices that constitutes a common culture. Together, they constitute the “semantic net” described in the last chapter. Within it, objectivity is a matter of common senses grounded by common practices. Such practices, however, presuppose trust: the trust that a child exhibits in learning from her parents, her sibling, cousins, friends, etc. Such trust is an attitude that begins with our helplessness and vulnerability as infants. It grows out of our experience of our needs being met by our caregivers. It continues as we learn our life-practices and language from them, opening ourselves up to what they have to impart to us. As such, it underlies our growing sense, through these practices, of a common intersubjective world. The conclusion, here, is clear: Our belief in this world, i.e., in its common, objective reality, is founded on Others. It is made possible by our trust in them. Equally clear is the distinction from Husserlian phenomenology. Trust is not a cognition. It is not, like evidence, an epistemological concept. It is, rather, an orientation, that of an openness that allows us to imitate and learn from Others. The activities it encourages do not just open us up to new sources of evidence—those that become available through specific practices. Trust also permits us to exceed our perceptual life as such. Through the belief it encourages in the reports of Others, it allows us to exit our “island of consciousness.” Needless to say, such conclusions transform Husserl’s conception of the natural attitude. The belief that characterizes this attitude is now taken as trust. It is a trust in the world based on our trust in Others. Such trust, moreover, is an ethical, rather than an

146 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS epistemological stance. It is the way that we overcome the epistemological impasse of not being able to see out of one another’s eyes. The insight here is similar to Levinas’s when he writes: “As the “overflowing of objectifying thought,” the ethical relation is the “forgotten experience by which [objectifying thought] lives.”17 The objectifying thought is that of the natural attitude. Its hidden premise is the ethical relation of trust. This signifies that the suspension of the natural attitude is not that of belief, understood epistemologically, but rather that of trust. With this, we come to yet another decision point regarding phenomenology. It comes with our acknowledging that questions of evidence are never pure, but rather always “contaminated” by those of trust. The point follows when we engage in a genetic analysis of the belief in the world that characterizes the natural attitude. Such analysis shows that the development of the natural attitude is actually the development of trust. This development presupposes our embodiment. It begins with our bodily vulnerability and dependence as infants and, with this our need to rely on our caregivers. It continues with our learning our pragmatic life skills from Others and building a common lifeworld from such bodily practices. The body, in such development, is not just a corporeal, but also an ethical object. It is the subject of care—the care of Others who, in fulfilling our needs and teaching us our life-skills, open us up to a common world. Given this, we cannot untangle the ethical from the epistemological when speaking of the natural attitude. The two are as inseparably intertwined as the conceptions of objectivity and Others. The suspension of the natural attitude is, then, not just an epistemological but also an ethical suspension. Genetically regarded, it is a suspension of the trust that links our embodied being to that of Others. For Husserl, the epoché’s necessity is epistemological. It is a suspension that makes us focus on the evidence for our judgements. Here, the suspension is a practical possibility that humanity has too often witnessed. To understand more clearly what our “trust in the world” entails, we must turn our attention to the suspension such trust. In analysing the extreme cases of such withdrawals, the

BELIEF AND TRUST 147 transformation of phenomenology that the new sense of the epoché entails will become apparent.

Chapter XI Trust and Violence Jean Améry’s memoir of his imprisonment by the Nazis describes the suspension of trust in terms of the torture he experienced. He writes, “The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin’s surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. At the first blow, however, this trust in the world breaks down.”1 The result of this breakdown is a sense of homelessness. In Amery’s words, “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world … Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained.” Instead, he experiences “a great amazement and a foreignness in the world that cannot be compensated by any sort of subsequent human communication.”2 What is the context of this “trust in the world” (Weltvertrauen)? How does violence destroy it? The previous chapter showed how trust is a fundamental form of our being-in-the-world. For Améry, violence, in undermining trust, makes the world foreign. In analysing his position, we will expand our descriptions of the role trust plays in the build-up of the intersubjective world—the world that is there for everyone. Violence has its force in attacking the very notion of the “for everyone.”

Intertwining and Selfhood Before we can discuss the intersubjective world, we must return to the dual status of the individuals composing it. As part of this world, they are present as objects. They form part of its appearing entities. Yet as subjects, they are also places where the world comes to presence. They are sentient entities to whom the world appears. For Husserl, the phenomenological basis for this dual characterization is the “double sensation” that we experience whenever we touch something. Touching, we feel the object, but we also feel the 149

150 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS touching finger. We don’t just have a sense of the object, but also that of ourselves as a sensing subject. Now, when one of ours hands touches the other, each becomes an object for the other. But this object is also experienced as sentient. As touched, it exhibits its warmth and tactile qualities. As touching, it has its localized sensations that spread across its surface. Each hand through the other thus becomes aware of itself as a sentient object. Each is grasped as an object that, qua sensing organ, is also a subject. In passing over to the “rank of the touched,” i.e., in becoming an object, the touched hand, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world.”3 We thereby achieve our identity as sentient beings in the world. This identity rests on the ability of our flesh to be taken as both subject and object. It is what gives us our unique self-presence. Such self-presence distinguishes us from the world since, when we touch other objects, we feel their qualities, but we do not feel their being touched. We have no direct evidence for their being subjects. The experience of self-touch, in separating us from the world as the only objects that are experienced as subjects, defines our integrity. It marks our skin as the boundary of our body. Thus, the surface of my skin shields me against the external world. But it also, as sentient, opens me up to it. This dual role can be put in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the intertwining: that double relation of subject and object where we both internalize the world and take ourselves as objects in this same world. We are convinced that we internalize the world since each time we close our eyes, its visual presence disappears. The same holds for its audial presence when we stop up our ears. Yet we are equally convinced that the objects we regard are out there. They are part of the world that includes ourselves as one of its perceived objects. The fulcrum of such intertwining is our skin: from the surface of our eyes to that of our tongue, our skin marks the boundary of ourselves as sensitive objects—i.e., as objects that are also subjects. It is what “lines” the world, providing, as Merleau-Ponty says, measures “for being, dimensions to which we can refer it.”4 It is also the boundary of ourselves within it.

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 151 Our perceptual faith, which can also be considered as trust, is that there is an inherent bond between the world I internalize through my senses and the world I find myself in. Here, trust in the world can be taken as a trust that the external world reflects the world I internalize. It is a trust not just that my experience faithfully “represents” the external world. It also sees the two as intertwined—each side serving as a disclosure of the other. As we shall see, the violation of the boundary of our skin—which, as Améry remarks, can be accomplished by rape5—unsettles this intertwining, which is definitive of our being-in-the-world. We no long feel “in” the world that we internalize. We become homeless in the world that seemed to include us.

Trust and Being-in-the-world The last chapter discussed the role that trust plays in the apprehension of the world. Its conclusion was that we believe that what we see is “real” because we trust Others, that is, trust their assertions when they confirm our own perceptions. Such trust, we noted, is not a cognition. Since no one can see out of another person’s eyes, no one can directly confirm another person’s report—i.e., access the perceptual evidence that lies at its basis. Since I cannot directly confirm that it agrees with what I see, I have to trust the Others’ reports if I am to take the world as “real” in the sense of being there for everyone. Without such trust, I would have only, what Kant calls, “subjective validity,” i.e., the “true for me.”6 In other words, I would simply be a place of subjective appearing. This, however, would eliminate the perceptual faith that believes, as MerleauPonty expresses it, that when I see an object, “my vision terminates in it, that it holds and stops my gaze with its insurmountable density.”7 If we take such “density” as a sign of the objectivity that exceeds the thing’s perceptual presence in us, this faith is a faith that Others see what I see. It is also a faith in the objective reality—the thereness for everyone—of the world I find myself in. Believing in their reports, I take my inner experience as an expression of objective reality. I grasp my being-in-the-world as an intertwining of the two.

152 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS How does this perceptual faith arise? What is the origin of our trust in Others? Genetically regarded, it appears first in the infant’s relation to his or her caregiver. It grows out of our dependence and vulnerability as infants and small children. Infants are totally dependent on Others. Their experience of their caregivers’ meeting their emotional and physical needs generates the expectation, which is felt as trust, that they will continue to meet them. Levinas and Patočka indicate the essential features of this initial state. For Levinas, it is anchored in our corporeal existence, understood as the ability “to be at home with oneself in something other than oneself, to be oneself while living from something other than oneself.” Such existence “affirms its independence in the happy dependence of need.”8 At its root, for Patočka, is “our own acceptance by that into which we are placed.” It is only as accepted by our caregivers that we can “develop our own possibilities, those which are inherently given.” We need them to teach us how to talk, walk, dress and feed ourselves. Through them we actualize our human potential. They mediate our relation to the world, supplying our needs. In Patočka’s words: “The accepted being is initially a mediated being; the world, for it, is its parents, those who take care of it.”9 As in Levinas’ description, the dominant feature of this state is that of enjoyment.10 It evinces, Patočka writes, “the blissful bonding which assimilates the outside without which we could not live.”11 This bonding is “a movement of anchoring or being rooted … an impulsion towards attachment.”12 It is characterized by a trust not just in Others but in the world they open us up to.

Trust and World-Constitution To see the genesis in the trust in the Other’s assertions, we have to return to how we first learned our language. Such learning is never a matter of memorizing the meanings of words or learning the grammar that knits them together. It occurs in the context of Others’ teaching us our initial life projects. Generally they accomplished this while talking to us about them. Thus, they used the word spoon in teaching us how to eat. Its meaning was given by its function, and its function was set by the particular projects that our

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 153 caregivers and companions introduced us to. Given this, the more multiple the projects an object is involved in, the more multiple are its meanings. Water, for example, can means something to drink, or to wash with, or to extinguish a fire, depending on my project. Similarly, paper can signify something to write and draw upon; it can be taken as material to start a fire or to make a paper airplane. As such examples indicate, the basic senses that form our language come from the projects that disclose the world. Such projects articulate the world, distinguishing its various objects through their possible uses. Language expresses the latter in its basic senses. If we ask whether such senses are within or external to us, we have to say that they are both. They are within us since they are what we have in mind when we employ various objects for particular purposes. On another level, they are external to us. When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, the pragmatic meanings we assign to these objects are apparent to others. The body-project that is guided by these senses thrusts into the public realm what we have in mind. They become senses inherent in a project that is there for others to observe. This example should not be taken as indicating that such senses are initially private, their public presence being dependent on what we have in mind as we engage in our projects. We learnt our projects from Others—first of all from our caregivers as they engaged in them. It was by observing and listening to them that we saw what they had in mind, thereby acquiring the senses of the objects they used. The question of what was first here, private subjective understanding or public presence, admits of no definite answer. The public presence internalizes itself within the subjective understanding. Such understanding, however, concerns how we use the objects of the world. As such, it is within the world. It has a public presence. Given this, the senses that compose it have to be grasped in terms of the intertwining of the subjective understanding and the world. To grasp them in themselves is to grasp them in the intertwining of the private becoming public and the public becoming private. Only as such are they seen as what they inherently are: the senses of the world that are both disclosed by and internally guide our various projects. The same holds for the language that describes them. It too shares in the intertwining of the senses of such

154 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS projects. It is both within us, capable of sustaining an interior monologue, and without, being the way that we exhibit what is within us. To argue for the priority of one over the other is to forget its tie to the world, that is, to the senses of it disclosed by our projects. The role of trust in this process is apparent. Without this, the child would not have the confidence to learn his initial life projects. Take, for example, the project of learning to tie one’s shoes. To do this, the child has to have sufficient trust to take up the caregiver’s perspective as the latter kneels down, holds the laces in his hands, crosses, intertwines, loops and knots them, pulling the bow tight with his fingers. Empathetically, the child is there with his caregiver, even as, physically, he stands apart, watching him. The role of trust in bridging this divide can be put in terms of the intertwining of the child and the world provided by the caregiver. The child is in this world of care as an object—as the one who has his bath, his dinner, etc. But this being-in is not a merging, since the world is in the child. Its internalization forms the contents of his consciousness. It enriches his own being-in-the-world. The perceptual faith that links the two is based on the child’s trust in the caregiver—on the belief that his being in the caregiver’s world will not result in harm, but rather in pleasure and gain. It is only on this condition that the child willingly assents to the internalization of that which he is placed in. Without this, he cannot adopt the Other’s perspective.13 The same holds for the practices through which the child learns his basic life projects: dressing himself, taking his own bath, etc. It also obtains for his teenage engagements where companions and teachers supplement and, eventually, replace his caregivers. Even as a young adult, a person is constantly being initiated into activities that place him in a world that he acts to internalize. Playing basketball on a team with Others, he discloses the world of this game—the very world that he is physically in through his activity. Without trust, without the reliance of each member on the others, the team could not function. It is based on the faith that each member will do his part. The same holds with the members of a string quartet. Without each performing her part, the world that they disclose through their playing together could not come to pass. They would neither be able to inhabit nor internalize it. Each

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 155 member, then, depends upon and trusts in the action of the Others in the action that establishes this double being-in. Such examples could be multiplied. One can speak of the collective activities of a sports team, a business organization, etc. They all exhibit the fact that being in a common world involves acting in common. This holds even in our initial life projects—such as the child, through his parents, learning how to bathe himself. Such common actions involve a common “I can,” that is distinct from the participants’ individual actions. Thus, the action of a soloist is distinct from that of a member of an ensemble. In the movements of the members of the string quartet as they watch and gesture to each other, moving in tempo with the music, the performers exhibit a sense of a collective action that is founded on but distinct from that which is present when they play alone. The same holds for the members of a basketball team. Such actions disclose a collective common world. Equally they disclose the individual actors as members of this world. The trust that make collective action possible appears in the perceptual faith that characterizes its result. In each case, the participants identify the world that they are in with the world they internalize.

Solicitude and Violence Jean Améry asserts that an essential part of our trust in Others is the expectation of their solicitude when we are in distress. He writes in this regard, “The expectation of help, the certainty of help, is indeed one of the fundamental experiences of human beings. It is, he writes, “a constitutional psychic element.” It appears when, “to a child moaning in pain,” a mother says, “Just a moment … a hot-water bottle, a cup of tea is coming right away, we won’t let you suffer so!” The doctor manifests it when he tells us that the medicine he prescribes will help us. So does the Red Cross on the battlefield. As Améry concludes: “In almost all situations in life where there is bodily injury there is also the expectation of help; the former is compensated by the latter.” This expectation, however, is shattered by the violence Améry experienced. He reports that “with the first blow from a policeman’s fist, against which there can be no defense and which

156 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived.”14 This part is that of our being at home in the world. In his words, “If from the experience of torture any knowledge at all remains …, it is that of a great amazement and a foreignness in the world.”15 The amazement comes from regarding a world that we are no longer part of. Because of the destruction of our Weltvertrauen—our trust in the world—we cannot find our place in it. There are many ways to express this homelessness. The most direct is to point to the disruption of the collective action that places us in a common world. The torturer acts on us and we, through our suffering flesh, contribute to his action. Yet the resulting world— which is that of pain—is not shared. The torturer feels none of it. He expels his victim from the normal world—the world of trust and solicitude—into the world of “agony and death.”16 The astonishment that his victims feel is one before a collective action, where their role, which is that of suffering flesh, enables their expulsion.17 According to Améry, this astonishment remains. He writes: “That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules.”18 The view is blocked because the person has lost confidence in the solicitude of the Other. The trust that enabled him to constitute with Others a common world can no longer be taken for granted. This loss of trust can be put in terms of the temporality of experience. Normally, we link the past and future through anticipation. As Husserl puts this, “the style of the past becomes projected into the future.”19 This means that, experiencing, we constantly anticipate. We assume that fresh experience, in maintaining the “style of the past,” will confirm what we have already experienced. But the experience of torture, Améry reports, is that of “the Other as absolute sovereign.”20 With the nullification of one’s own agency comes the breakdown of anticipation. Our homelessness in the world that the torturer has thrust us into is exemplified by our inability to anticipate what might next arise in this world. To the point that this psychological state remains, we cannot anticipate—i.e., be sure—of the actions of the Others we

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 157 subsequently encounter. The trust that linked us to them suffers a permanent deficit.21

Skin in the Extended Sense Améry limits himself to the violence experienced as torture. But the antithetical relation of trust and violence extends far beyond this. This becomes clear when we expand our conception of “skin.” Thus far, we have taken skin as a bodily boundary—as that which divides the inside and the outside of the individual person. To extend its sense, we need to note that this border, though bodily, is not physical. “Inside” does not refer to a person’s internal organs. It rather designates what our sensitive skin with its various perceptual organs forms—namely, an embodied place of appearing. Skin, in an extended sense, can be taken in a similar manner. As an embodied place of appearing, it can be understood in cultural, social, and political terms. What sets its boundaries are the collective activities that let a world appear. It is embodied as a place of appearing through such activities. Their disruption is its disruption. As with the individual, the result is a homelessness. As befits its collective origin, such homelessness is itself collective. A couple of examples will make this extension clear. One of the main ways that European colonists destroyed the aboriginal cultures they encountered was through their seizure and enclosure of lands for farms and ranches. This action deprived the native inhabitants, who were primarily hunters and gatherers, of their original means of supporting themselves. It thus made impossible the collective actions by which they placed themselves in their collective world. The result was a homelessness in a double sense. Not only were they excluded from the land that they once held in common. The very activities that placed them in a common world of practices and corresponding senses became impossible. This impossibility extended to their self-understanding as members of this world: They could no longer see themselves as providers through hunting and gathering. With this, the trust that enabled the constitution of the corresponding common world—the expectation that each would play his or her part in their collective activities—lost its

158 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS basis. In the resulting, enforced idleness, this breakdown in expectations often manifested itself in other social roles. It showed itself in the difficulties they experienced in being a parent, a spouse, an advisor, an “elder,” etc. Generally speaking, the displaced inhabitants experienced a collapse of interpretative categories. Categories appropriate to contexts (and corresponding “worlds”) that were no longer possible became, themselves, impossible. To maintain them was to exclude oneself from the actual world. With this came the phenomena of abuse. The disorders of sexual, spousal, drug and alcohol abuse, which are often encountered in aboriginal communities, are, in fact, symptoms of the homelessness imposed on them.22 The “skin” that was violated in the above example was set by the collective activities that let a world appear. The role of trust in such activities is especially apparent in our second example: that of the destruction of Uchuraccay.23 This small, Indian village, located in the central highlands of Peru was caught up in the violence unleashed by the guerrilla Shining Path movement in the 1980’s. During these years, the village was repeatedly overrun by participants in the conflict. As a contemporary witness reported: “the Shining Path, the members of the Self-Defense Committees and the military all came and burned the houses. They took our belongings, robbed us of our livestock … They respected neither man, woman nor child, subjecting them to public beatings. They raped and killed the women; moreover, when they wanted, they killed the children. No one could protest without being killed.”24 Having lost 135 of its original 470 inhabitants, the village finally was abandoned in 1984.25 As the report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes clear, the question of who was a terrorist was paramount in this violence. In the internecine struggle that engulfed the region, the participants struck blindly at each other. Natives accused natives of being Shining Path supporters and were themselves accused of being such by the army and paramilitary groups that roamed the region. Even the terrorists in their incursions were unsure of who their opponents were. The fate of a group of journalists who came to the village to report on the conflict showed the

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 159 depths of the general distrust. The natives mistakenly took them for members of the Shining Path and murdered them—their action being photographed, almost to the last, by the journalists themselves. The natives acted because they suspected the journalists’ guide of being a terrorist. The military had also warned them that any nonnatives they encountered were likely to be Shining Path members. Not that the military’s behavior inspired trust. Its punitive actions often equaled those of the terrorists. Both were equally indiscriminate, since neither could ascertain who was a friend and who an opponent. The same held for the various self-defense committees set up by different villages. They sent out patrols to ferret out members of the Shining Path and attacked the neighboring villages in the region suspected of harboring them. The question they faced and brutally tried to answer was: Who is and who is not a terrorist? This was a question impossible to answer since, generally speaking, everyone was acting under compulsion. As Arendt pointed out, people have their public identities through their words and deeds as heard and seen by Others.26 This identity is collective insofar as their discourse and actions involve Others. But in Uchuraccay and the surrounding region, such action was often forced. People thus faced the questions: Was a person a terrorist who claimed to be compelled by the Shining Path? Could we really tell how he would act in the absence of such compulsion? The same doubts surrounded his discourse. Were the senses it employed descriptive of actual practices or were they deceptive? In fact, the very practices people were seen engaging in were greeted with suspicion. One could not tell whether they were innocent or subversive. Was the meaning that they thrust into the public realm genuine or meant to deceive? Was there a match between the inner and the outer: the intention that guided their actions and the latter’s public presence? Or was there a breakdown between the two and, hence, the intertwining that supposedly linked them? Since no one could tell, the “skin” that marked the boundary between the inner and the outer no longer held. The collective activities that should have let the world appear lost their validity. As such, they could not function as “skin” in an extended sense, i.e. as an embodied place of appearing.

160 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS The resulting homelessness was felt by each isolated individual. Unable to ascertain the motives of Others, the public world was experienced as a foreign land—a place whose language and practices are alien and unknown. Unable to find themselves within it, the natives’ perceptual faith in the match of the world they internalized and the world they found themselves in suffered a breakdown. As a result, the inhabitants of the village fled to the hills and abandoned the village.

Restoration Uchuraccay, of course, represents an extreme case—one manifesting the complete dissolution of shared public space and society. It is, nonetheless, exemplary of the relation between violence, trust, and our being-in-the-world. Trust in Others is also a trust in the world that we share in common. Without it, our being-in-the-world is marked by homelessness: We find ourselves thrust into a world that we cannot make sense of. The violence that attacks trust prevents us from finding our place in it. Such homelessness is not limited to cases such as Uchuraccay. We need only regard the largescale migrant flows that press upon the borders of the United States, Europe, and the Middle Eastern states bordering Syria. At the heart of such flows is the violence of failed states—states that have made their own citizens homeless, states where trust has been replaced by suspicion and despair. The causes of such violence are numerous; they range from an incapacity to deal with climate change to the corruption and militarization of the political context. Each factor points to a specific cure: actions, for example, to combat climate change, to reform the judiciary, to depoliticize the military, to combat the corruption of the political process, and so on. In engaging in these, however, it is crucial to keep the factor of trust in mind. Violence destroys society by making trust impossible. The only lasting cure to its action is the rebuilding of trust. We have to re-establish the boundaries of the public space of appearing that trust makes possible. To do so is to restore the “for everyone” that links objectivity to intersubjectivity. Truth and Reconciliation programs, where victims and victimizers

TRUST AND VIOLENCE 161 meet to establish a common narrative are attempts to establish this “for everyone,” as are the commissions established to write histories—including those of school textbooks—that include the positions of all parties to a conflict. The goal of these and other such attempts is to generate the collective perceptual faith that links the inner and the outer. It is to re-establish the trust that allows us to be at home in a common world. It is, in Husserl’s context, a reestablishment of the “natural attitude” that characterizes the world we share. We would be unfaithful to the underpinnings of this world if we did not mention another set of methods we employ to combat the violence that undermines the intersubjective world. They attempt not to overcome violence but rather to channel it against a supposed enemy. In them, social peace is not a matter of suppressing but rather correctly employing violence. Again, our analysis of violence will be phenomenological—but this, in a transformed sense, one that reflects the new meaning given to epoché. Its basis is our embodied being-in-the-world understood as a defining structure of appearing. It is this that allows us to see phenomenology not just as a theoretical, but also as a practical, “applied” science.

Chapter XII Violence and the Return of the Religious The debates on the return of the religious have a curious quality. It is not as if, viewed on a global scale, religions had departed and are now, somehow, returning. The puzzlement is rather: Why has the force behind them not disappeared? Why has it not succumbed to the various critiques—particularly those of science—directed against it? What have such critiques missed? With these questions comes the suspicion that we do not understand the religious or the sacred, that it is somehow outside or beyond the division between the rational and the irrational. As such, it cannot be dismissed by calling it “irrational.” But, if it is not some error that can be corrected by providing the correct information, what exactly is it? A look at the hermeneutical context of the discussions regarding the return of the religious is instructive. The context is that of the violence perpetrated in its name. Such violence is as much political as it is religious. There is, in fact, a blurring of the divide between religious and political authority. Is there, then, an inner connection between the political and the religious? There is a tradition that associates violence with the political. It stretches from Plato’s Thrasymachus to Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. In their view, humans are competitive rather than co-operative. Our natural condition, as Hobbes wrote, is that of a “war of every man against every man.”1 The political order regulates, but does not eliminate this natural violence. It preserves it in its institutions. The police and the penalties that the state imposes on infractions exhibit its presence. What is the relation of such “natural” violence to the violence associated with religion? To answer this, scholars have focussed on the theories of Schmitt and René Girard, who are united in seeing violence as endemic to humanity. 2 They claim that it can only be restrained by channeling it towards a determined minority—the “enemy” for Schmitt, the “sacrificial victim” for Girard. In 163

164 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS Salvatore’s “parallel reading” of these authors, they are united in their focus “on the structural relationship between political stabilization and social exclusion.”3 For both, “exclusion is a structural, and thus, unavoidable side effect of any form of political organization.”4 It expresses itself in the religious exclusion of the “victim” or the political elimination of the “enemy.” The question that remains, however, is that of the conflation of the two: the situation where the sacrificial victim becomes the political enemy. This can be put in terms of the return of the religious understood as the return of violence. Girard writes, regarding this return: “After having extricated ourselves from the sacred somewhat more successfully than other societies have done, to the point of ‘forgetting’ the founding violence, of losing all sight of it, we are now about to rediscover it. The essential violence returns to us in a spectacular fashion—not only with regard to history but also with regard to knowledge.”5 What we face is a “surreptitious return of the sacred … in the form of violence.” He adds, “The thought which moves away indefinitely from the violent origin approaches it again, but without its knowledge, for this thought is never conscious of changing its direction.”6 Implicit here is the thought that the element missed by the rational critiques of religion—the element that prevents religion from being dismissed as an “error”—is the violence at the heart of the sacred. This violence remains even when, in its return, the religious or the sacred assumes a political character, one where the sacrificial victim becomes the political enemy. My claim will be that there is, in fact, a double return of the sacred. With the collapse of the “sacrificial system,” the sacred first reappears in the legal order. When this loses its binding claim, the sacred manifests itself politically. In establishing this, I will argue that Schmitt’s conception of the political is not simply structurally similar to Girard’s conception of the sacrificial system; it is actually a manifestation of this. In this political return of the religious, the religious and the political system are conflated. What prevents us from seeing this is the self-concealment that is essential to the sacrificial act, a self-concealment that also characterizes its twofold return.

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The Sacrificial System Girard and Thomas Hobbes both point to equality as the root of violence. There is, however, a difference in their understanding of equality. For Hobbes, equality is natural. He writes: “Nature has made men so equal” that no one “can … claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.”7 Since both see themselves as entitled to what “they cannot both enjoy … they become enemies … and endeavor to destroy or subdue one another.”8 In this description, the object is prior and the conflict arises because both desire it. Girard, focusing on our innate tendency to imitate one another, reverses this relation. He writes: “Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.”9 His point is that we are social animals because of our imitative behavior. This is what allows us to learn from one another. 10 The equality that Hobbes points to is, for Girard, as much a matter of imitation as it is of personal features. As a result, we do not just compete out of a sense of equal entitlement. We come into conflict because our imitation of an other’s behavior extends to the desires exhibited in such behavior. According to Girard, there is a kind of “positive feedback” here: the conflict of desires feeds on itself, with each participant feeling his desire increasing as he is thwarted by his rival. 11 The result is a growing violence that threatens to undermine the relations that we need to survive. It becomes contagious when the losers in the competitive struggle seek revenge. “Vengeance,” Girard writes, “…is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body.”12 Expressed in terms of the last chapter, it appears as a growing malignancy at the heart of the trust that binds its members together. It is at this point that the community turns to religion. According to Girard, “Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion.”13 Their intimate connection arises from the attempt to limit violence. The community uses the sacrifices religion institutes to deflect the violence that threatens to consume it. As for the sacrificial victims, there is no question of their guilt or

166 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS innocence, “no question of ‘expiation.’” At issue is society’s attempt “to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.”14 The reason for the lack of qualities—the indifference—of the victim is that the guilt for the violence is shared by the members of community. The violence is their own. So is their susceptibility to violence—i.e., their liability to be victimized by it. The victim, in other words, stands in for both sides of the situation.15 On the one hand, he bears the guilt for the communal violence; on the other, he is the victim of this violence. For his sacrifice to be effective, however, the community must conceal from itself this “displacement of violence.” It is in terms of this concealment that we can speak of violence seeking “shelter in religion.” According to Girard, “Religion in its broadest sense” is “another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence.”16 In the theological interpretation it offers, it “is the god who supposedly demands the victims; [it is] he alone, in principle, who savors the smoke from the altars and requisitions the slaughtered flesh. It is to appease his anger that the killing goes on, that the victims multiply.”17 Here, we project upon God our own violence, thereby concealing it. There is, in fact, a double concealment. We collectively conceal from ourselves not just our authorship of violence, but also the fact of our being the victims of our violence.18 In this sacrificial system, the victims must display a crucial characteristic—one that is independent of their possessing any specific qualities. This is their inability to exact revenge. While they have to bear some resemblance to the members of the community, they must stand outside of it. They must be unable to avail themselves of its resources so as to retaliate against their persecutors. In Girard’s words, “between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal.”19 The victims, then, are composed of “exterior or marginal individuals, incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants.” They are “foreigners or enemies” or those in a “servile condition,” incapable of “fully integrating themselves into the community.”20 As a result, “they

VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS 167 can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal.”21 Based on these conditions, the black victims of lynchings and the marginalized Jews of Nazi Germany can count as sacrificial victims. To see them as such, however, we have to move from the initial relation of religion and violence to its concealed returns.

Sacrifice and the Judicial System The first return occurs with the replacement of the sacrificial system. According to Girard, “When … the judicial system appears, sacrifice disappears.”22 This is because it performs the same function, which is “to prevent the contagion of violence.” It takes the vengeance that is at the heart of this contagion and “effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal,” that performed by the courts.23 As Girard also expresses this, the “judicial system rationalizes revenge.” It “succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands.”24 As such remarks indicate, the judicial system shares a number of features with the system it replaces. The violence that sheltered in the religious, sacrificial system now finds shelter in the judicial processes. Thus, neither the sacrificial system nor the judicial processes are “strangers to the ways of violence.” 25 The concealment that the sacrificial system offered to violence is now taken over by the judicial system. In Girard’s words, “Like sacrifice, it conceals—even as it also reveals— its resemblance to vengeance.”26 The concealment arises from its being “imbued with religious concepts.”27 The judicial system also claims to be “a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate,” a violence “successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.” As “a sanctified, legitimate form of violence,” it avoids “becoming an object of disputes and recriminations.” It escapes being trapped by “the vicious circle of revenge.”28 Thus, if before the god demanded the killing of the victim, now the judicial system makes this demand. Doing so, it takes the place of the god. Its authority and impartiality are those of the divinity it has replaced. It assumes the god’s transcendence.29 As such, it appears as “beholden to no one … at the disposal of everyone” and is “universally respected.”30

168 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS What happens when this assumption of transcendence and impartiality is no longer accepted? Girard writes: “As soon as the essential quality of transcendence— religious, humanistic, or whatever—is lost, there are no longer any terms by which to define the legitimate form of violence … The definition of legitimate and illegitimate forms then becomes a matter of mere opinion.”31 The result is a renewal of the original “sacrificial crisis,” which occurred with “the disappearance of the sacrificial rites” and, with this, “the disappearance of the difference between impure violence and purifying violence.” The former is the violence of revenge, the latter that of sacrifice. The point of sacrifice was to control the intercommunal violence that, in the form of vengeance, threatened to consume the community. With the loss of its efficacy, the distinction between the pure and the impure disappears “and impure, contagious, reciprocal violence spreads throughout the community.” The original sacrificial crisis, thus, was “a crisis of distinctions.”32 As such, it was “a crisis affecting the cultural order,” which is itself “nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions.”33 What brought about this crisis was the breakdown of the religious concealment that is essential to sacrifice. People no longer believed that it was “the god” who demanded the victims. The decision regarding victims lost its transcendence and, hence, its impartial, “holy, legal, and legitimate” quality. The result was “a threat to the very basis of the community, to the principles on which its social harmony and equilibrium depend.”34 The same points hold with regard to the judicial system when, through the politicization of its processes and decisions, it loses its claim to impartiality and transcendence. Its breakdown also threatens the cultural order. Again there is a crisis of distinctions and the threat of all-consuming violence. If the judicial system represents the return of the religious as sheltering and being sheltered by violence, its breakdown can be understood as calling for a further return. As before, this return can be understood as involving a concealment. As with the judicial system, it need not be recognized as explicitly religious. It can involve a transformation of the political, one that seeks within it the transcendence claimed by the religious.

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The Political System According to Carl Schmitt, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”35 In Schmitt’s political system, the enemy takes the place of the sacrificial victim. Just as the victim’s quality is a matter of indifference, so, in his account, “the political enemy” appears without any special features. As Schmitt writes, he “need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions.”36 What distinguishes him is, first of all, his marginal quality. In Schmitt’s words, he is “the other, the stranger,” that is, “existentially something different and alien.”37 Like Girard’s victim, he lacks the social bonds that would make him a part of society. He is also distinguished by his sacrificial quality— i.e., his readiness to be killed. Discussing the concept of the enemy, Schmitt asserts that its “real meaning” refers to “the real possibility of physical killing.”38 In Girard’s sacrificial system, the point of such killing is to restore social order. At stake is the existential survival of the community. In Schmitt’s system, such survival is at issue in the “state of exemption.” This “case of extreme peril,” of “danger to the existence of the state,” appears in the failure of the legal, judicial system. 39 Thus, the exception “appears when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations … There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos.”40 For Schmitt, the enemy assumes the restorative role that Girard assigns to the victim. His presence unifies it and insures its cohesion. If no external enemy is present, then an internal one must be found. In Schmitt’s words: “this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.”41

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Transcendence and Sovereignty How does the declaration of the enemy restore the legal order? The crisis of this order, according to Girard, was caused by the loss of its sense of transcendence. To function, he writes, the system requires “the recognition of the sovereignty and independence of the judiciary, whose decisions no group, not even the collectivity as a body, can challenge.”42 The judicial system, in other words, must have an authority transcending all these. For Schmitt, this authority is found in the sovereign. He decides on the exception.43 He also determines who is to count as an enemy.44 In both of these cases, he has an absolute authority. This authority, in fact, is such that he transcends the legal order. In Schmitt’s words: “The decision [that a state of exception exists] frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute.” If correct, the decision that the conditions for legality no longer exist is a decision that, by definition, cannot bound by such conditions. It is, in this sense, absolute. Thus, with “the suspension of the entire existing order,” the sovereign acts with “principally unlimited authority.” “In such a situation,” he adds, “it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes.”45 What remains, in fact, is the sovereign as a transcendent principle. Like the god who demanded sacrifice, he is both within and yet outside the human order. In Schmitt’s words, “He decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.”46 This being both inside and outside the legal system means that the sovereign has complete authority with regard to it. Being himself unconstrained by its norms or rules, he nonetheless acts within it, i.e., has its forces at his command. Thus, under the sovereign, “order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.”47 The order now comes from the sovereign will: what the sovereign decides becomes law. This means that “[t]he sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality.”48 Standing outside of the legal framework, he belongs to it by founding and enforcing it. Thus, his “authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law.”49

VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS 171 For Schmitt, then, the sovereign will replaces that of “the god.” In producing law, the sovereign provides its transcendent principle. According to Schmitt, the decision of the sovereign is “absolute and independent of the correctness of its content.”50 There is nothing behind it. In fact, “[l]ooked at normatively, the decision emanates from nothingness.”51 It is simply an act of the pure spontaneity of his will. It is an act of unconditioned freedom.52 As such, it can no more be questioned than the will of the god. The law that the sovereign produces thus regains its required transcendence. As for the violence that, in the system of sacrifice, was directed against the victim and, in the judicial system, was directed against the offender, its force now falls on the enemy. As in the original system, there is no question of his guilt or innocence. At issue, is not “expiation.” The enemy, like the victim, is simply defined by his functioning in the system. He cannot step out of his role, since he is defined in terms of it. Thus, there was nothing that the Jew in the Nazi system could do to expiate his guilt. The system for which Carl Schmitt served as a legal theorist, required him and other similar internal enemies for its internal cohesion. Like the sovereign, the chosen enemy was both inside and outside of the social order. Marginalized, he stood outside. Yet, as a victim, he was within, essential to its functioning, essential for the trust that bound its members together.

Violence and the Suspension of the Ethical For Girard, the violence that shelters in religion acts as social remedy. It serves to deflect the intercommunal strife that threatens the social order. Does this mean that this channeling of violence is as affective as the remedies for restoring trust suggested at the end of the previous chapter? There are good reasons to doubt this. The violence that Hitler, as sovereign or Führer unleashed, for example, went beyond all social contraints. Resulting in war, it worked to destroy the social order. The same can be said of Shia-Sunni violence that followed the American invasion of Iraq, and the HinduMuslim violence that accompanied the partition of India. The question such examples raise is whether the relation of religion to

172 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS violence is such that violence exceeds its social function of insuring cohesion through exclusion. According to Girard, religion performs its role through the transcendence it offers. The transcendence of the god reappears in each of its returns. What is the relation of violence to this transcendence? Carl Schmitt, in linking sovereignty to the state of exception, quotes Kierkegaard saying, “The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general.”53 For Schmitt, the exception is the situation where the legal order no longer obtains. It shows that the origin of law is the sovereign decision. Such a decision, as “absolute and independent of the correctness of its content,” is not based on knowledge, but on an act of the will. Now, for Kierkegaard, this act is crucial to becoming a Christian. This is because the object of Christian faith unites the contradictories of the eternal and the temporal. It sees the non-worldly, non-temporal God as present in the historical figure, Jesus.54 Since it involves a contradiction, its object transcends reason. As a result, Christian faith is a matter of will rather than of understanding.55 This priority of the will shows itself in what Kierkegaard calls “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” which occurs when we face the transcendent God. As the story of Abraham and Isaac shows, God can demand an action that cannot be ethically defended. Seen in the light of faith, Abraham’s willingness to kill Isaac appears as a “sacrifice.” Grasped in terms of ethics, it appears as “murder.”56 Which is it? According to Kierkegaard, “there is an absolute duty toward God,” one that determines the individual’s “relation to the universal”—i.e., the ethical. 57 This duty, as Abraham experienced it, can suspend the ethical. This point holds generally when we assume the absolute transcendence of God. Such transcendence signifies that God’s will supersedes our understanding. In fact, it places God beyond all the moral strictures that stem from the common experience of mankind. This, then, is what allows the violence that shelters in religion to exceed its social function. As Girard shows, the transcendence of the divine secures the acceptance of the act of sacrifice; it also underpins the consent given

VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS 173 to judicial order. For Schmitt, transcendence is essential to the sovereign’s absolute authority to produce law. Such transcendence, however, can also leave us in a moral vacuum. At this point, the violence that shelters in religion exceeds its initial purpose of ensuring social cohesion. It can itself become all consuming.

The Current Sacrificial Crisis It is important to note that this analysis of the return of the religious does not take account of Girard’s hopes for the redemptive message of Christianity. In Girard’s view, Jesus did not die “as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices.”58 The real meaning of his Passion is that “of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open.”59 This happens because Jesus, in the Gospels, is the innocent victim par excellence. His sacrifice reveals that the violence that condemns him is our own. The difficulty with this view, as Salvatore remarks, is that it positions the Gospel’s message as both “a brake and accelerator.” On the one hand, it contributes “to curtail the different forms of scapegoating perpetrated around the world inasmuch as potential killers become aware of the perverse mechanism that operates behind their backs.” Yet, the unmasking of the sacrificial mechanism leaves social actors without a reliable way to eliminate violence from their community.60 Given this, the message appears as part of the “sacrificial crisis.” As such, it opens the way to the judicial and the political returns of the religious. The political return can assume two forms. The first occurs when the religious absorbs the political. Here, the government takes on an explicitly theocratic cast. It claims an authority that transcends normal human understanding. It can then issue decrees guarding the faith—such as those concerning blasphemy—and persecute non-believers to prevent them from corrupting believers. In the second, the political absorbs the religious. Assuming its transcendence, it also claims an authority that exceeds human understanding. This claim becomes that of the sovereign, who appears as a charismatic leader, i.e., a leader who has an absolute or “one-to-

174 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS one” relation with his followers. Here, the priority of the will over the understanding becomes the priority of the leader’s will. Examples can be found of both forms of return. In terms of their causes, one can point to the existence of globalization, without a corresponding, adequate legal order. On the one hand, the world has grown more interconnected. On the other, there is no correlative juridical system to channel the violence that the sacrificial process once contained. The return of the religious in the form of a transcendent legal order is, in other words, absent on the global level. Beyond this, there is a lack of faith in the limited order that obtains. The politicization of this order, its rending by an increasingly narrow nationalism, points to the present version of the sacrificial crisis.61 So do the failures to assure cohesion by appealing to the transcendent. In the past century, both communism and capitalism have made transcendent claims. They both asserted the absolute and universal validity of their respective legal systems. Communism, in the traditional sense, has largely disappeared, while few unquestionably accept the claims of capitalism. In such a situation, we can speak of the return of the religious as a return of the repressed in the Freudian sense. Such a return is implicit in Girard’s claim that having come “to the point of ‘forgetting’ the founding violence, of losing all sight of it, we are now about to rediscover it. The essential violence returns to us in a spectacular fashion.”62 Like all returns of the repressed, it is, as Freud teaches, a return in a distorted form. It presently appears in the guise of the political and the sacrifices demanded by this. It is marked by the instability of the order that we now confront.

___________ In Girard’s terms, this instability marks a new sacrificial crisis. Such a crisis would require yet another return of the sacred to channel our violence. Is such a return necessary? Is it part of an inevitably repeating cycle? If we refuse to accept this conclusion, then we face the question of avoiding this return. To do so is to take the conception of sacrifice as a decision point. Here, we open ourselves up to

VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE RELIGIOUS 175 its alternatives in our attempt to rethink it. For Girard (and, implicitly, for Schmitt), sacrifice is the link between religion and violence. Is there a way to conceive sacrifice differently? Is there a way to understand religion, not as a channel for violence, but rather as opposed to sacrificial violence? To explore these questions yet another division in our enquiry is needed—one that employs phenomenology to explore the Biblical sense of the sacred and the sacrifice it demands.

Part IV Sacrifice and the Presence of the Divine

Chapter XIII Suffering and Theodicy What does it mean to suffer? How are we to understand the sufferings we undergo? Is there a sense, a purpose to them or is the very passivity implied in the word to “suffer,” which etymologically signifies to “undergo” and “endure,” something that robs suffering of all inherent meaning? Levinas, in his article, “Useless Suffering,” argues that “intrinsically,” suffering “is useless: ‘for nothing.’” It exhibits “a depth of meaninglessness” that repeals any sense that we could attach to it.1 He remarks, further, that while “suffering is … a datum in consciousness,” it is, nonetheless, “unassumable.” We cannot synthesize such data into a one-in-many—i.e., a common sense that would apply to them. Suffering is not simply “a symptom of the rejection” of “the synthesis of the Kantian ‘I think,” it is “this rejection itself.” As such, it is “[t]he denial, the refusal of meaning, thrusting itself forward as a sensible quality.”2 What we experience in suffering is a pure “passivity,” one that “is not the other side of any activity.” Thus, normally, the receptivity (or passivity) of our senses “is already active reception.” The data that we receive are synthesized and are part of the active perceptual process.3 Here, however, what we experience is “the concreteness of the not … a negativity extending as far as to the realm of un-meaning.”4 It is the “un-meaning,” “absurdity” of suffering that makes it intrinsically useless.5 Is Levinas correct or does suffering, in its suspension of synthesis, exhibit a meaning beyond meaning, one embodied in the unique singularity of our flesh? How are we to conceive this meaning beyond meaning? What is its link to sacrifice? Such questions involve us in a network of interlocking conceptions—all directed to the sense (or senseless) of the evil of suffering. Historically such conceptions have been both theological, involving God’s relation to the evils we experience, and economic, where suffering and sacrifice have been conceived in terms of an exchange.

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180 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS The present chapter limits itself to exploring these conceptions. Answers will be postponed for a later inquiry.

Suffering and Theodicy Theologically, the question of suffering is tied to theodicy. In the monotheistic religions, which see God not only as the creator, but also as the ruler of the world, the question becomes that of God’s tolerance of evil. How can we justify such tolerance? Etymologically, the word, “theodicy” comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (diké). Although coined by Leibniz, the effort it represents is far older. In the Jewish tradition, it stretches to the stories of Genesis with their attempts to explain how the evil of suffering could exist in a world created by God. God, after each creative act, sees that his creations are “good.” Women, however, bear their children in pain (Gn 3:16) and the ground, sprouting “thorns and thistles,” can at times appear “cursed” to the farmer (Gn 3:18). How do we explain the suffering that such facts imply? How is suffering compatible with God’s justice? Is it, in fact, possible to justify God’s ways to man? The question is not limited to the Jewish tradition. Hume, referring to Epicurus,6 puts it in terms of a series of alternatives: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”7 Something, here, has to give. To explain evil, we seem to have to abandon God’s power or his goodness or his intelligibility. The last alternative is included since, as Hans Jonas writes, “Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful, yet tolerate the world as it is”—the world that is marked by suffering.8 In speaking of such suffering, it is helpful to distinguish between natural and human evil. Natural evil involves such things as the suffering involved when an animal seizes on its prey. It also includes natural disasters like draught and disease. Its exemplar is the fact of death, which, as inevitable, is a part of life as such. Human evil, by contrast, is the evil that we ourselves commit. In Genesis, it appears when Cain murders Able. God, regarding Cain’s intention, says to him: “Sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward

SUFFERING AND THEODICY 181 you, yet you can be its master” (Gn 4:7).9 Evil, here, is not some force of nature; the death Able suffers is not inevitable. Cain, as the text makes clear, is not compelled to commit murder. Here, the question of theodicy concerns God’s response to the evil that we bring into the world. Theodicy, as will become apparent, fails when it runs together these two types of evil. Justifying the presence of natural evil in terms an “economy” that looks to the whole, it makes itself ridiculous when it applies this concept to human evil. The failure here is one of understanding God’s presence in a world marked by evil. Our goal, in describing it, is to open up the question of the nature of such presence.

The Theodicy of Natural Evil The Christian conception of evil was decisively shaped by Augustine’s response to Mani, the Persian founder of Manichaeism. He saw good and evil (spirit and matter, light and dark) as names of opposed powers locked in a struggle for the world. In answer to the question of how God could permit evil, the Manichaean solution is to declare that God is not all-powerful. Rather than being all-encompassing, God is limited, his goodness being opposed by a contending principle of evil. Augustine was himself a Manichi for nine years. When he converted to Christianity, he turned his efforts to combat his former faith. Evil, he claimed, was not a positive character. It is a lack, a privation, an absence of goodness. In his words, “evil is nothing but the removal of good until no good remains.” In itself, it is simply a lack of positive qualities.10 In the Middle Ages, this position became incorporated in the doctrine of the transcendent properties of being. These are the properties of being irrespective of where it is found. Every being is not just existent. To the point that a being is, it is one, true, and good. Conversely, to the point that it is not, it lacks unity, truth, and goodness.11 Goodness, here, is an ontological concept. It is simply one of four equivalent ways of characterizing what is. God, in his supreme perfection, embodies all of them in an exemplary degree. He is supremely “being,” supremely “good,” supremely “one” and supremely “true.”

182 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS The evil that is the opposite of this positive state is not. Lacking any unity or self-identity, it is formless and powerless. This reduction of evil to nonbeing leaves us with an obvious difficulty: how are we to account for the presence of evil in the world? For a Christian this difficulty is compounded by God’s supreme perfection. The goodness that always accompanies being implies that God always acts for the best. What he produces is, in Leibniz’s phrase, the “best of all possible worlds.” Given this, how can evil be present in it? The answer of classical theodicy is that evil is simply an unavoidable result of finitude. Since God’s creations are finite, none of them can have all the perfections. Were they to have all of them, each would be God. Since, in fact, they are finite creatures rather than the infinite Creator, each necessarily lacks some measure of being and, hence, of the good. This lack or privation can, from the individual’s perspective, be considered an evil—that is, a falling off from the good. But it is more than compensated for by the perfection of the whole made up of these finite beings. This means, as Descartes writes, “We should not consider a single creation separately when we investigate whether the works of God are perfect, but generally all created objects together.”12 From the perspective of the world as it is and will be, everything is, in fact, the best it can possibly be.13 One way to understand this is in terms of an economy. By this I mean the process of exchange that allows creatures to compensate for their lack of self-sufficiency. Animals are dependent on the air they breathe, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide. They also need the water that they drink, the food that they eat, which also involve exchange. In fact, exchange is built into the metabolic processes that sustain living creatures. In German, metabolism, Stoffwechsel, signifies, as we noted, the exchange of materials. Creatures cannot live without this. Such exchange, of course, may involve individual suffering. A draught causes individuals distress. The animal caught by the predator experiences, on an individual level, a lack of the good. So, in fact, do the creatures that this victim, itself, feeds on. When, however, we regard the whole of life, we cannot say that predation makes the world less good. It is simply the result of the dependency of living things upon each other. God,

SUFFERING AND THEODICY 183 in setting up this economy, makes it work for the good of all creatures together.14 While such a view works with regard to natural evil, it clearly fails when we apply it to the evil that we commit. Can we, in fact, say that the losses that humanity has experienced at its own hands work for the greater good? Auschwitz stands, here, as the great counter example. As Hans Jonas writes, it names not just the setting in which over a million Jews, Poles and Gypsies perished. It also signifies the dehumanization of its victims. In the “factory-like working of its machine” for extermination, even the gesture of martyrdom and witness was not left to the dying. In Jonas’s words: “Not fidelity or infidelity, belief or unbelief, not guilt or punishment, not trial, witness and messianic hope, nay, not even strength or weakness, heroism or cowardice, defiance or submission had a place there. .... Of all this, Auschwitz, which also devoured the infants and babes, knew nothing. ... no glimmer of dignity was left to the freights bound for the final solution, hardly a trace of it was found in the surviving skeleton specters of the liberated camps.”15

In point of fact, the holocaust represents, a dead loss. The Jewish communities lost to it—from Łódź to Szczecin—will never come again. When theodicy ignores this and persists in an “economic” explanation, it makes itself ridiculous. It does so, for example, when it argues that the horrors of the concentration camps are justified because they resulted in the return of the Jews, after a nearly two thousand year absence, to their promised land. Their suffering, in other words, served to expedite this end. There is an obvious moral objection to this view. The victims of Auschwitz were not part of this return. To treat them as means for this end argues, not for God’s goodness, but rather the reverse. Ethically regarded, the end does not always justify the means. Its “goodness” can be corrupted by the means employed to achieve it. This is particularly the case when the means involve the degradation and destruction of millions of innocent victims. Thus, as Kant argued, we leave the path of morality whenever we treat another person as simply a means for our ends. To regard persons as means is to take them as things, as instruments for our purposes, rather than as individuals with

184 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS purposes and a dignity of their own. Here, the attempt to justify God by pointing to the founding of Israel makes him a moral monster. As Jonas writes, the “agonizing problem today” is to explain “God’s lordship.” To appeal to the founding of Israel as a justification is to save his lordship by sacrificing his goodness. This, for Jonas, signifies that the question one faces “after Auschwitz,” is “how to rethink the traditional concept of God” so as to understand God’s presence.16 How, in fact, are we to think of him outside of any “economy”?

The Theodicy of Human Evil The traditional theodicy that directs itself to human evil ignores such questions. It also frames its answer in terms of an economy. Here, the economy is that of human exchange. Once again, it is understood as a response to a lack of self-sufficiency. Aristotle, regarding our dependence on others, claimed that a solitary human being “may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.”17 Apart from the board and the other pieces, a single piece lacks its essential context. Similarly, “the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing.” 18 He can only live in an economy with others, one where each individual, through exchange, supplies what the others cannot produce themselves. When we extend this conception to our relations to God, we also see them in terms of an exchange. Plato’s Euthyphro, for example, takes piety as “service of the gods.” 19 Prayer and sacrifice is what we offer to the gods; in return they provide us with their benefits. As Socrates sums up this position, “piety would then be a sort of trading skill between gods and men”—one involving a mutual exchange of benefits.20 Here, the exchange is one of goods for goods. An economy, however, can also be conceived as an exchange of evils for evils. We see this in our legal systems, where penalties are imposed on crimes. When we extend this conception to our relations with God, then we assert that God not only returns good for good, but also evil for evil. Emmanuel Levinas points out that this view “is as old as a certain reading of the Bible. It dominated the consciousness of believers who explained their misfortunes by

SUFFERING AND THEODICY 185 reference to Sin, or at least to their sins.”21 The Book of Job, for example, bears witness to this view. Job’s “comforters” explain his sufferings as God’s punishments—i.e., as a recompense for his sins. Job, they claim, “cheated orphaned children of their rights.” He was “led astray by riches or corrupted by fat bribes” (Jb 36:17-18). His sufferings are, in fact, for his benefit since God saves the wretched “by their very wretchedness and uses distress to open their eyes” (Jb 36:15).22 Here, the explanation of suffering is that it is a punishment for sin. It is God’s response for the evil that we commit. Once again the fact of the holocaust stands as the crucial counter example. As Levinas points out, “The inhabitants of the Eastern European Jewish communities constituted the majority of the six million tortured and massacred; they represented the human beings least corrupted by the ambiguities of our world, and the million children killed had the innocence of children.”23 How, then, can we see their deaths as a punishment? In fact, the holocaust, “renders impossible and odious every proposal and every thought that would explain it by the sins of those who have suffered or are dead.”24

The Theodicy of Innocent Suffering The fact of innocent suffering is not unknown to the Bible. We find it in the Book of Job’s response to the arguments of the “comforters.” Responding to their accusations, Job insists on his innocence. God “knows that I am innocent; if he sifts me,” he asserts, “I will shine like gold” (Jb 23:10).25 Since we do see the innocent suffer and the wicked flourish, prosperity and power cannot, he argues, be the sign of goodness (Jb 12: 6, 21:7-13, 34:1-12). Neither can suffering be a penalty for evil doing. God appears to back up Job’s response when he declares at the end that Job, unlike the comforters, has spoken “truthfully about me” (Jb 42:7). Another example of innocent suffering occurs in Isaiah’s depiction of the suffering servant. The context once again is that of an “economy,” this time involving debt and credit. In the legal system, penalties are imposed on crimes. The criminal, in paying them, “pays his debt to society.” Debts, however, need not be paid by those who incurred them. A father, for example, can pay his son’s

186 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS fine. If we apply this to our commerce with God, we can see innocent suffering as a recompense, a “payment,” by the innocent for the guilty. This is implicit in Isaiah’s account of the suffering servant. In his words, he was “reckoned among transgressors” because of what he endured (Isaiah 53:12).26 In fact, however, “he was pierced through for our transgressions, tortured for our iniquities.” Yet it is “by his scourging we are healed” (53:5). He pays our debt. In this exchange, “himself bearing the penalty of their guilt,” the servant “bore the sins of many” ( 53:12-13). Paul, in his Epistles, imports this view to describe the Passion. According to Paul, “God designed [Christ] to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death” (Rom 4:25). Insofar as “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3), he pays the penalty that God imposed on us.27 The sentiment here is the same as that of the prophets who saw the misfortunes of Israel as punishments for its sins. What Paul does is combine this view with Isaiah’s conception of the suffering servant. Christ, like the servant, pays the debt. By his sacrifices, he squares our accounts with God, our creditor. With this, we have another version of the theodicy that seeks to understand God’s relation to evil. It begins with the notion that suffering is God’s response to the evil we commit; but then it has God, in the form of his Son, pay the debt. As Anselm of Canterbury, in his book, Why God Became Man, puts this: “it is not right to cancel sin without compensation or punishment.”28 God, having assumed flesh, takes this on for us. His suffering is sufficient to compensate for our sins.29 The repayment, in other words, is provided by God himself. As Paul writes, “we have been consecrated through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.” In other words, “Christ offered for all time one sacrifice for sins” and this is sufficient.30 On one level, this view transforms theodicy. Human suffering is no longer justified simply as a punishment by God. God himself, in the form of the Son, takes on the punishment. In being innocent of sins, he is also the paradigm of innocent suffering; he identifies himself with it. What we have here is a way to meet Jonas’s demand “to rethink the traditional concept of God” so as to understand God’s presence. In this view, Christ, as the suffering servant, was

SUFFERING AND THEODICY 187 present during the holocaust. He was present in each person forced onto a deportation train. He was present in the destitution of those who survived the journey to the camps. His face was that of each degraded inmate in his or her nakedness and need. Such a solution, however, does not show how this identification takes place. Is the identification a matter of sympathy or something much deeper? Moreover, punishment is still taken as coming from God. God the Father continues to assume the role of a creditor. But in punishing his Son to redeem the debt, he appears as a moral monster. No moral being would treat his son that way. If I am angry at someone for something that he has done, how would it make sense to take my anger out on my son? One can, of course, reply that God the Father is “one in being” with the Son. He is, in this sense, punishing himself. He is both debtor and creditor. This, however, does not obviate the deeper difficulty that in this economic exchange, suffering takes on the role of a currency. It is used to pay the debt. Currency, however, is indifferent to those who employ it: I can use it to pay for my meal, but you can also use it to pay for it. It makes no difference so long as the bill is paid. Suffering, however, is the opposite of this indifference. It is always personal. At the extreme, it nails one to one’s flesh, the very flesh that makes a person himself and not someone else. It is as little transferable as one’s organic body. Given this, it is inherently incapable of serving as a neutral currency. In spite of these difficulties, the attempt to understand sacrifice (and the suffering it involves) as quid pro quo has not been abandoned. It has, for some thinkers, simply shifted its terrain from theology to sociology. The exchange is now one of the victim (the suffering servant) for social peace. Its context is the internal violence that threatens society. This context should be familiar to us through our discussions of René Girard’s position that “[r]eligion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion.”31 Their intimate connection arises from the attempt to limit violence by diverting it towards a sacrificial victim. In concealing its action, religion asserts that “it is the god who supposedly demands the victims.”32 The solution, in other words, is to project our internecine violence on the divine, using religion to conceal its origin. Once

188 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS again, we are confronted with an economy. Behind the Christian economy of innocent suffering as a payment for the guilty party’s misdeeds, there is the exchange of such suffering for the containment of violence. The difficulties with this view center on the transcendence of God. Plato criticizes the conception of piety as “service of the gods.” He asks what the gods could possibly gain from us? Are they hungry so that they need the goat that is slaughtered? Do libations appease their thirst? The difficulty focuses on the transcendence of the gods, which is their transcendence of any economy. They are, in their self-sufficiency, defined by their transcendence of the human economy. 33 The same difficulty holds for the sociological view of sacrifice. The religions that accept the account of Genesis hold that God created the world not from some pre-existing matter, but rather ab novo. If we accept this, then neither God nor his action are bound by the world. They cannot be if both are prior to it. This, however, implies that they cannot be understood in worldly terms. Thus, in the world, nothing happens without a cause. The cause is prior to the effect; it explains why the effect came about. There is, however, nothing prior to God. Given this, no causal explanation can be offered for God’s action. In fact, no explanation conceived in worldly terms can be proffered. This, holds, in particular for the economic relations that define our world. Both the exchange of benefits and the judicial exchange of penalties for misdeeds are rendered inapplicable by God’s transcendence. Given this, how can we gauge the sacrificial repayment required by God? Without our knowing how much is enough, we face the danger of sacrifice exceeding its parameters. This danger, as we noted, is exacerbated when we assume that God’s transcendence places him beyond our moral understanding. The danger here is that of the violence that “shelters in religion” becoming all consuming. The historical truth of this inference is witnessed by the religious wars and persecutions that have marred the history of Christianity and Islam. Here, the transcendence of God seems to stand behind the savagery committed in his name. With this, we seem to have come to an impasse. The attempt to think of theodicy in economic terms leads, in the case of human

SUFFERING AND THEODICY 189 evil, to insolvable difficulties. To think of evil as a punishment, that is, as a response for the evil we commit turns God into a creditor and suffering into a currency. It makes God’s relation to the believer an economic one. As Derrida remarks, such an interpretation bears witness to “the irreducible experience of belief, between credit and faith, the believing suspended between the credit [créance] of the creditor ([créancier] Gläubiger) and the credence ([croyance] Glauben) of the believer [croyant].” He asks, “How can one believe this history of credence or credit”34 The difficulty does not vanish when we redo this interpretation in sociological terms. Here it flounders on the transcendence of God—a transcendence that does not just undermine every economic relation with the divine. In threatening to make God unknowable, it also threatens, by definition, to undermine his very notion. At issue here is our experience of God. If the history of faith and credit is unbelievable, how do we understand God’s presence?

Chapter XIV Embodiment and the Experience of the Divine At the outset of Genesis, we are presented with two different pictures of God. The first depicts God as the creator of the world and, thus, as transcendent to it. This implies that we cannot understand his creative action in worldly terms. The objective order of the prior and posterior, as Kant pointed out, is definitive of what we mean by objective time. Since nothing in the world occurs without something prior bringing it about, such time cannot have a beginning. Yet, the statement, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” implies that there is nothing temporally prior to God’s act (Gen 1:1). Not having a “before,” his creative action thus cannot be located in the successive order of time or understood in its terms. The action has, in fact, the paradoxical quality of a one-sided border. We can grasp, in a worldly sense, what follows God’s act, but not what precedes it. The same argument can be made with regard to each of our attempts to interpret God’s actions in terms of the relations we find in the world. The inference, as the last chapter stated, is that God, as their author, escapes human comprehension. This, however, is what the second depiction of God by Genesis seems to deny. In a striking passage, it uses repeatedly the word “image” to describe our relation to God. It quotes God as saying: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him” (Gen 1: 26-27). Here, the implication is that to understand God, we need to understand “man.” The way to such comprehension is to see God’s actions as analogous to our own. If the first picture of God emphasizes his transcendence, the second depicts him as immanent. It links the understanding of God to our self-understanding. How can such radically different descriptions be combined? Hume, in his Dialogues, thought that they could not. For Hume, to assert the transcendence of God is to abandon all human analogy. 191

192 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS But “[i]f we abandon all human analogy, … we abandon all religion and retain no conception of the great object of our adoration.” 1 This means that we cannot say what we believe in. But, then, are we really believers? As Hume has his protagonist, Philo, ask: how do those “who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who [also] assert that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible?”2 Yet, as Hume notes, if we avoid this conclusion by embracing human analogy, we slip very easily into an absurd anthropomorphism.3 Nothing prevents us from claiming that God has a gender, gets angry, has to be reminded of his promises, and so on. The dilemma Hume poses is not limited to the Mosaic religions. It is felt by all who assert the transcendence of the divine. A traditional response has been to seek a solution in terms of our selftranscendence. It is assumed that we must somehow transcend our embodiment to experience the divine. This appears to be the goal of the ascetic practices that characterize a number of religions. The assumption is also present in Socrates’ assertion that “the philosopher more than other men frees the soul from association with the body.”4 This, he explains, is because the timeless ideas or genuine “realities” cannot be grasped through the body. The philosopher who apprehends them is he who, “using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from … the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth.”5 If we accept this, we can also assert that our being the “image” and the “likeness” of God does not refer to our bodies but only to our souls. In spite of its appeal, the idea that we must somehow transcend the body to experience the divine suffers from an overwhelming difficulty. The body is not just a constituted formation arising from our experience. It, itself, in its senses and embodied positionality, is formative of experience. In fact, as philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas have pointed out, there is no apprehension, sensual or conceptual, without it. If we accept this, we face the problem of how our embodiment affects our experience of the divine. How can such experience avoid the absurdities of anthropomorphism? Can it reach the radically transcendent?

EMBODIMENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE 193

The Experience of the Divine in the Mosaic Tradition In answering such questions within the Mosaic tradition, it is helpful to list the features used to characterize the divine. The first of these is God’s transcendence. In the account of Genesis, this follows from his position as the creator of the world. His transcendence of the world implies that he surpasses human understanding. This leads us to assert, with Anselm of Canterbury, that God is not just “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” God is “also something greater than can be thought.”6 The experience of the divine is an experience of this excess. It is an encounter with a givenness that cannot be given in a way that we could conceptualize. Thomas Aquinas thought of this as the givenness of existence. Drawing a distinction between existence and essence, he considered God as esse tantum, as existence considered in itself apart from any conceptions that we might draw from particular things with their defining essences.7 In taking God as the source of existence, he thus took him as a cause that constantly escapes being described.8 A similar derivation can be made of God’s unique singularity. It follows when we say that he is the self-sufficient cause of the world. Were another cause necessary, God would not, by definition, be self-sufficient. But if he is, he is unique. Thus, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all assert that there is only one God. Unlike numerical singulars, which exist as one among many instances of their kind, God, they maintain, exists in only one example. Aquinas expressed this insight by noting that existence (esse) as such is not diverse. What distinguishes entities are the essences that their definitions express. As distinct from essence, esse tantum has no particularizing features that would distinguish one example of it from another. It is, thus, inherently uniquely singular. A further characteristic of the creator God is his status as the Mysterium Tremendum. This, Patočka writes, is the mystery before which we tremble.9 The trembling shakes us loose from our everyday world in a much more radical sense than that imposed by philosophy. For Patočka, the questioning initiated by Socrates brings about “an upheaval aimed at the former meaning of [our] life as a

194 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS whole.” It confronts us with “the problematic nature, the question of the ‘natural’ meaning” we previously took for granted.10 The result is a shaking of our world-view. Socrates, for example, makes us ask why we have understood the world in the way we have rather than in some other way. Why have we arranged our lives, our politics, and our societies in the ways we find them? His invitation is to ask, politically and culturally, whether the reasons we give can withstand examination. But, despite its radicality, this inquiry remains on the level of the world. The perspectives it calls into question are those of the world. Socrates invites us to pass from one such perspective to another. By contrast, the shaking induced by the Mysterium Tremendum calls the world itself into question. It confronts us with a perspective that is radically non-worldly. It allows us to ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?”—a question that could not occur to the ancients with their belief in the eternity of the world. The question directs us to the cause of the world—a cause that exceeds our understanding. As such, the thought of such cause is experienced as a shaking of all our worldly categories. Coincident with our experience of God as transcendent, as uniquely singular and as a Mysterium Tremendum, there is also a felt sense of the sacred. We can find this sense in the Greek root of the Latin word, sacer. The root, σῶος (soös), signifies “safe,” in the sense of kept apart or reserved for the god.11 As consecrated, the sacred cannot be used by us. One cannot, for example, cut down and use the timber of a sacred grove. The trees forming the grove are inviolate. One should not, in fact, even enter the grove. Thus, as Sophocles has a stranger say to Oedipus who has strayed into a sacred place, “It is forbidden to walk on that ground … It is not to be touched.”12 A similar sense of the sacred is present in God’s encounter with Moses in the burning bush, when he is bidden to stop and remove his sandals.13 The sacred cannot be entered or used. It is what is withdrawn from the “earthly economy”—that system of exchange by which we live. It is not something that can be bought or sold or used in any form of exchange. Its transcendence of the economy can also be thought of in terms of God’s being prior to creation. As prior, he is, by definition, set apart. To experience him as set apart is to experience the sacred in the sense just defined.

EMBODIMENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE 195 If our experience of God were simply that of his transcendence, we would, in Hume’s words, be left only with “the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity.” We could not say what we believed in. Here, as we said, the transcendence of God threatens to undermine the very notion of the divine. The Bible, however, also emphasizes the carnal intimacy of God’s relation to us. This emphasis ill accords with the supposition that our soul, as opposed to our body, is what makes us an image of God. For Plato, the contact with the divine was that of our intelligence to the intelligible. It was exemplified by our attempts to grasp, first, the eternal ideas and, then, “the Good.”14 By contrast, the Bible’s preferred metaphor involves the bodily relation of God to his people. Isaiah, for example, writes: “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you” (Is. 62:5). Hosea, another prophet, has God say, “I will betroth you to me forever” (Hosea 2:19). The Apostle Paul picks up this carnal relation—though without the erotic implications—in speaking of Christians as forming the body of Christ. He writes, “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body (I Cor. 13). This emphasis on the body is also present in the Apostle’s Creed, which includes the affirmation, “I believe in … the resurrection of the body [σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν].” In such examples, the intimacy of our relation to the divine is understood in terms of the relation of flesh to itself—the very flesh, σάρξ, that is resurrected to “eternal life.”

Flesh and Transcendence Given its emphasis on transcendence, why does the Biblical tradition choose the body to describe our relation to the divine? Is not carnal experience opposed to the encounter with the transcendent? To answer these questions, we have to turn to the concrete experience of our flesh. Flesh, in such experience, exhibits itself as uncannily similar to the transcendent God. For the Israelites, the chief characteristic of God, the creator, is his unique singularity. When the book of Deuteronomy proclaims, “Hear, O Israel: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” it is affirming that he is known in only one

196 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS example (Deu. 6:4). The same uniqueness holds for our knowledge of our flesh. It appears in the fact that our flesh is at the basis of our being ourselves rather than someone else. The flesh that we directly encounter is, as has been stressed, not one among many, but uniquely our own. This very uniqueness causes our embodiment to show another characteristic of the divine: it makes it transcend our conceptualization. Given that we have only one example of the flesh that incarnates us, it cannot be defined—i.e., specified in terms of species and genus. It can only be directly sensed.15 This uniqueness, as noted, makes it inexpressible in the common meanings of our language, which, by definition, apply to more than one object. With this, we have the conceptual transcendence of flesh. Its inability to be conceptualized recalls Aquinas’s description of God as esse tantum, as existence considered apart from essence. Flesh also gives itself as escaping conceptualization, i.e., as apart from any defining essence. There is, moreover, a parallel with Anselm’s description of God as “something greater than can be thought.” The experience of the divine is an experience of this excess. It is, we noted, an experience of a givenness that escapes our comprehension. The same holds with regard to our encounter with our flesh. It is an encounter with a radical uniqueness. In this uniqueness, its givenness exceeds the properties that it shares with the flesh of others—these being, for example, the common properties that make it an object of biological and medical studies. The excess, here, is its manifestation as our own existing flesh. Because of this uniqueness, our flesh shares with the divine the sense of being sacred—that is, the sense of being withdrawn from the earthly economy. Our economic relations consist in the exchange of goods and services. The latter are the acts that we can perform for one another. Such acts cannot include those that comprise our organic functioning. To return to the common example, another person cannot eat my meal for me. His being satisfied does not alleviate my hunger. The same holds for the death—the cessation of functioning—that, as Heidegger remarked, each us must privately undergo.16 A similar withdrawal shows itself with regard to the exchange of goods. It is, perhaps, best illustrated in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, with its account of Shylock’s inability

EMBODIMENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE 197 to collect on his debt of a pound of flesh. The exchange economy consists of substitutable items, with currency serving as a universal substitute. But flesh, Shylock realizes, is inherently non-substitutable and, hence, incapable of serving as a currency. In fact, as Shakespeare’s example illustrates, to experience the flesh that incarnates us is to encounter the interruption of every system of exchange. We experience the interruption as a withdrawal. The experience is one of the sacredness and moral inviolability of flesh. A similar resemblance holds with regard to our experience of God as the Mysterium Tremendum, the mystery before which we tremble. Like God, flesh also exhibits a givenness that escapes our comprehension. It, too, directs us beyond the givenness of the world to that which is responsible for such givenness. Thus, God’s causality is external to the world. As prior to the world, he is not bound by its temporality. Outside of its temporality, he acts on what is temporally within it. This implies that both the beginningpoint and the end-point of his action display the paradoxical quality of being both inside and outside of time. Thus, in terms of what follows it, the beginning-point is in time. But in terms of what precedes it (and which could temporally condition it), the beginning point is not in time. The same holds, in reverse order, for the endpoint of God’s action. What follows the end is not in time and, hence, is not conditioned by what precedes the end. Both the beginning and the end thus have the paradoxical quality of being onesided borders. The same holds, we saw, for our birth and death. Phenomenologically regarded, they share this paradoxical quality. Behind this is the fact that our flesh is basic to our making sense of the world. Through its senses, it provides the material for the syntheses that result in apprehension. Not that we are passive observers. We rely on the motility that our body affords us to manipulate and move around objects and, thus, register their different sides. Without this, we could not synthesize or put together what we see so as to grasp objects as identities that show themselves first from one side and then another. The role of flesh in our apprehension of the world is, of course, a point that has been repeatedly stressed. At its basis is the fact that the givenness of the world is founded on the givenness of our flesh—i.e., on the giving that it provides through

198 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS its senses and actions. This implies that flesh’s own beginning and end cannot be grasped in terms of the world. Since we lack the requisite experience—the experience of an occurring before we were born or after we die—we cannot directly constitute (or know) the sense of our own birth and death. What we confront in flesh is thus, once again, akin to Aquinas’s esse tantum. We confront a giving that is prior to our categories, a giving that supports and yet escapes our conceptual categorizations. Such giving mirrors on an individual level the causality of God. The Mosaic tradition derives God’s transcendence, unique singularity and sacred character from his creative causality. The same qualities, however, also follow from the causality of our flesh, i.e., its providing the basis for our access to the world.

Transcendence and the Intimacy of Flesh If we accept this, we cannot say that carnal experience is opposed to the encounter with the transcendent. Such experience exhibits both intimacy and transcendence. In fact, transcendence, here is a function of the intimacy of embodiment. I experience this intimacy each time I touch myself, when, for example, I place my hand on my cheek. Doing so I feel myself being touched. The touching hand functions as a subject, while the cheek stands as an object. There is, however, a reversibility here. My cheek, in feeling itself being touched, also feels the hand. As a place of disclosure, it functions as a subject, exhibiting the hand’s objective roughness or smoothness. Paul employs the intimacy of this relation in his descriptions of the body of Christ. According to Paul, every member of this body is both subject and object. Being both, each acknowledges and shares in the other members’ experience. Previous chapters have described how such intimacy involves transcendence—a transcendence arising from the inner alterity of our flesh. We experience it each time we apprehend our body as a sensible object. The apprehension occurs with our loss of it as a sentient subject. The same holds in reverse fashion: we cannot apprehend it as a subject without losing it as an object. There is, in other words, never a merging of the touching and the touched. As we cited Merleau-Ponty, a gap

EMBODIMENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE 199 always opens up between “my body touched and my body touching.”17 The “dehiscence” or bursting open of the two is an expression of the body’s inner transcendence. The transcendence that appears here is, in fact, the same as the transcendence that occupied Hume: it is an escape from conceptualization. We have treated this escape as a function of the unique singularity of the flesh that embodies us. Here, it appears in our inability to grasp flesh in its character of being both subject and object. The apprehension of it as a subject excludes its grasp as an object, and vice versa. We are both, but we cannot grasp both together. This inability is related to the unique singularity of our flesh. Our ability to feel ourselves being touched distinguishes us from all other objects. Touching them, we do not feel their being touched. Self-touch, in other words, is experienced in only one example. Behind it is the fact that we are the only object we encounter that is both subject and object. Now, our inability to grasp ourselves as both is not just practical, but also ontological. Our flesh is the only sensing subject that we can directly experience. As such, it has, like God, the status of being a unique singular. As touched, however, it becomes an object. In Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, it “descends into the things.” It becomes one of the many objects that we can encounter. It has the status of a numerical, as opposed to a unique singular. In this guise, it offers itself to conceptualization. The flesh that stands as object can, for example, be the subject of a science and be exhibited in medical textbooks. This exhibition, however, is one with the withdrawal of its unique singularity. In this, it mirrors the withdrawal of God when we try to delimit him in terms drawn from the world—for example, when we make the sacred part of the earthly economy of exchange. .

Resolution of the Dilemma Hume’s dilemma works by radically opposing transcendence to immanence. For Hume, God’s transcendence is such that he becomes totally other and, as such, unknowable. Any attempt to regard him as immanent, that is, to describe him in terms of our experience, cannot overcome this transcendence. Because of this, it

200 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS can only lead to an anthropomorphism that, at best, is inappropriate, and, at worst, absurd. Believers thus face the choice of speaking nonsense or admitting that they have no conception of the object of their faith. This dilemma grows out of the philosophical tradition’s contempt for the body—a contempt that ranges from Plato to Heidegger. Those who embrace this tradition ignore the transcendence that is inherent in our embodiment, a transcendence that proceeds ontologically from numerical to unique singularity, from flesh as conceivable to flesh as surpassing all conception. This transcendence suggests that our own bodily experience can serve as a basis for a grasp of the divine. Not all attempts to describe God in terms of our experience lead necessarily to an absurd anthropomorphism. The transcendence and unique singularity that characterize our carnal experience can be taken as an openness that sees in flesh the presence of the divine. The conception of such presence is not simply that of an empty possibility. It is exemplified by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. To understand this doctrine phenomenologically is the task that now faces us. The phenomenology we will employ has itself been transformed by our focus on embodiment. In employing the insights of the present chapter, our goal will be to resolve the difficulties we confronted in discussing theodicy—in particular, those involving the economy of suffering and sacrifice.

Chapter XV Flesh and Forgiveness Thus far our treatment of sacrifice has focused on the sense that is implicit in the Latin equivalent, sacrificium, which joins the concept of facere (to do or perform) with sacra (sacred things). It signifies the rites of making offerings to the gods. Plato brings out its character as an exchange when he has a priest define piety as “service of the gods.”1 Prayer and sacrifice is what we offer to the gods; in return they provide us with their benefits. Chapter XII discussed the difficulties with this notion. There is, first of all, the problem of the transcendence of the divine, which is its transcendence of any economy. Thus, Plato raised the question of what the gods could possibly gain from us. Are they hungry so that they need the goat that is slaughtered? Do libations appease their thirst? The difficulty only increases when, with Christianity, we conceive of a God that created heaven and earth. As absolutely prior, he seems to exceed all human understanding, including all conceptions of a quid pro quo exchange. A second difficulty concerned the role of flesh in such an exchange. Insofar as its suffering is understood as a payment for sins, it functions as a kind of currency. But the suffering of flesh is always personal. It is as little capable of functioning as a means of exchange as one’s body. To forget this is to imagine, as Shylock did, that a pound of flesh could stand as surety for a debt. Finally, there is the problem that arises when we see the suffering of Christ as a payment for the “debt” incurred by humans for their misdeeds. God, in collecting this debt, appears as a moral monster. He also appears as such, when we attempt to justify the Shoah as the working out of God’s plan to return the Jews to Israel. The human, intersubjective meaning of sacrifice, where we speak of sacrifice for Others, escapes from these difficulties. Parents, for example, sacrifice for their children: they do without, saving for their tuition, so that their children can have advantages that they did not have. Soldiers also sacrifice themselves for their 201

202 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS comrades—often to the point of giving up their lives. What is common to such sacrifices is their transcendence of the economy of exchange. Genuine sacrifice, here, is not transactional. It is not a quid pro quo. To take the extreme example, the soldier has nothing worldly to gain in giving up his life. Similarly, the parent who spends sleepless nights to stay with a sick child does not think of a return. This does not mean that the human sense of sacrifice is unproblematic. Its difficulties, however, are the opposite of those presented by the religious, economic conception. While the latter places us in a transactional relation with the divine, placing both parties in an economy, the human sense of sacrifice assumes that we can transcend economic relations. The question, here, is: how can we be capable of this? We literally live by exchange: We are dependent on the air we breathe, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide. We also need the water that we drink and the food we eat, both of which involve exchange. In fact, exchange is built into the metabolic processes that sustain us. We cannot live without them. The same holds on the social level. Aristotle, regarding our dependence on others, claimed that a solitary human being “may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.”2 This means, as we cited him, “the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing.” 3 She can only live in an economy with others. Given this, to assert that humans are capable of sacrifice seems to contradict their sense as defined by exchange. A similar aporia, we note, also arises when we assert that we are capable of forgiveness. Forgiveness contradicts the economy of justice. It suspends the exchange of penalties for misdeeds that courts impose. But without such an exchange, i.e., without justice, humans could not maintain the social functioning that supports their interdependent existence. Both meanings of sacrifice thus seem to contradict themselves. Whatever model of sacrifice we turn to, we have to assume that the human and the divine are characterized by both transcendence and immanence. Thus, the religious model assumes the immanence of the divine is making God (or the gods) trading partners with humans. To sacrifice to pay debts to or gain benefits from them assumes that they are part of the economy that defines us. Yet the very definition of their divinity, as Plato points out, demands their

FLESH AND FORGIVENESS 203 transcendence. Such transcendence, however, destabilizes the very notion of exchange, since, in the face of it, all calculation fails. Similarly, the human sense of sacrifice implies our transcendence since it assumes our independence of transactional relations. Yet, it also takes for granted our immanence in the systems of exchange that are necessary for our survival. It does so when it assumes the embodiment that places us in such systems. Thus, we cannot speak of a parent giving up sleep without assuming embodiment. The same holds for a soldier sacrificing his life. What does this assumption of both immanence and transcendence point to? Is there a way to think them together to come up with a coherent concept of sacrifice?

Embodiment and Transcendence The role that embodiment plays in the human sense of sacrifice points to the fact that embodiment, itself, involves transcendence. Such transcendence is, in fact, implicit in the critique of the view that sees suffering as a kind of currency. As just noted, suffering is always personal; it is inalienable as one’s body. Given this, it cannot function in an economy. As that which nails one to one’s flesh, physical suffering is, rather, transcendent in the sense that it is an interruption of every form of exchange. This interruption follows from the fact that our flesh is our own. It expresses, as we saw, what cannot be transferred to the Other. The same holds for the suffering that flesh undergoes. As non-transferable, it cannot, by definition, serve as a currency. We hardly ever grasp this because the flesh that incarnates us escapes all conceptualization. It exists in only in one example; and, as such, it is inexpressible in the common meanings of our language. This does not mean that it escapes all universality. While it is not common like a genus or a species, the flesh that suffering exhibits, pertains to each of us. To borrow a term from Nietzsche, what we confront here are universalia ante rem (universals before the thing). Concepts are universalia post rem (universals after the thing); they are universals that we draw after we regard similar individuals. The flesh that each of us directly encounters is, however, before such individuals.4

204 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS Regarding such flesh, we have to say that it is both immanent and transcendent. It is the embodiment that places us in the economy. Yet it, itself, transcends this economy since it is incapable of participating in it. The economy of sacrifice thus involves both embodiment and the interruption that is based on this.5 Flesh, here, has a liminal quality belonging completely neither to one side nor to the other. On the one hand, our embodied needs for food, clothing, and shelter thrust us into the economy. On the other hand, our embodiment transcends this economy since it, in its uniqueness, is incapable of participating in it. One cannot, as Shakespeare pointed out, pay for a debt with a pound of one’s flesh. Flesh, here, is in the economy as incapable of participating in it: it is in it as an interruption.

Forgiveness and Sacrifice It is possible to understand Christ on the Cross as such an interruption. We do so, when we take his suffering not as a payment, but rather as an interruption of every economy of debt and credit. Christians claim to see God in Christ’s suffering flesh. Viewed in our terms, this is to see him as interrupting the very system of exchange that Paul, relying on Isaiah, uses to understand Christ’s sacrifice. The sense of this interruption also involves forgiveness. Christ says, regarding his crucifiers: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).6 Forgiveness is the interruption of the economy that exchanges evils for evils. It does not reciprocate. It refuses payment by forgiving the trespass or debt of the other. What is the basis for such forgiveness? Incarnate beings are enmeshed in and live from a system of exchange. How is it possible for them to transcend the economy of justice? The Book of Job indicates the answer. It begins with God making a wager with Satan (the “adversary” or “accusing” angel). God praises Job as “a man of blameless and upright life” (Jb 1:8). Satan, in reply, asserts that Job’s goodness is motivated by the benefits he receives. He asks, “Has not Job good reason to be God-fearing? Have you not hedged him round on every side with your protection, him and his family

FLESH AND FORGIVENESS 205 and all his possessions. Whatever he does you have blessed, and his herds have increased beyond measure.” If, however, God withdraws such benefits, “then he will curse you to your face” (Jb 1: 911). The wager, then, is that Job’s goodness is simply a function of the economy. His goodness is dependent on the benefits he receives. Insofar as his relation to God is a relation to such benefits, it is simply transactional. God accepts this wager and tells Satan, “All that he has is in your hands” (Jb 1:12). Satan, accordingly, destroys Job’s wealth and family, leaving only his wife alive. Job, however, does not curse God. Rather, he proclaims, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the Name of the Lord” (Jb 1:21). Satan next induces God to let him ruin Job’s health. He says to God, “But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and see if he will not curse you to your face” (Jb 2:5). Still, however, Job retains his integrity. He does not curse God, he does not return evil for evil. Reduced to his suffering flesh, he is placed outside of the economy. The flesh that incarnates him can offer nothing to the economy. Yet Job claims, “if He sifts me, I will shine.” What shines through is the basis for the forgiveness that appears at the end of the book. God, after having said that Job, rather than the comforters with their economic explanations, has spoken the truth about him, asks Job to pray that they will be forgiven. He adds, “And I will listen to him with favor and excuse your folly in not speaking of me properly as my servant Job has done” (Jb 42:8). Job’s position to ask forgiveness is given by his flesh. The interruption of the economy, exhibited by his flesh, is also a manifestation of the transcendence on which God wagered. Thus, Job shines like gold insofar as he shows that his relation to God is not economic. It is a matter of his integrity, his uniqueness in not being defined by exchange. The same relation between flesh and forgiveness can be drawn from the story of Abraham pleading for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Again and again, he intercedes for them. He gets God to “pardon the place” if there are, first, “fifty good men in the city,” then, “forty-five,” then, “forty,” then, “thirty,” then, “twenty,” and, finally, if “ten can be found there” (Gen 18:23-33). What is striking in this pleading is Abraham’s remark, “May I presume to speak to the Lord, dust and ashes that I am” (Gen 18:27-28). How is this a

206 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS basis for his pleading for the city’s pardon? According to Genesis, the city’s sins merited its destruction. The economy of misdeed and penalty was clear. Such an economy, however, is interrupted by flesh—the very flesh that Abraham references in speaking of himself as “dust and ashes.” With this, we return to the themes of the previous chapter. Its point was that the uniqueness and transcendence of God is mirrored in our flesh. God’s uniqueness, we noted, is expressed in his authorship of creation. In this, he distinguishes himself from his creations. He is outside of the economy that sustains them. As such, no “trading skill,” as Plato put it, is appropriate in our relations to him; neither is the exchange of evils for evils. Given this, he can only be present in the world as outside of its economy. The Gospel of Mathew indicates this presence when it describes those whom Jesus will admit to his kingdom when he “comes in his glory.” These will be those who fed him when he was hungry, gave him drink when he was thirsty, clothed him when he was naked, made him welcome when he was a stranger and visited him when he was in prison. The chosen ask, when did we do this? Jesus in his glory replies that when they did it “to one of the very least”—that is, to the hungry, the naked, the rejected of society—they did it to him (Mt 25: 33-40). Here, the divine presence is exhibited by those, like Job, who have nothing to offer the economy. Reduced to their flesh, they interrupt its processes. The same holds for the flesh that Christ exhibits on the cross. Like the flesh of those whom the chosen succor, it also appears as the point where the human meets the divine. Our relation to such flesh must, as the story indicates, transcend the economy. We must give to those who cannot reciprocate. We must also break the economy of evil for evil through acts of forgiveness.

Evil and Theodicy What does the above say about the presence of evil? Augustine, we recall, took evil as a lack. It is the privation of positive qualities. The truth of his remark is that, as a privation, evil gives us nothing positive to hold on to. In this, it conceals itself, avoiding any easy explanation. The economy of evil for evil is, in fact, part of this self-

FLESH AND FORGIVENESS 207 concealment. In this economy, every explanation of evil necessarily goes back to previous evil. Whom or what, for example, should we blame for the Second World War? Was it Hitler and the generals who supported him in the hope of avenging the results of the First World War? Is, then, the latter to blame? But many of the animosities that fueled it can be traced to the wars by which Prussia unified Germany—including, most notably, the Franco-Prussian war. Is this, then, the ultimate cause? Or should we go back further to the wars by which the French sought to extend their boundaries eastward? As is obvious, in the chain of actions and reactions, the explanation, as constantly deferred, is nullified. What we can say is that in the economy of evil for evil, disorder in the form of vengeance tends to spread. This, in fact, is the truth behind the extension of Augustine’s insight occasioned by the doctrine of the transcendent properties of being. If such properties imply each other, then evil lacks not just goodness, but also being, unity and truth. It will show itself in disorder, lies, and our inability to pin it down when we interpret it in terms of an economy. Where the extension fails is in its failure to realize that the extension, itself, is part of the self-concealment of evil. In the equivalence of goodness, being, unity, and truth, evil has no place. It is ruled out ontologically as a nothingness that cannot show itself. Such self-concealment continues when we assert that to act a thing must first be. Action, in other words, follows upon being. Thus, God’s power follows from his being; and since he is supremely existent, his action must be all-encompassing. With this, we set the stage for the theodicy that asks: Where was God in the holocaust? Why didn’t he intervene? Was he powerless? Or simply malevolent in failing to prevent suffering when he could? Given the equivalence of being, goodness, unity and truth, the theodicy that attempts to answer such questions appears at an impasse. It cannot explain the presence of evil without undermining God’s power, goodness, or intelligibility. Its inability, in fact, points to itself as part of the self-concealment of evil This concealment involves our responsibility for the evil we commit. Genesis emphasizes this in its account of the first murder. As we recall, God tells Cain that he need not murder Able; he can

208 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS master his desire. God’s lordship, in this account, is not a compelling force. The creature, in its being, is not, according to Genesis, absorbed by the being of the creator. Levinas makes this point when he writes: “The great force of the idea of creation such as it was contributed by monotheism is that … the separated and created being is thereby not simply issued forth from the father, but is absolutely other than him.”7 This otherness is such that the individual must take responsibility for his actions. He also must take responsibility for breaking the chain of vengeance, of acting, through forgiveness, to interrupt the economy of evil for evil. To apply this to theodicy is to eliminate the economic explanation that, in Derrida’s words, understands belief in terms of a “history of credence or credit.”8 In Christian terms, it is to see how the justification of God’s ways to man involves the Incarnation. It is to focus on Christ’s suffering flesh, not as a payment within some economy, but rather as its interruption. This interruption has to be understood as breaking the self-concealment of evil, a concealment that occurs when we interpret it in terms of an economy. What breaks this is the flesh that, in its uniqueness, is our identity with the divine. Such uniqueness points to our unavoidable responsibility. Not only does Christ’s flesh, in its uniqueness, underpin God’s identification with those who suffer. As a basis for forgiveness, it is also God’s presence in a world marked by human evil.

Transcendence and Immanence With this, we have the resolution of the oppositions between transcendence and immanence that characterize the human and the religious senses of sacrifice. Its human meaning implies our transcendence of systems of exchange. But how can a being whose embodiment thrusts it into the economy transcend the latter? Similarly, the religious meaning of sacrifice implies the immanence of the divine. Yet, how can God—particularly, the God of Genesis— abandon his transcendence? The answer to the first question has already been indicated. The very embodiment that immerses us in the economy also provides, in its uniqueness, a basis for transcendence. In interrupting the economy, it provides a place for

FLESH AND FORGIVENESS 209 forgiveness. This place is its universality before things—i.e., before the divisions that allow us to order them into species and genera. God, in his uniqueness, occupies this place in his being before creation. We, in the unique singularity of our flesh, mirror this condition. Such mirroring may be likened to our being called the “image of God” (Gen 1:26-27). Like God, we transcend the economy, this transcendence being inherent in our embodiment. Embodiment, here, is more than what Levinas calls the “famished stomach that has no ears”—i.e., the natural egotism that characterizes flesh.9 It is also the basis for our sociality. It is what allows us to sense the hunger of the Other as an interruption of our own embodied enjoyment. We feel, pre-conceptually, the hunger of the other both as our own and as an interruption of the economy that divides things into “mine and thine.” With this, we have the answer to the difficulty regarding God’s transcendence. How can God remain God, i.e., maintain the transcendence that defines the divine, and yet become part of the human world? Insofar as such transcendence is his uniqueness— his numerical singularity—the answer is that he can do so by assuming flesh. This assumption of flesh involves a double disclosure. In becoming flesh, God immerses himself in the economy brought about by our finitude and needs. The Incarnation is his disclosure as the flesh that is hungry and thirsty, that is capable of bodily attachments and is subject to the assaults of the world. As the latter, it is his assumption of the flesh that is capable of suffering and dying on the Cross: the flesh that pays the penalty for misdeeds. This very immersion in the economy is, however, also its interruption. The uniqueness of the flesh that is thrust into the economy discloses itself as incapable of being considered a mere item of exchange. Its singularity makes it transcend its being defined in such terms. One cannot guarantee a debt through offering to forfeit a pound of flesh. The flesh that embodies us is not a matter of legal exchange. Flesh is, rather, a basis for our transcending this exchange. This is why Shakespeare’s Portia, in pointing out the impossibility of the forfeit, also speaks about mercy. At the deepest level, such transcendence is one of the economy that divides things into “mine and thine.” It can be thought of as the

210 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS transcendence of the universalia ante rem. It can also be understood as an expression of the non-extended coincidence Husserl ascribed to egos on the primal level. Another expression of it is the suffering that for Levinas exists as “the refusal of meaning, thrusting itself forward as a sensible quality.”10 For Levinas, we recall, it is the “unmeaning,” “absurdity” of suffering that makes it intrinsically useless. It is its quality as the rejection of “the synthesis of the Kantian ‘I think’” that puts it beyond every sense we might make of it. For us, such unmeaning is a function of the unique singularity of the flesh that suffers. Numerical singulars exhibit their transcendence through their simple alterity. Unique singulars exhibit theirs in bridging this. They exhibit their transcendence by manifesting a level of our being that allows us to feel the distress and needs of the Other as an interruption of our own. We can see this interruption in Matthew’s account of those who will be admitted into Christ’s kingdom. They are those who recognized his presence in individuals who have nothing to offer the economy. Christ’s identification with the helpless and the vulnerable leads Paul to describe the Incarnation as a kenosis, an emptying out. In his words, God, in incarnating himself, “made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave” (Philippians 2:7). The completion of this self-emptying is Christ’s appearance on the Cross. At the end of his earthly life, he appears as the wretched creature who cries out, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). In Christ’s very nakedness and exposure, in his having absolutely nothing to offer to the earthly economy, Christians are supposed to see God. What they view is his reduction to suffering flesh. The focus of their gaze is on what is uniquely singular—the flesh that is not one-among-many, but uniquely one. To see such flesh as embodying his sacrifice is to grasp their own uniqueness and capability for sacrifice. To resolve the aporias regarding sacrifice is, in fact, to see the flesh that Christ assumes as the human presence of God, a presence born by each of us in our singularity.

Afterword The arc of this book has embraced disparate topics. It began by recounting Husserl’s analysis of the facts that mark the finitude of our flesh—those of birth, death, and the periods of unconsciousness that occur in dreamless sleep. It ended with the assertion that our flesh, in its singularity, bears witness to the presence of God. A reader who has traced the course of its chapters through topics as various as trust, violence, sacrifice, and social change is entitled to ask the overriding theme of its inquiry. A first answer is that this is unique singularity—the unique singularity that characterizes God, the world, and our embodiment. Not only are God and the flesh that incarnates us uniquely one; the world is as well. As Husserl writes, “the world does not exist like an entity, an object, but exists in a singularity for which the plural is senseless.”1 We are not conscious of it as a thing among things, but rather “as a horizon.” A horizon is a series of experiences that have been connected and, in their connections, determine the further experiences which can join this series. Through their connections, our perceptions determine the sense of individual objects. In Husserl’s words, “the individual thing has a sense in perception only through an open horizon of ‘possible perceptions,’”—the perceptions, for example, of a perspectivally connected series, which allows us to posit a spatialtemporal object. With this, we come to a second response to the question. The theme is not just unique singularity, but also facticity. Husserl asserts that the connections that allow us to posit objects are not necessary. The course of consciousness that gives them, he asserts, is “the factual (das Factische).” 2 This signifies that the uniquely singular world, the world that we are conscious of as an unending horizon of all the horizons that allow us to posit individual objects, has a factual basis. This basis is prior to the phenomenology that explores the connections of consciousness and the various positings that these allow. To cite Husserl again: “Prior, then, to transcendental phenomenology, it is, therefore, a fact that the course of consciousness

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212 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS is so structured that within it a nature as a ‘rational’ unity can constitute itself.”3 What sets this fact? Husserl takes it as determined in advance by a teleology whose telos is God, who is understood as an ultimate logos or rational principle. An alternative answer focuses on our embodiment. The flesh that incarnates us structures the course of consciousness. Thus, the motion that such flesh makes possible sets the flow of our experiences—for examples, the successive perceptions that fill consciousness as we walk down the street. The contents of our perceptions is given by our senses. Because we have eyes capable of colored vision, the course of our experience is filled with colored qualia. The same holds for our other senses as we “line” or “paper over” the world with our bodily senses. With this, we have the link between the unique singularity of the world and that of the flesh that incarnates us. Our body, in “lining” the world, determines its horizons. Doing so, it imposes its unique singularity on the world taken as a horizon. Yet, as Chapter IV indicated, it is possible to reverse this conclusion. From a Darwinian perspective all the features of our embodiment, from the shape and function of our hands to the type and acuity of our senses, are determined by our evolutionary history. Here, as we wrote, the “phenomenological horizon is founded on the ontological one of the animate and inanimate entities” of the world that evolutionarily shaped and presently environs us. The coherence of this world, its unique singularity as an ontological horizon understood as a “web of life,” is here understood as imposing its unique singularity on our embodiment. It shapes the embodiment that determines the course of our consciousness. When we take these two, apparently opposing conclusions together, a third response to the question of the overriding theme of this book appears. It is that of the intertwining of self and world. Each determines the other and their determination is such that we cannot think of either factor without the other. Does this third response lead to the relativism that Husserl so assiduously tried to avoid? The dependence of the course of consciousness on our embodiment, especially when we take the latter as evolutionarily dependent, raises the specter of its radical contingency. In Darwin’s conception, evolution is animated by “the

AFTERWORD 213 struggle for existence.” This implies, Nietzsche writes, that “we have senses for only a selection of perceptions—those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves.”4 The same holds for our epistemological claims. Preservation, rather than the objective state of things, determines what counts as knowledge. As Nietzsche expresses this: “The meaning of ‘knowledge’ ... is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. ... The utility of preservation—not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observation suffices for our preservation.”5 The crude expression of this, as was earlier noted, is the claim that “even logic alters with the development of the brain."6 At the basis of such claims is, of course, a naturalistic interpretation of our embodiment. In a late essay, Husserl protests against this, writing, “One should not engage in the absurdity … of presupposing in advance the dominating, naturalistic interpretation of the world and then … consider the development of science and [its] account of the world as something that contingently happened on earth.” The same holds for “human history” and “the history of the species.”7 Such things are essentially and necessarily tied to the earth. Husserl, in this essay, justifies this conclusion through the paradoxical claim, “The earth does not move.”8 The assertion is not meant to contest the Copernican claim that the earth does, in fact, move, revolving about the sun. Rather, Husserl is focused on the fact that both motion and rest require a reference point, i.e., a ground (Boden) in terms of which we can say that an object moves or stands still. If we take the earth as such a ground, then we distinguish it from the objects that move or rest upon it. This means, he writes: “The earth itself in its original conception neither moves nor remains at rest. Rest and motion first have sense in relation to the earth.”9 It is not just the earth that functions as a reference point for motion. The same can be said of my body. In Husserl’s words: “My body (Leib), primordially experienced, neither moves away nor rests … unlike external bodies.”10 His point is that I cannot depart from my body or it from me: “whether I stand still or move, I still have my body (Leib) as a center and a physical body (Körper) that

214 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS does not depart.” It does not change place or remain like other bodies.11 Rather, I measure their motion or rest relatively to myself. What is the relation between the earth and my body considered as reference points? Neither, regarded in itself, is capable of motion and rest in the way that other objects are. Internally, of course, each is capable of motion. The tides of the sea rise and fall. Walking, I move my legs. Neither the tides nor my legs, however, can be said to depart from their reference points. What can depart from the earth—Husserl here speaks of “spaceships”—are Körper. But for those remaining on the earth, they no longer serve as reference points The same holds with regard to my body. The limb I might lose is no longer part of my Leib understood as a center. Thus, neither the earth nor my body are for Husserl physical bodies (Körper). When we consider them as such, they lose their grounding quality with respect to rest and motion. For the “dominating, naturalistic interpretation of the world,” such a loss is always possible. We can imagine humanities on other planets who regard the earth as one moving object among others. We can also assert that “animate bodies [Leiber] are only contingently distinct physical bodies, which could conceivably not exist” without disturbing the physical order.12 For Husserl, such speculations are basically perverse. They amount to asserting that “the development of science and [its] account of the world as something that contingently happened on earth.”13 In fact, the basic assumption of the naturalistic attitude is that the world that science describes obtains whether or not there are scientists, whether or not, in fact, there are animate bodies (Leiber). But, Husserl asks: “What sense could colliding bodies have in space—in an absolutely homogenous space, in such a space set up apriori in advance—if we get rid of constitutive life.”14 In fact, “the earth can no more lose its sense as ‘the primal place of home’ [Urheimstätte], as the ark of the world, than my body [Leib] can lose its unique sense as the primordial body [Urleib] from which every [other] body [Leib] draws its sense of being.”15 The reason for this is that they serve as the basis for constitution. Beginning from my sense of my body as my own, I constitute Others as embodied subjects. Similarly, from the basis of the sense of the earth as a reference point,

AFTERWORD 215 I constitute physical bodies as defined by rest and motion. Understood in this sense, both the earth and my body distinguish themselves from what they allow to be constituted. As unique bases, both show themselves to be uniquely singular. With this, we can state the fourth theme of our book, the question of relativization. Does our recourse to the fact of the body return us to the relativism that Husserl so opposed? It would if the body were a contingent thing among things. The fact that it could be other would imply that the course of consciousness that it structures—along with the knowledge that grows from this—could also be other. The same holds for the earth in its intertwining with our embodied selfhood—i.e., in its role in “human history,” which includes the development of the natural sciences. The assertion that neither the earth nor the body moves is meant to deny such contingency. In regarding them, we confront not contingent, but rather “absolute” facts. Such facts cannot be other since they stand as the ground of becoming other.16 Without them, contingencies—such as being in this place rather than another, moving rather than being at rest, etc.—have no sense. Here, the basic “absurdity” (Verkehrtheit) of the natural attitude is simply a category mistake: one of conflating the ground with that which it grounds. In engaging in this, science undermines itself. It relativizes the basis of its own procedure. We can make the same point by recalling Patočka’s apriori. He asserts that “[t]h original possibilities (the world) are simply the field where the living being exists, the field that is co-original with [this world].” As set of “legalities,” they determine the world “as a field of appearing,” 17 Such original possibilities are not themselves contingent. They cannot be other since they themselves determine the possibilities of being other. What can be other are the possibilities that a particular sentient being instantiates. In Patočka's words, “my totality of possibilities” are “a selection” made from the original possibilities.18 What makes this selection is my embodiment. It gives me the senses that “paper” over the world. It determines whether I have color vision, whether such vision is binocular or not, and so on. Is, then, this body, in its determination of appearing, contingent? It would be if we could be imagined to violate the legalities of appearing as such—if, for

216 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS example, it could violate the legality that spatial-temporal objects appear perspectivally, that they cannot show a finite observer all their sides at once. Given, however, that the body determines appearing by exhibiting a subset of such legalities, this is not possible. The “earth,” taken as such legalities does not move. Its stability is also that of the subset applicable to my body’s role in making the world appear. In their different ways, the themes we have mentioned have transformed the phenomenology at work in this book. To engage them is to face the decision points that have determined the path of its enquiry. This can be put in terms of the phenomenological conception of constitution or synthesis. To constitute is to seek to posit a referent expressing the sense of what we experience. In straightforward perception, this is the “unity of sense” that we aim at when we see an object first from one side and then another. When we grasp such views as aspects of one and the same object, we make sense of what we see. This constituted sense is the object itself as the unitary referent for our perceptions. Can we apply this procedure to ourselves? Can we make sense of our being in the world? As we have seen, the attempt to do so is fraught with ambiguity. Not only are self and world intertwined, neither of them is capable of being presented as an objective unity of sense. Thus, when we try to make sense of our embodied selfhood, we confront a ground that both appears and yet escapes the net of meaning. It appears as an animate body among others and yet, in its unique singularity, it cannot be caught by any semantic net. Similarly, it appears as a fact—the fact of my embodiment—and yet, as an “absolute” fact, it escapes contingency. As we have seen, such appearing and escape manifest themselves in theological terms when we attempt to understand the Incarnation. Here, the appearing and escape is in terms of the earthly economy. They manifest themselves in the relations of justice and mercy. In philosophical terms, the appearing and escape point to ourselves in our divided being as both object and subject, both as disclosed and as a place of disclosure. As Merleau-Ponty points out, we cannot be both. To grasp one aspect of the self is to let the other aspect escape. The same holds for the incarnate God and the world taken as “the primal place of home”

AFTERWORD 217 (Urheimstätte). As we have presented them, all three—self, incarnate God, and world—are intertwined. Our flesh, understood as an interruption, points both to the world and to the God that seeks to incarnate itself. In each case, the intertwining involves a gap—a tear in the constitutive syntheses by which we attempt, in general, to understand. The result is that our efforts constantly point to what is beyond. The phenomenology we engage in is always on the way. The “absolute facts” it encounters—the original possibilities that, for Patočka, are the world, always invite us to continue our enquiries.

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Endnotes Introduction 1

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3

4

As George Berkeley shows, to assume this is to make a decision. As he points out, experientially, the primary qualities of bodies, rather than being independent causes of sensuously perceivable qualities, are, in fact, dependent on the latter. This means that “[a]bstracted from all other [sensuous] qualities,” the primary are “inconceivable.” (Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, §10 [La Salle, Open Court, 1963], p. 35). Thus, we cannot think of extension apart from color, or think of motion apart from extension and color. In short, we cannot number what we cannot see, and seeing is a matter, not of primary, but rather of secondary qualities. Plato, “Phaedo,” in The Dialogues of Plato, 2 vols. trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 485. This asserts that the path that an object takes is such as to minimize at every instant the product of mass times velocity times distance. Mathematically expressed, it is the path that minimizes the integral of Mvds over the distance ds: 𝑀𝑣𝑑𝑠. According to Bergson, for actual consciousness, the “succeeding each other” of mental states “means melting into one another and forming an organic whole.” Language breaks up this whole into individual, namable referents. Following its lead, one “substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. The result is a “self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces” (Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. I. Pogson [New York: Macmillan, 1959], p. 128). For Bergson, then, “our perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas occur under two aspects: the one clear and precise, but impersonal.” This is the aspect given by language. The second aspect, which occurs prior to language, is “confused, ever changing, and inexpressible.” It is inexpressible “because language cannot get hold of

227

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5

6

7

8

9 10

11

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it without arresting its mobility or fit it into its common-place forms without making it into public property” (ibid., p. 129). “Objective,” since language, both spoken and written, is publicly available. Unlike our private, conscious experiences, it is capable of being present to others. In Heidegger’s terms, this is the disclosure of their “what is it for” and “in-order-to” (Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], pp. 164-65). Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968), p. 70. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 121. As he also puts this: “significations or essences do not suffice to themselves, they overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them from a brute being.” In contrast, “we must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations” (ibid., p. 110). Ibid., p. 158. “Wir bohren und sprengen, wie in dieser Abhandlung überhaupt, allseitig Minengänge nach allen möglichen Seiten, erwägen alle logischen Möglichkeiten und spüren nach, welche davon Wesensmöglichkeiten und Wesensunmöglichkeiten darstellen, und schließlich sichten wir so das System einstimmiger Wesensnotwendigkeiten” (Edmund Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 2001], p. 189). In Frank Jackson’s words, they exist, but “[t]hey do nothing, they explain nothing.” They are “a useless by-product” of our evolutionary development (“Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 135, 134). Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 18. David Chalmers “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness” (1996), p. 8. Available at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~phi los/papers/chalmers.consciousness.html. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Amherst [New York: Prometheus Books 1995], p. 444.

ENDNOTES 229

15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

See ibid., p. 445. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. R. Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) p. 106. This text will be cited as Ideen I. Ibid., p. 109. Ms. C4, 10 b, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 102. The Phenomenon of Life, ed. cit., p. 19. Jonas adds: “this body is the memento of the still unsolved question of ontology, ‘What is being?’ and must be the canon of coming attempts to solve it. These attempts must move beyond the partial abstractions (‘body and soul,’ ‘extension and thought,’ and the like) toward the hidden ground of their unity and thus strive for an integral monism on a plane above the solidified alternatives (ibid.). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908-1937), eds. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2014), p. 11. In Husserl’s words, “Beim Bewusstloswerden ist das Schwinden nicht ein solches der Mannigfaltigkeit der Empfindungsdaten der aufgefassten Gegenstände und so von abgehobenen Gegenständen sonst her, sondern ein Schwinden des affizierten Ich in seinen Affektionen” (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 9). Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 118. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl first states this priority with regard to metaphysics: “Epistemology must not be taken as a discipline which follows metaphysics or even coincides with it; on the contrary, it precedes it as it does psychology and every other discipline” (Logische Untersuchungen, 5th ed., 3 vols., Tübingen, 1968, vol. 1, p. 224). He later extends it to science in general: “Epistemology is situated before all empirical theory; it thus precedes all explanatory sciences of the real—i.e., physical science on the one hand and psychology on the other—and naturally it precedes all metaphysics” (ibid., II/2, p. 21). Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 21. Logical Investigations, I, p. 147, fn. 1.

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27 28 29

30 31 32 33

“Nachwort,” in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 150. This book will be cited as Ideen III. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid. p. 150. As we shall see, it also makes the ego anonymous. In Husserl’s words: “the ego which is the over-against (gegenüber) everything is anonymous. It does not stand against itself. The house stands over against me, not vice versa. And yet I can turn my attention to myself. But then this counterpart (gegenüber) in which the ego comes forward along with everything which was over against it is again split. The ego which comes forward as a counterpart and its counterpart [e.g., the house it was perceiving] are both over-against me. Forthwith, I—the subject of this new counterpart—am anonymous” (Ms. C 2 I, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 2). The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter I: Birth, Death, and Sleep: Limit Problems and the Paradox of Phenomenology 1

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology §53, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 178. Davd Carr, whose seminal book, The Paradox of Subjectivity, focused on this paradox writes: “These two descriptions of the subject—subject for the world and object in the world—are equally necessary and essentially incompatible” (The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999), p. 135. For Carr this incompatibility affects transcendental philosophy as such. In his words: “the practice of transcendental philosophy results in the recognition that the two views of the subject, transcendental and empirical, can be neither avoided nor reconciled. Thus, in my view it concludes in paradox” (ibid., p. 9).

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9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

Ibid., §54a, p. 182. Ibid., §53, p. 180. Ibid., §54a, p. 183. Ibid. Ibid, §54b, p. 186. Ibid. For Husserl, the very notion of a human world involves the succession of generations. Given this, “[it] must be shown that birth and death have to count as constituting events or as essential elements that allow for the constitution of the world” (Ms. E I 4 in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, ed. I. Kern [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973], p. 171). Except for the Crisis, all translations from the German are my own. Ms. C 4, 6b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 96. Ms. C 4, 7a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 97. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 12. “Die pure Hyle ist in einem gewissen Sinne ichlos, die ‚Auffassung; derselben, wodurch sie Erscheinung von Mundanem ist, ist Ichleistung; in den mundanen Auffassungen stecken “implizit” als Erwerbe die früheren Aktivitäten: die Interessen” (Ms. C4, 9a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 100). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 9. Ibid., p. 11. In Husserl’s words, “Beim Bewusstloswerden ist das Schwinden nicht ein solches der Mannigfaltigkeit der Empfindungsdaten der aufgefassten Gegenstände und so von abgehobenen Gegenständen sonst her, sondern ein Schwinden des affizierten Ich in seinen Affektionen” (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 9). Ibid., p. 10. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 11. The full quote in German is: “Das Inhaltliche ist das Ichfremde, das Gefühl ist schon ichlich. Das ‘Ansprechen’ des Inhaltes sei nicht Anruf zu etwas, sondern ein fühlendes Dabei-Sein des Ich und zwar nicht erst als ein Dabeisein durch Hinkommen und Anlangen. Das Ich ist nicht etwas für sich und das Ichfremde ein vom Ich Getrenntes und zwischen beiden ist kein Raum für ein Hinwenden. Sondern untrennbar ist Ich und sein Ichfremdes, bei jedem Inhalt im Inhaltszusammenhang und

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20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

bei dem ganzen Zusammenhang ist das Ich fühlendes” (Ms. C 16, 68a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, pp. 351-52). “Was von Seiten der hyletischen Data Affection auf das Ich heißt, heißt von Seiten des Ich Hintendierien, Hinstreben” (Ms. B III 9, pp. 70a-70b). I am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium for permission to quote from the unpublished manuscripts. C4, 10a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 101. Husserl writes: “The running off of the retentional branches … works on the protention, determining its content, tracing out its sense” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001], p. 38. Without retention, protention is empty, void of content or sense. The German text is: “das Abnehmen der Affektivität, immer größere Unfähigkeit, Empfindungsreizen zu folgen, Unfähigkeit, sich selbst als Ich zu kennen als Subjekt von Vermögen und Pol von Affektionen und Aktionen, die eben auch immer verschwunden sind – schließlich als Limes Aufhören allen Bewusstseinslebens und damit auch des Ich als Identitätspol dieses Lebens und der zugehörigen Vermögen? Das wird wohl die beste Fassung des Limes-Gedankens sein” (C8, 5b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, pp. 158-59). C17, 85b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 438. C17, 74b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 424. C17, 93a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 445. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 78. Ibid., p. 16. Ms. C 1 in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 667. Ms. C 10, 14a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 197. Ms. A V 5, p. 3, June 1933. Ms. C 1, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 668. Husserl also writes in this regard, “Die Rückfrage von der Epoché aus führt auf das urtümlich stehende Strömen – in einem gewissen Sinne das nunc stans, stehende ‚Gegenwart’, wobei das Wort Gegenwart als schon auf eine Zeitmodalität verweisend eigentlich noch nicht paßt” (Ms. C 7, 14a). See also Ms. C 3 4a, in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926-1935), ed. Sebastian Luft (Dordrecht: Kluwer

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34 35 36 37

38

39

Academic Publishers, 2002), p .187, where Husserl writes that the welling up, which constitutes the streaming of the living present, is not in time. What is in time is the result of such welling up. “Kann ich je angefangen haben? Hat Angefangen-Haben Sinn, wenn nicht als Haben in einer Zeit? Ich kann ein erstes „Erwachen” haben und ein letztes „Erwachen” – aber einen Anfang als strömend „lebendige” Gegenwart? Ohne sie hat nichts überhaupt Sein und so die in ihr implizierten Anderen und die Welt mit menschlicher Geburt und menschlichem Tod, “ (Ms. C2 24b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 22). The essential distinction here is that between the ground and the grounded. As Fichte noted, “by virtue of its mere notion, the ground falls outside of what it grounds” (Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Heath and Lachs [Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982], p. 8). It cannot have the same character as the latter. If it did, the ground would lose its function of explaining the grounded. It itself would be in need of the explanation that it is supposed to provide. Thus, were the constitutive origin of time itself in time, then its very temporality would demand that we seek a further origin. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 7. The Crisis, p. 186. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, pp. 78-79. “Kann ich je angefangen haben? Hat Angefangen-Haben Sinn, wenn nicht als Haben in einer Zeit? Ich kann ein erstes ‚Erwachen’ haben und ein letztes “Erwachen” – aber einen Anfang als strömend ‚lebendige’ Gegenwart? Ohne sie hat nichts überhaupt Sein und so die in ihr implizierten Anderen und die Welt mit menschlicher Geburt und menschlichem Tod.” (C2, 24b Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 22). Natur ist aber konstituierte Natur, mein körperlicher Leib konstituierter Leib; die Konstitution (ist) das ständige transzendentale Geschehen in meinem Ego und von ihm aus und in ihm die (der) anderen Egos (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 80). We assume this role of the body when we try to wake someone. In Husserl’s words: “Den Schlafenden wecke ich, ich schüttle ihn etwa leiblich, ich rufe ihn laut etc.; der Leib, Index für psychophysische Reize, Index für eine Gesetzmäßigkeit der Bindung seiner hyletischen Abhebungen an die organische

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42 43

44

45

Leiblichkeit in ihrem naturalen objektiven Sein; und zwar eine solche Gesetzmäßigkeit, daß die immanent-zeitliche Ordnung, Gruppierung der hyletischen Daten mundane Apperzeption ermöglicht” (Ms. C4, 10 b, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 102). Here, we abstract from the fact that their deaths and births continue to have the paradoxical status of one-sided borders. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p 3. The same reasoning applies to the conception of my birth. As Husserl writes, “von Anderen her weiß ich, daß ich geboren bin” (C17, 90b, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 443). Ibid., p. 80. “Und ‚solange’ dieses Bewusstseinsleben ‚dauert’, sich forterstreckt im Strömen und darin im Aktivsein, ist mein Leib primordial konstituiert und sich fortkonstituierend und von da aus Träger für primordiale Natur und Mitsein von mitgegenwärtigen Anderen, ihren Leibern etc. und so von Welt als gegenwärtiger, die Zukunft vorzeichnet, als welche mir gilt. Aber da tritt eben auf dem Weg über die so geltenden Anderen als weltlich andere Menschen mein Tod ins Spiel – als Vorkommnis in der Weltzeit” (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 80). The words, solange and dauert are in scare quotes since the life of consciousness, when taken as constitutive of time, is not, itself, in time. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, ed. Rudolf Boehm, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 100. Contrary to the position of some works on Husserl’s theory of temporality, most notably those of Toine Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-Consciousness (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002) and Lanei Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), Husserl never abandons this stress on the primal impression, i.e., on the material of sensation or “hyle” (the Greek word for “material”). Twenty-five years later, he still asserts, “When we speak of a primal impressional core (in a formal sense, of material, of hyle), we obviously come to the deepest level … to the hyle in the sense of the Ideen, as the core of the ‘data of sensation’” (Ms. C 4, p. 8b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 99). This hyle is externally provided. In Husserl’s words, “The primal hyle in its own

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temporalization is, so to speak, the core of the concrete present, a core that is foreign to the ego” (Ms. C 6, p. 4b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 110). As part of the core, this external material is also really—i.e., immanently—present in the perceptual experience. In Husserl’s words, “In the streaming experience, which is called perception, there comes forward the phase-by-phase changing impressional moment as really [reel] belonging to it” (Ms. B III 9, 55b). It belongs to it as other than it. Ms. C8 11b in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 166. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 20. Ibid. Ms. C4, 11a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 102. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 81.

Chapter II: The Numerical and the Unique Singularity of the Ego in the C Manuscripts 1

2

3

“Ich bin. Von mir aus konstituiert die Zeit” (Ms. C 1, September 21-22, 1934, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, ed. I. Kern [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973], p. 667). The extended quote here is: “Aber die Zeitigung, die Erfahrungsbildung, die Konstitution hat verschiedene Seiten. Das Ich selbst ist konstituiert als zeitliche Einheit. Es ist die schon als stehendes und bleibendes Ich erworbene (und im Forterwerben immerfort weiter erworbene) ontische Einheit: identisches Ich meines zeitlichen Lebens als dasselbe seiende Ich all meiner Vergangenheiten, meines innerhalb der kontinuierlichen Einheitsform der Zeit verlaufenen und jetzt noch fortströmenden Lebens, das fortströmend in sich und für sich immer neue Vergangenheit als verharrende konstituiert” (Ms. C 17, Sept. 20, 1931, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 348). Italics added in the translation. In German: “Jedes Ich, das ich als anderes in originaler Vergegenwärtigung erfahre, hat seine Einheit und sein strömendes Leben, seinen immanent-zeitlichen Strom sachlicher Zeitigung, seine primordiale Natur” (Ms. C 16, May 1933, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität:

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5 6

7

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9 10 11

Dritter Teil, p. 576). Cf. Ms. C17, 15b, where Husserl writes “Ich sehe dann, daß jedes Ich, rein als Ich betrachtet, als in seinem Bewußtseinsleben und rein darin lebend seine Individualität hat, jeder ein Ich und doch ein Anderer, derart daß schon völlige Gleichheit notwendig ausgeschlossen ist. Im Gehalt jedes Ich selbst liegt die absolute Einzigkeit, trotz der allgemeinen Form, dem allgemeinen Wesen, durch die Ich eben Ich ist.” “Aber es ist doch Gemeinschaft (‘Deckung’ weist leider auf Deckung in Extension, auf Assoziation hin), … Das Ich … Sein Leben, seine Erscheinungen, sein Zeitigen hat ‘immanente’ Erstreckung in der konstituierten Stromzeit, und wieder das darin als sachlich-zeitlich Konstituierte. Alles Gezeitigte, alles durch strömende Erscheinungen in dem immanentzeitlichen Strom und dann wieder durch ‘äussere’ Erscheinungen (raumzeitliche) Gezeitigte hat eben Erscheinungseinheit, zeitliche Einheit, Dauer; das Ich als Pol dauert nicht. So hat auch mein Ich und das andere Ich in der Gemeinschaft des Miteinander keine extensive Abständigkeit, aber auch mein Leben, mein Zeitigen nicht Abständigkeit von dem fremden” (Ms. C 16, p. 100a, May 1933, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 577). Ideas I, p. 123. Hume’s analysis of personal identity is marked by his failure to recognize this point. He begins his search for some lasting impression that would correspond to the identical self. Finding none, he concludes that the conception of personal identity is a “fiction.” See “Sect. VI. Of Personal Identity”, in A Treatise of Human Nature. “Verbleibt uns als Residuum der phänomenologischen Ausschaltung der Welt und der ihr zugehörigen empirischen Subjektivität ein reines Ich (und dann für jeden Erlebnisstrom ein prinzipiell verschiedenes), dann bietet sich mit ihm eine eigenartige—nicht konstituierte—Transzendenz , eine Transzendenz in der Immanenz dar” (Ideen I, p. 124). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), p. 112. This text will be cited as Ideen II. Ibid., p. 111. Ms. E III 2, Sept., 1921, p. 18. Ibid.

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18 19 20

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24

Ibid. “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl,” Husserl in his Contemporary Radiance: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle, Waterloo, 1992, pp. 271-2. Ms. C 3, p. 26a, March, 1931, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934), Die C-Manuskripte ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 35. Ms. C 7, p. 9b, June-July 1932, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 122. Ms. M III 3, XI, p. 21, Sept., 1921, my italics; see also Ideen II, p. 105. Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis ed. M. Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 205. Ibid., p. 204. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 100. As Husserl puts this, “every retention intrinsically refers back to an impression” (ibid., p. 34). In fact, it is an “a priori necessity that a corresponding perception, or a corresponding primal impression, precede the retention” (ibid., p. 33). Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), p. 38. For an extended account of the retentional process, see chapter 2 of James Mensch’s Husserl’s Account of the Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010). Ms. C 2, p. 11a, Sept.-Oct. 1931, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 8. The German text is: “In diesem Strömen ist ein stehendes und bleibendes Ur-Jetzt als starre Form für einen durchströmenden Gehalt konstituiert und als Urquellpunkt aller konstituierten Modifikationen. Konstituiert ist aber in eins mit der starren Form des Urquellenden, Ur-Jetzt eine zweiseitige Kontinuität von ebenso starren Formen; also im Ganzen ist konstituiert ein starres Kontinuum der Form, in dem das UrJetzt urquellender Mittelpunkt ist für zwei Kontinua als Zweige der Abwandlungsmodi: das Kontinuum der Soebengewesenheiten und das der Zukünftigkeiten.” “Die Reduktion auf die lebendige Gegenwart ist die radikalste Reduktion auf diejenige Subjektivität, in der alles mir Gelten sich ursprünglich vollzieht, in der aller Seinssinn für mich Sinn ist und mir erlebnismäßig als geltend bewußter Sinn. Es ist die Reduktion

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25

26

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28 29

auf die Sphäre der Urzeitigung, in der der erste und urquellenmäßige Sinn von Zeit auftritt – Zeit eben als lebendig strömende Gegenwart” (Ms. C 3, p. 4a, summer 1930, in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, p. 187). “Ich bin. Von mir aus konstituiert die Zeit. Transzendentale Selbstzeitigung des ego in der stehend-urtümlichen Vor-Gegenwart” (Ms. C 1, September 21-22, 1934, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 667). “Jedes konkrete Individuum dauert in der Zeit und ist, was es ist, indem es von Präzenz zu Präzenz stetig werdend übergeht” (Ms. E III 2, p. 2, Sept., 1921). It is interesting to note that this view of individual existence dates from the time of the Logical Investigations. In this work, he writes: “What is real is the individual … Temporality, for us, is a sufficient characteristic of individuality” (Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Ursula Panzer in Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992], vol. 3, p. 129). A few years later, in the lectures on time consciousness, he writes, “Each individual object … continuously exists in time and is something identical in this continuous existence” (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, pp. 73-74). This conception is repeated in the Bernau Manuscripts when he declares that time is “a necessary form of individual existence” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 90). This means that all individual objects must be temporal objects (see ibid., p. 190). “Zeitigung – das ist die Konstitution von Seiendem in Zeitmodalitäten. Seiendes, gegenwärtig Seiendes mit Vergangenheit desselben Seienden, künftig Seinwerden desselben. So ist im ursprünglichen Sinne Seiendes eine ursprünglich konkrete Präsenz, es ist dauernde Präsenz, die als unselbständige Komponenten im Strömen der Präsenz Vergangenheit und Zukunft ‘einschließt’” (Ms. C 13, p. 31b, March 1934, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution , p. 274). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, pp. 74-5. “Diese strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist nicht das, was wir sonst auch schon transzendentalphänomenologisch als Bewußtseinsstrom oder Erlebnisstrom bezeichneten. Es ist überhaupt kein ‘Strom’ gemäß dem Bild, als ein eigentlich zeitliches (oder gar zeiträumliches) Ganzes, das in der Einheit einer zeitlichen Extension ein kontinuierlich-sukzessives individuelles

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34

35

Dasein hat (in seinen unterscheidbaren Strecken und Phasen durch diese Zeitformen individuiert). Die strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist ‘kontinuierliches’ Strömendsein und doch nicht in einem Auseinander-Sein, nicht in raumzeitlicher (welträumlicher), nicht in ‘immanent’-zeitlicher Extension Sein; also in keinem Außereinender, das Nacheinander heißt – Nacheinander in dem Sinne eines Stellen-Außereinander in einer eigentlich so zu nennenden Zeit” (Ms. C 3, 4a, summer 1930, in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, p. 187). “Wenn ich mich besinnend auf meine lebendig strömende Gegenwart in ihrer vollen Konkretion zurückgehe, in der sie der Urboden und Urquell aller für mich jetzt-gegenwärtig aktuellen Seinsgeltungen ist, so ist sie für mich nicht die meine gegenüber derjenigen anderer Menschen, und sie ist nicht die meine als die des körperlich-seelisch seienden, des realen Menschen” (Ms. C 3, 3b, summer 1930, in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, p. 186). Ms. C 16, p. 100a, May 1933, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 577 “Meine ‘Deckung’ mit dem Anderen, in der konstitutiven Urstufe, sozusagen bevor die Welt für mich und den Anderen als gemeine Welt und schließlich als Welt für alle konstituiert ist” (Ms. C 17, 84a, end of 1931, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution , p. 435). “The Self-Pluralisation of the Primal Life. A Problem in Fink’s Husserl-Interpretation,” Recherches Husserliennes 2, 1994, 3-18. Zahavi emphatically rejects this interpretation. “Dem transzendentalen Sein, meinem, als Identischsein in meinem transzendentalen Leben, dieses in der extensionalen Form der immanenten Zeit, geht voran mein Sein in der lebendigen, nicht extensionalen Urzeitigung als urphänomenaler Lebensstrom” (Ms. B II 6, summer 1930, in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, pp. 174-5). “So stoßen wir bald vor auf das nie herausgestellte, geschweige denn systematisch ausgelegte ‘Urphänomen’, in dem alles, was sonst Phänomen heißen mag und in welchem Sinn immer, seine Quelle hat. Es ist die stehend-strömende Selbstgegenwart bzw. das sich selbst strömend gegenwärtige absolute Ich in seinem stehend-strömenden Leben” (Ms. C 7, p. 38a, June 1932 in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 145).

240 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

36

37 38

39

40

41

42 43

Ms. C 1, September 21-22, 1934 in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 668. Ms. B III 9, p. 15a, Oct.-Dec. 1931. Ms. C 7, p. 14a, July 1, 1932 in Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion, p. 384. The extended passage is: “Ein Akt, eine Ichtätigkeit ist wesensmäßig ein urquellendes ‘Ich tue’. Als Urquellendes ist es stehendes und bleibendes Urquellen, aber auch in eins Verströmen in stetige Modifikation des soeben Gewesenen; anderseits urquellend zugleich Vorgerichtetsein auf das soeben Kommende; dieses ganze Urquellende unter Verströmen, und Heranströmen von Kommenden ist Einheit eines stehenden und bleibenden Urphänomens, ein stehender und bleibender Wandel, Urphänomen meines ‘Ich tue’, worin ich, das stehende und bleibende Ich bin, und zwar bin ich der Tuende des ‘nunc stans’. Jetzt tue ich und nur jetzt, und ‘ständig’ tue ich. Aber das ‘Ich tue’ verquillt auch ständig, und ständig habe ich zukommendes, das aus mir betätigt wird” (Ms. B III 9, p. 15a, Oct.-Dec. 1931). “Aber das Ich ist in besonderer Weise stehend und bleibend, nämlich es selbst strömt nicht, aber es tut, es setzt seinen Satz, und das Tun ist ein aus sich Entlassen, urquellend – schöpferisch aus sich Hervorgehen-lassen von selbst wieder Strömendem nämlich den Akten” (Ms. B III 9, p. 10b, Oct.-Dec., 1931). “In jeder Zeitigungsschichte: das Fungieren ist ständig Urfungieren als ständige Gegenwart, aber auch ständig aus sich entlassen von Retentionen, die ichliche Abwandlungen besagen als ‘Noch’-fungieren in strömender Wandlung, die ständig ist als Wandlung” (Ms. A V 5, p. 6b, Jan. 1933). Ms. B III 9, p. 15a, Oct.-Dec. 1931. See note 39 for the German. Ms. C4, 11a in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 102.

Chapter III: The Spatiality of Subjectivity 1

See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 74.

ENDNOTES 241

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9

Leibniz, “Monadology,” in Basic Writings, trans. George Montgomery [La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1962], p. 254. David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” electronically published at http://www.imprint.co.uk/chal mers.html. For Aristotle, time exists in our measuring motion. Time is the “number” of movement, as when we look at the shadow on a sundial and say, “now it is 4:00,” and look again an hour later and say, “it is 5:00” (see Aristotle, Physics, 219b 1) Through the numbers on the dial, we measure the motion of the shadow caused by the sun. For Aristotle, this implies that when there is no “soul” to apply numbers to this motion, the only thing that remains is this motion itself (see ibid., 223a, 28-29). The reality of time is in our acts of measuring it. Heidegger does not speak of minds or souls. His word for our selfhood is Dasein or human existence. The project of his Being and Time, he writes, is to exhibit “temporality as the meaning of the being that we call Dasein.” This involves “the repeated interpretation … of the structures of Dasein … as modes of temporality” (Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967], p. 17). Outside of Dasein, it makes no sense to speak of time. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernuft, B37. All translations from Kant are my own. The text of the Kritik is from Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955). Ibid., B51. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 8. Ideen II, p. 153. In Husserl’s words: “die Abwandlung als Bewußtsein ist jetzt wirklich, aber in ihrer abgewandelten Intentionalität macht sie das eigene Nicht-Jetzt bewußt; das Nicht-Jetzt transzendiert das Jetzt, im besonderen das Bewußtsein vom Nicht-Jetzt. So ist die Kontinuität der intentionalen Abwandlungen eine stetige Kontinuität, in welcher Transzendenz ursprünglich bewußt wird, und dieses Transzendente ist immerzu Bewußtsein; immerzu ich selbst als Primordium nicht als der ich bin, sondern der ich war” (C 7, p. 21a-b, July 9, 1932; in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934), Die C-Manuskripte ed. Dieter Lohmar [Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006], p. 130).

242 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

10

11

12 13 14

15

16

17

See Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein, pp. 28687. As the register of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium shows, Merleau-Ponty had read Husserl’s Ideen II. Ideen II, p. 145. Kritik der Reinen Vernuft, B50, ed. cit. Aristotle, Physics, 218a, 5-10, 18-19, “Aristotle, ‘Time’ from the Physics” in Time, ed. Jonathan Westphal and Carl Levenson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), p. 61. In Augustine’s words, “there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation” (“Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions,” trans. Frank Sheed in Time, eds. Jonathan Westphal and Carl Levenson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), p. 19). In Locke’s words, “That we have our notion of succession and duration from this original, viz., from reflection on the train of ideas, which we find to appear one after another in our own minds, seems plain to me, in that we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of ideas that take their turns in our understandings. When that succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases with it; which every one clearly experiments in himself, whilst he sleeps soundly, whether an hour or a day, a month or a year; of which duration of things, while he sleeps or thinks not, he has no perception at all, but it is quite lost to him; and the moment wherein he leaves off to think, till the moment he begins to think again, seems to him to have no distance” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 122-3. Hume makes the same observation. See A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Book I, Part II, section iii, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 35. The key point here is that perception is interpretation. In Husserl’s words: (It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation [die Interpretation] makes up what we term appearance—be it correct or not, anticipatory or overdrawn. The house appears to me through no other way but that I interpret [interpretiere] in a certain fashion actually experienced contents of sensation. I hear a barrel organ—the sensed

ENDNOTES 243

18

19

20

21

22

tones I take [deute] as barrel organ tones. Even so, I perceive via interpretation [interpretierend] what mentally appears in me, the penetrating joy, the heartfelt sorrow, etc. They are termed “appearances” or, better, appearing contents precisely for the reason that they are contents of perceptive interpretation [perzeptiver Interpretation]” Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Ursula Panzer in Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, p. 762). See Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), pp. 3-7. Gravity, of course, curves space. Here, however, we are abstracting from the considerations that Einstein brings forward in his theory of general relativity. In Poincaré’s words, “Each muscle gives rise to a special sensation which may be increased or diminished so that the aggregate of our muscular sensations will depend upon as many variables as we have muscles. From this point of view, motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles” (Science and Hypothesis [New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1905], p. 64). Here, all the work on the phenomenology of the body, its movement and its spatiality (including the work by feminists on the female body), is relevant to the mind-body problem. See Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality—A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Laurence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 86-89.

Chapter IV: Life and the Reduction to the Lifeworld 1 2 3

4

5 6

Ideen I, p. 106. Ibid., p. 109. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 113, translation modified. If it were, we would have the “absurdity” of “a component part of the world, its human subjectivity,” constituting “the whole world” and thus itself (ibid., p. 179). Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 23.

244 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23

24

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. This whole procedure, it should be noted, involves the mistake of substituting the description for the thing described. Just as the law of gravitation is not the gravitating bodies whose relations it describes, so a mathematical relation is not itself the things it relates. Thus, it is perfectly possible to describe a function in mathematical terms without asserting that what performs this function is, itself, mathematical. The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 54. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid. The sense of “object” here is metaphorical. As Husserl emphasizes, the world is not given as an object among objects. It is not a numerical singular—one among many objects. Since there is only one world, it’s givenness is that of a unique singular. The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 113. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. L. LaFleur (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 73. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. This, according to Merleau-Ponty, is our natural, perceptual faith. In his words, “The ‘natural’ man holds on to both ends of the chain” (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 8). See Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 1356. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 140. I could, equally, have taken up Levinas’s position. One can, for example, read “Section II. Interiority and Economy” of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity as a description of the structures of the human lifeworld. The apriori here is that of the “atheist” self-sufficiency, which characterizes our life of sensuous enjoyment, dwelling, and labor. Such self-sufficiency stands as a presupposition for our ability to be called into question by another person. For Levinas, this calling into question, which

ENDNOTES 245

25

26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

interrupts our enjoyment and pragmatic engagements, is the birth of objectivity. What is interrupted is the sense the object has for me, the sense given to it by my enjoyment and by the uses that I put to it. Facing an alternative sense asserted by the Other, I also confront the question of what the object is “kath’ auto”—i.e., what it is according to itself. For an account of this, see James Mensch, Levinas’ Existential Analytic, A Commentary on Totality and Infinity (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press), 2015. Ted Toadvine, “The Chiasm,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, ed. Sebastian Luft and Soren Overgaard (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 340. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 9. Ibid., p. 123. M.C. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” in Phenomenology, Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 2 vols., eds. Dermot Moran and Lester Embree (New York: Routledge, 2004), vol. 2, p. 298. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. See “Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” p. 299. See ibid, p. 300. This holds even though, as Merleau-Ponty quotes a painter, “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who was looking at the forest. I felt, on certain days, that it was rather the trees that were looking at me ...” (L’Oeil et l’esprit [Paris: Galimard, 1964], p. 31). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are my own. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 140. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p 136. Ibid., p. 123. Renaud Barbaras, “L’Autonomie de l’apparaître,” Chiasmi International (Paris: J. Vrin, 2013), p. 34. The citation is from “Chair du monde—Chair du corps—Être, May 1960” of the “Notes de travail” to Le visibile et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 304). This note is not included in Lingis’s English translation. Barbaras cites it in “L’Autonomie de l’apparaître,” p. 34.

246 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

40

41

42

43

Referring to the same note, Barbaras asserts that “the split between the subject that makes things appear and what appears exterior to it divides [the sense of] flesh itself into a proper and a merely metaphorical sense” (“L’ambiguïté de la chair, Merleau-Ponty entre philosophie transcendentale et ontologie de la vie,” in Merleau-Ponty aux frontiers d l’invisible, Chiasmi International, 1 [Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2003], p. 187. This split signifies that Merleau-Ponty has not advanced beyond the position of the Phenomenology of Perception: “Autant dire que nous n’avons pas avancé d’un pas par rapport à la Phénoménologie de la perception. En ce sens, la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty demeure une philosophie de l’incarnation plutôt qu’elle n’est une philosophie de la Chair—incarnation de la conscience dans un organisme et, partant, du sens dans une extériorité—et elle demeure en cela une philosophie de la conscience” (ibid., p. 188). Merleau-Ponty, thus, leaves us suspended between a transcendental phenomenology and an ontology of flesh: “J’en conclus d’abord que la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, en raison de sa radicalité phénoménologique ou, comme on voudra, de sa non-radicalité ontologique, est une philosophie essentiellement instable, dans laquelle on ne peut demeurer. Elle nous projette nécessairement en-deçà ou au-delà d’elle-même : en-deçà, dans une phénoménologie transcendantale qui demeure sa vérité la plus profonde, ou audelà, dans une ontologie de la Chair ou de la Vie au seuil de laquelle elle a été conduite sans pouvoir l’assumer” (ibid.). L’autonomie de l’apparaître, p. 33. See also Barbaras, L’ouverture du monde, lecture de Jan Patočka (Lonrai: l’Editions de la Transparence, 2011), p. 35, where he repeats this claim. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 24. “Showing is not then, as it may seem, merely an objective structure, because the objective, material structure is that which shows itself. Showing is also not mind and it is not the structure of mind, because that is also just a thing; it is also something that is and that eventually can also manifest itself…. showing itself is not any of these things that show themselves, whether it is a psychic or physical object … and yet it is still the showing of those things” (ibid., p. 22).

ENDNOTES 247

44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51

52

53 54

55 56 57 58

Patočka takes this field as “the authentic discovery of the Logical Investigations” (“Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’ Phänomenologie” in Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, ed. K. Nellen, J. Nemic, and I. Srubar (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), p. 274.) Patočka, “Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparation,” p. 127. What we confront here is, in fact, a “world-structure,” one embracing both things and subjects. In Patočka’s words, “Und da dies Erscheinen von der Präsenz der Dinge und der Welt im Original nicht abzutrennen ist, ziehen wir es vor, das Erscheinen als eine Dinge und Subjekt umspannende und umfassende Struktur aufzufassen. Die einzige Dinge und Subjekte umfassende Struktur ist aber die Welt selbst, und deshalb möchten wir sie als Weltstruktur aufgefaßt wissen” (“Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’” in Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, eds. Helga Blaschek-Hahn und Karel Novotny (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), p. 123). Ibid., p 124. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 126. “Nachwort,” in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, Phänomenologische Schriften I, ed. Klaus Nellen und Jiří Němec, trans. Eliška und Ralph Melville (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990, p. 243. “La conception aristotélicienne du mouvement: signification philosophique et recherches historiques,” in Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine, ed. and trans. Erika Abrams (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 129. Papiers Phénoménologiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), p. 42. Ibid., p. 31. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, p. 86. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 132.

248 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

59

60 61

The full quote is: “Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except insofar as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (Charles Darwin, “The Origin of the Species,” in The Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man [New York: Random House, 1967], p. 65). Ibid., p. 63. “ …die Phänomenologie untersucht schauend die Grundstrukturen, aufgrund deren überhaupt Welt erscheinen kann und aufgrund deren etwas wie natürliche, d.h. nicht schauende, sondern hypothetisch erwägende, formal-leere und erst Voraussicht aufgrund der Erfahrung verbürgende Erkenntnis möglich ist. Das von der Phänomenologie Geleistete wäre zugleich eine neue Wissenschaft vom anschauungszugänglichen Apriori, ein Beitrag zur Metaphysik als Wissenschaft vom Aufbau der Weltstrukturen und eine Grundlage für die objektiven Wissenschaften” (“Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’” p. 126).

Chapter V: Life and Horizon 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8

Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutroit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 11. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 165, my translation. See The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr, p. 162 for Carr’s translation. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid. Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Erste Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 393. Ideen I, p. 103. Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil, p. 393. Husserl remarks, “a complete dissolution of the world in a tumult of experiences is equivalent to a dissolution of the ego” (Ms. K IV 2, p. 14). I

ENDNOTES 249

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11 12 13

am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium for permission to quote from the unpublished manuscripts. Ms. K III 2, Oct. 10, 1935, p. 10. Iso Kern writes with regard to Husserl’s stress on facticity, “In his interpretation of the facticity of world-constitution or of the ‘ego of transcendental apperception,’ Husserl was aware that he was in a fundamental opposition to German idealism.” For the latter, as represented by Kant, the ego is prior to and determinative of the factual. For Husserl, the reverse is the case. Regarding the resultant contingency of both the ego and its world, Kern expresses this opposition as follows: “Insofar as Husserl teaches that worldconstitution or, as the case may be, the ego who possesses the world (the ‘ego of transcendental apperception’) does not, itself, have a basis in a transcendental subjectivity which would make this constitution necessary and permit the positing of the ego itself as necessarily possessing the world—or, better, insofar as world-constitution does not have a basis in a transcendental subjectivity which could guarantee the genesis and continuance of this constitution so that there would not continually exist for transcendental subjectivity the possibility of the dissolution of the cosmos and the ‘ego of transcendental apperception’—there results for Husserl a concept of transcendental idealism which is basically different from those of German idealism” (Husserl und Kant [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964], pp. 297-98). Thus, for Husserl, “Facts are, in principle, incapable of being derived from essential laws; such laws, in the manner of ideal norms, only specify facts with regard to possibility” (Ms. F I 14, p. 49, June 1911). They specify, in other words, the possibilities of what would obtain, if certain factual conditions were, indeed, given. They do not, however, prescribe the obtaining of such factual conditions. In Husserl’s words, “These laws ... cannot pronounce with regard to an actuality—i.e., whether or not there exists an actuality which corresponds to them. Essential laws possess a meaning for the real if something real (an individual being) can be given which falls under the essences, the ideas” (Ms. D 13 XXI, p. 26, 1907-09). Ideen I, p. 125. Ms. E III 9, p. 11. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil, p. 378.

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14 15

16 17 18

19

20

21 22

23

Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil, p. 380. Erste Philosophie (1923/24), p. 188. That this metaphysics also has a theological sense is indicated by Husserl’s asking: “Can one say, in this situation, that this teleology with its primal facticity has its basis in God” (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 385). God, here, is understood as the logos or principle of rationality. See ibid., p. 610. Ibid, p. 62. See ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 275. Since biologists ascribe senses and motility to plants, the same assertions hold with regard to them. Their horizons are linked to those of the animal world. Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1998), p. 153. Ibid. “Nachwort,” in Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, p. 242. Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin, 2011), p. 128.

Chapter VI: Rethinking Subjectivity as an Environmental Concept 1

2 3

4 5

Hans Rainer Sepp, Grundrisse einer oikologischen Philosophie (Prague: Arbeitsfassung, July 2014), p. 3. Ibid. Aristotle, Physics, 211a 13. All translations of Aristotle are my own. Ibid., 212a 20. Only if we ignore the issue of motion can we define “place” as the interface between the body and what immediately surrounds it. Once we do consider motion, then as Aristotle notes, this definition has to be modified. We have to say that “place is a receptacle which cannot be transported” (Physics, 212a 15). Thus, the place of a motionless boat is given by the surrounding water, but once we consider the boat as moving down the river, “it is the whole river which, being motionless as a whole,

ENDNOTES 251

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9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

functions as a place” (ibid., 212a 19). As the example of the boat suggests, the place of a body need not be continuous with the body itself. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid. “Pourtant, les moyens ontologiques d’Aristote sont une chose. Autre chose est son projet de pensée fondamental—comprendre l’être de l’étant fini comme faisant partie d’un mouvement global d’accroissement de l’être. Que ce projet de pensée soit inséparable de l’empirie grossière de départ ou des propres moyens conceptuels du penseur, cela n’a pas été prouvé. De nos jours, alors que la philosophie cherche derechef un fondement ontologique asubjectif, un Aristote dédogmatisé est, pour cette raison, actuel” (Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, p. 253. Mortality and Morality—A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, p. 86. Without the seeing eye, objects are simply emitters of colorless electromagnetic waves. “The Origin of the Species,” p. 62. Ibid. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 63. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 8. Aristotle, Physics, 202b 7-8. Physics, Physics 202a 16-20. Aristotle defines motion as the actualization of a potentiality. In his words, “the actualization of what is potential as potential is ‘being in movement’” (ibid., 201a 11). Thus, the teacher’s movement is his actualizing the student’s potential to learn a given subject. Since this potential is in the student, so is the teacher in actualizing it. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 123 Ibid. See The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1.

252 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Chapter VII: Self-Identity from the Perspective of the Body 1

2 3 4

5 6 7

8

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 1, Part IV, sect. 6, ed. L.A. Selbey-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 251. Ibid., p. 252. Ideen I, p. 123. “Verbleibt uns als Residuum der phänomenologischen Ausschaltung der Welt und der ihr zugehörigen empirischen Subjektivität ein reines Ich (und dann für jeden Erlebnisstrom ein prinzipiell verschiedenes), dann bietet sich mit ihm eine eigenartige—nicht konstituierte—Transzendenz, eine Transzendenz in der Immanenz dar” (Ideen I, p. 124). Ms. E III 2, Sept., 1921, p. 18. Ibid. Can we maintain this position? If we cannot say what the self is, can we even say that it is? Hume raises this doubt with regard to God. He argues that if we cannot say what God is, i.e., what the object of our belief is, then can we say that we believe in anything at all? Thus, in his Dialogues, he has his protagonist, Philo, ask how those “who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who [also] assert that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible?” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1966], p. 32). Hume maintains a similar skepticism with regard to the self, understood as the mind. Having stated that “the mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations,” he immediately corrects any impression that the notion of a theater has any ontological content. He writes: “The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 1, Part IV, sect. 6, p. 253). This means that there is no existence of a self or subject other than that of a “bundle or collection of different perceptions” (ibid., p. 252). Ideen II, p. 150.

ENDNOTES 253

9

10

11 12 13 14

15

16 17

18

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 55. As Sara Heinämaa writes, there is here a clear “difference between Husserl’s phenomenological concept of embodiment and the naturalistic concept dominant in physiology and bio-sciences.” Thus, phenomenologically, “a paralyzed limb does not belong to the system of living organs but constantly remains on the margin of one’s life.” For the biological sciences, however, it remains part of our physiological identity (“The Body,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, ed. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard [New York: Routledge, 2012], p. 227. As Rudolf Bernet puts this: “it is one and the same flesh (and only mine!) that is and that simultaneously feels itself touching and touched … In the hand that touches and in the hand that is touched, my body simultaneously explores itself from the outside and feels itself from the inside” (“The Body as a Legitimate Naturalization of Consciousness,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 [July 2013], p. 50). The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. Ideas II, p. 152. Ideas II, p. 147. “Keiner kann dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehmen” (Sein und Zeit, p. 240). “But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. … one of the individual circles … of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of intuitive thinking or of perception; and when they pass out of this complete realization [of being perceived] it is not clear whether they exist or not” (“Metaphysics,” 1036a, trans. T. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941], p. 799). Ms. A VII 11, p. 92. “Book Review of J. C. Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the myth of the Voice,” Husserl Studies 11 (1994-5), p. 208. Derrida denies this simultaneity, writing: “The local coincidence that is important for Husserl in the touching-touched pair is grounded in a temporal coincidence meant to give it its intuitive plenitude, which is to say its dimension of direct immediacy. … if one questions this absolute simultaneity of the touching and the touched-and the active and the passive-for an

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19 20

21 22

immediate and direct intuition, this whole argument [of Husserl’s] risks becoming fragile” (Jacques Derrida, On Touching— Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005], p. 172). As Robin Durie points out, this insistence on “absolute simultaneity” ill accords with the shift of attention required to go from the hand as touching to the hand as touched (“At the same time, Continuities in Derrida’s readings of Husserl,” Continental Philosophy Review (2008) 41, p. 81). He explains Derrida’s puzzling interpretation “of temporality as immediacy, as punctual instantaneity” as Derrida’s attempt to continue the analysis of Speech and Phenomena (ibid., p. 87). The Visible and the Invisible, p. 9. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 93. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. Bernet writes with regard to this difference. “This suggests that the event of this non-coincidence of the two hands and, more generally, of the touching and the touched—that is, of this distance in proximity, of this separation of the inseparable, of this in-between—is the most original experience of a bodily spatiality” (“The Body as a Legitimate Naturalization of Consciousness,” p. 51).

Chapter VIII: Temporality and Embodied Self-Presence 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Aurelius Augustine, Saint Augustine Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Book, 1964), p. 264. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 412. Ibid., pp. 411-412. Ibid., p. 419. Ibid. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Physics, p. 78. Ibid., p. 77. Saint Augustine Confessions, p. 264. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 277.

ENDNOTES 255

12

13 14

15

16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

This diagram appears in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), p. 22. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 23. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 102 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998), p. 211. In adopting Kant’s description, I am not assuming that the self is some noumenal thing in itself. In fact, I take such syntheses as functions that the brain performs. This, however, does not mean that consciousness is equivalent to such physical functions. See note 33 below. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 51, p. 110. Ms. B III 9, p. 15a; Oct.-Dec. 1931. “Die strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist ‘kontinuierliches’ Strömendsein” (Zur Phänomenologischen Reducktion, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926-1935), p. 187). “But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. … one of the individual circles … of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of intuitive thinking or of perception; and when they pass out of this complete realization [of being perceived] it is not clear whether they exist or not” (“Metaphysics,” 1036a, p. 799). Phenomenology of Perception, p. 93. Ibid. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 37, p. 97. As Merleau-Ponty expresses this: the road that I see “in the distance has no ‘width’ one could even ideally calculate; it is as wide as the road close-up, since it is the same road—and it is not as wide, since I cannot deny that there is a sort of shrinking in perspective” when viewed from a distance (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 22. See “Merleau-Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” ed. cit., vol. 2, p. 298. This is why Merleau-Ponty can write of the observer: “The space, the time of the things are shreds of himself, of his own spatialization, of his own temporalization.” The two are intertwined. In Merleau-Ponty’s words: he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling” (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 114;). Thus, to think of the nowness or presence of the body in space is to think of it in terms of this coiling up (or intertwining) of our spatialization

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26

27

28

29

30 31

and temporalization. The simultaneity of space is thought in terms of the simultaneity of time’s moments, which, of course is behind the thought that time is like a river. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 122-3. As Husserl writes, the “elapsed duration” of a tone is “represented [repräsentiert] by means of a continuity of fading modifications.” Such modifications are “the flow of adumbrations in which the identical tone ‘presents’ itself [sich ‘darstellt’] (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 277). Thus, our sense of pastness “springs from the interpretation of the temporal representatives of the temporal positions” [Zeitstellenrepräsentanten], such representatives being the fadings. “This interpretation too is continuously maintained in the flow of modification” in that we continuously interpret the process of fading as departure into pastness (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins p. 66). For an extended account of this, see James Mensch, Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time, (Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 2010), pp. 7881. If we look at the neurons in our brains, there is nothing about their behavior that distinguishes them from, say, liver cells with regard to consciousness. The metabolic processes of neither point to consciousness. See Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks, “The Challenge of Consciousness,” The New York Review of Books Daily, Nov. 23, 2016, available at: https://www.ny books.com/daily/2016/11/21/challenge-of-defining-conscio usness/. We can, of course, find neural correlates to our sensory experiences. When we see or hear something, patterns of activity occur among our neurons. But a correlate of consciousness is not consciousness. As Manzotti, writes, “When scientists look for AIDS or DNA, they look for the thing itself, not a mere correlate” (ibid.). Thus, when we limit our focus to the functioning of the brain, we lose sight of consciousness. Aristotle’s Physics, p. 78. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 138.

Chapter IX: Social Change and Embodiment

ENDNOTES 257

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2 3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12

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Aristotle, “Politics” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1129. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” 1036, p. 799 See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 164-65. The premise here, as William James expressed it, is that “[m]y thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time” (Psychology, Briefer Course [Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1948], p. 355). What I actually do determines my thinking about what a particular object is. It determines what I take its sense to be (ibid., p. 356). The latter is “that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest” (p. 357). Thus, depending on my project, the same paper can be disclosed as “a combustible, a writing surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain stone in my neighbor’s field, an American thing, etc., etc.” (p. 355). Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 70. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 261. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 276. Jan Patočka, “Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparation,” p. 122. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid. “Discussion,” in Living in Problematicity, trans. and ed. Eric Manton (Prague: Edice Oikúmené, 2007), p. 66. For the political implications of the position, see James Mensch, “Politics and Freedom,” Idealistic Studies, 36:1, 2006, 75-82. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 211. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 8. See Aristotle, Politics, p. 1130. Totality and Infinity, p. 119.

Chapter X: Belief and Trust, An Analysis of Husserl’s Epoché

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1 2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10

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12 13 14 15 16 17

The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 135, translation modified. Ideas I, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2014), p. 49. Ibid., p. 52. Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairs (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 20. See Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. A. Hannibalsson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 12. Ideas I, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom, p. 55. Ibid., p. 58. Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 118. “Objective” means agreeing with the object. As Kant writes, “ there would be no reason why other judgments would necessarily have to agree with mine, if it were not the unity of the object to which they all refer and with which they all agree and, for that reason, must agree among themselves” (“Prologomena,” §18, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 23 Vols., Berlin, 191055, IV, 298). The point follows “because when a judgment agrees with the object, all judgments concerning the object must agree with each other” (ibid.). In other words, insofar as each judgment states the same thing with regard to the object, each has the same content. Their agreement with the object is their mutual agreement. “Discussion—Comments by Eugen Fink on Alfred Schutz’s Essay, ‘The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl,’” in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers III, ed. I. Schutz, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 86. Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 124. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p.113. Ibid., p. 116 Ibid., p. 174. Totality and Infinity, p. 28.

Chapter XI: Trust and Violence

ENDNOTES 259

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7 8 9 10 11 12

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Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 28. Ibid., p. 40. The German title of the original points to this alienation: Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne—Beyond Guilt and Atonement. One is thrust into a situation where neither category seems appropriate. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 29. The basic premise here is the Kantian equivalence between objective and universal validity. See Chapter X, notes 9 and 10. The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 4-5. Totality and Infinity, p. 165. “Nachwort,” in Ideen III, pp. 248-49. See Totality and Infinity, p. 141. “Nachwort,” in Ideen III, p. 249. He writes, describing it: “Le mouvement premier et fondamental, celui sans lequel les autres ne seraient pas possibles, est ainsi quelque chose de relativement autonome. C’est le mouvement de la vie instinctive—mouvement initialement dépourvu de rapport au mode d’être, qui n’englobe ce rapport que secondairement et existe aussi, comme tel, de manière indépendante. L’être humain est lui aussi, comme l’animal, un être instinctivement sentant et affectif, qui s’ouvre au monde dans la passivité et la consonance et répond dans un mouvement réflexe aux stimulations qu’il en reçoit. Dans notre mouvement d’ancrage ou d’enracinement, qui du début à la fin figure la basse fondamentale dans la polyphonie de la vie, il y a également une consonance avec l’aspect global du monde, une impulsion vers l’attachement, la chaleur vitale, la fusion, le bonheur, loin de l’étranger, du froid et de l’aversif, impulsion qui se réalise dans les mouvements accomplis par notre corps et organisés en modalités du comportement, en rythmes tant de l’activité répétée que de l’action qui est tout à la fois résolution” (“Leçons sur la corporéité,” in Papiers Phénoménologiques, p. 108. The violation of this trust by abusive parents does not just result in the child’s withdrawal from the world they provide. Since the child’s developing ego is itself the result of the

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14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

intertwining of the within and the without, abuse can result in its fragmentation. See “The Splitting of the Self,” in James Mensch, After Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 205-220. At the Mind’s Limits, pp. 29-30. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. Referring to Elisabeth Webber’s article on torture, Nicholas De Warren describes this expulsion as a de-constitution of “the self-constitution of the lived-body as both a ‘lived’ and a ‘material’ body.” In torture, the lived body “is no longer a Leib given the imposition of the sovereignty of the Other, who violates from the inside the Ich kann of self-constitution.” As for the material body, it suffers “Verfleischung”—which De Warren translates as “meatification.” By virtue of its suffering, it is not a corpse, but rather “entombed in a death that is lived.” The result is “an expulsion into death and ejection from the world as home while still nonetheless remaining within a form, or semblance, of world” (“Torture and Trust in the World, A Phenomenological Essay,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 40, 2015, pp. 95-96). See also Elisabeth Weber, “‘Torture Was the Essence of National Socialism’ Reading Jean Améry Today,” in Speaking About Torture, eds. J. Carlson and E. Webber, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 88. De Warren understands trust primarily in terms of our faith in the solicitude of Others. For me, its basis lies in perceptional faith and the role of Others (which includes their solicitude) in establishing such faith. Ibid. Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), p. 38. At the Mind’s Limits, p. 39. Following Alia Al-Saji, Fiona Utley links this deficit to the breakdown of the “inter-temporality,” which an individual establishes with Others. Such inter-temporality is based on our bodily experience of the rhythms of Others: “In my encounter with another sensing subject, the rhythms of the other are also responding to my rhythms, just as my rhythms are responding to hers” (“Violence and Relational Existence: Its Significance for our Understanding of Trust as Fundamentally

ENDNOTES 261

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Intercorporeal,” Parrhesia 26, 2016, p. 207). In a certain sense, the two embodied subjects “time” each other. Violence results in “an inhibition to synchronization, not only with others, but the world that is inhabited, and my self within it” (ibid., p. 208). Because of this, when violence is experienced, “my sensorial and corporeal being is situated, in that moment, through a world that does not support me” (ibid. 209). For Utley, intertwining refers to such rhythms. In this article, it has a much wider compass. See also Alia Al-Saji, “Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: Bodies of expression and temporalities in the flesh,” Philosophy Today 45, Supplement, 2001, pp. 112-114. In Canada, the imposition of homelessness involved sending native children to “residential schools,” where students were forbidden to speak their native language and were often subject to physical and sexual abuse. For a detailed explanation of what happened in Uchuraccay, see James Mensch, “Violencia y ceguera. El caso Uchuraccay,” in Memoria, Revista sobre cultura, democracia y Derechos Humanos, 7, 2010, pp. 93-102. An online version in English is available as: “Violence and blindness: the case of Uchuraccay,” August 9, 2009, http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/violence-andblindness-the-case-of-uchuraccay “El Caso Uchuraccay,” Vol. V, chapter 2, section, 2.4, of The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 9 vols. (August 28, 2003), p. 145, my translation. The full report can be accessed at: http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php. Ibid., 146. The Human Condition, p. 176.

Chapter XII: Violence and the Return of the Religious 1

2

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), ch. 13, p. 78. See, for example, Antonio Cerella, “Until the end of the world: Girard, Schmitt and the origins of violence,” Journal of International Political Theory, 2015, 11(1): 42–60; Eliabetta Brighi and Antonio Cerella, “An alternative vision of politics and violence: Introducing mimetic theory in international studies,”

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4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11

Journal of International Political Theory, 2015, 11(1): 3-25; Andrea Salvatore, “A ‘Theoretical Double’: Violence, Religion and Social Order in Schmitt and Girard” in The Sacred and the Political, Explorations on Mimesis, Violence and Religion, eds. Elisabetta Brighi, Antonio Cerella (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016). Salvatore, “A ‘Theoretical Double’: Violence, Religion and Social Order in Schmitt and Girard,” p. 160. Ibid., p. 162. René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972), p. 446, my translation. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 335-36. Normally, I will cite this translation. “La tendance à effacer le sacré, à l’éliminer entièrement, prépare le retour subreptice du sacré, sous une forme non pas transcendante mais immanente, sous la forme de la violence et du savoir de la violence. La pensée qui s’éloigne indéfiniment de l’origine violente s’en rapproche à nouveau mais à son insu car cette pensée n’a jamais conscience de changer de direction” (La violence et le sacré, p. 445). This passage is not present in the translation, Violence and the Sacred. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., pp. 154-55. In his words, “there is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behavior that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation. If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish” (Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer [London: Bloomsbury, 2016], p. 7). As Girard expresses this: “… the individual who first acts as a model will experience an increase in his own appropriative urge when he finds himself thwarted by his imitator. And reciprocally. Each becomes the imitator of his own imitator and the model of his own model. Each tries to push aside the obstacle that the other places in his path. Violence is generated by this process; or rather violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means” (The Girard Reader, ed. James Williams, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company 1996, p. 9).

ENDNOTES 263

12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

Violence and the Sacred, p. 15. Violence and the Sacred, p. 25. Ibid., p. 4. In Girard’s words, “the victim … is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself” (ibid., p. 8). Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 7. In Christianity, where God himself, in the form of the Son, is the sacrificial victim, we do not just project upon God our own violence, but also on him our own victimhood. Violence and the Sacred, p. 13. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid. It does such, since as Girard writes, “Only the introduction of some transcendental quality that will persuade men of the fundamental difference between sacrifice and revenge, between a judicial system and vengeance, can succeed in by-passing violence” (ibid, p. 25). Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid. Ibid., p. 33. Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 6.

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40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54

Ibid., p. 13. The Concept of the Political, p. 46. Violence and the Sacred, p. 23. Political Theology, p. 5. The ability to decide on the content of the friend-enemy distinction is, Schmitt claims, essential to the concept of sovereignty. See The Concept of the Political, pp. 38-9. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. For the application of this principle to the National Socialist Regime, see Carl Schmitt, State, Movement, People, where Schmitt writes, “Finally, the typically liberal divisions and dualisms between the legislative and the executive, and at the local organizational level, between the deliberative organs and the administrative or managerial organs have lost their meaning. The legislative competence of the Reich Government is a first, path-breaking instance of the removal of those artificial divisions. Everywhere, the system of repartition and discharging of responsibilities must be replaced by the clear responsibility of the leader who has acknowledged the mandate, and the election must be replaced by selection. The new idea of leader is of a particular and decisive importance for the National-Socialist State, and has as its natural complement, the institution of a Council of the Leader [Führerrat]. It stands by the side of the Leader, with advice, suggestions and opinions; it assists and supports him; it keeps him in live contact with his following and with the people, but cannot relieve the Leader of any responsibility” (State, Movement, People, The Triadic Structure of Political Unity (1933), ed., trans. Simona Draghici [Corvalis, Oregon: Plutarch Press, 2001], pp. 39-40). Political Theology, p. 15. With this, we have Kierkegaard’s definition of “that happy passion which we call faith, the object of which is the paradox.” According to Kierkegaard, “the paradox specifically unites the contradictories” by “the eternalizing of the historical and the

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56 57 58

59 60

61

62

historicizing of the eternal” (“Philosophical Fragments” in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], p. 61). The passion is “happy” because it makes us aware that faith is a matter of decision rather than understanding. The contradiction jolts one into awareness, and the advantage of this shock is “that one enters into a state in which the decision manifests itself even more clearly” (ibid., p. 93). See ibid, p. 37, where Kierkegaard claims that “the ultimate paradox of thought [is] to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.” Fear and Trembling, p. 60. Fear and Trembling, p. 98. Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du Monde, Recherches avec Jean-Michel Oughourlian et Guy Lefort (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978), p. 234. I follow the translation of The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), p. 183. Ibid., p. 205. The translation is from The Girard Reader, p. 205. “A ‘Theoretical Double’: Violence, Religion and Social Order in Schmitt and Girard,” p. 159. One sign of this politization of the legal order is the American withdrawal, under Trump, from international agreements. Within the American republic, such politization appeared when the Republican controlled Senate refused to schedule a hearing on President Obama’s final nominee to the Supreme Court or even, with rare exceptions, to meet with him. On October 17th, 2016, John McCain, a prominent senator, extended this blockade to Hillary Clinton. He declared: “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.” The refusal to consider the president’s other judicial nominees had become widespread when, in 2015, control of the Senate passed from the Democrats to the Republicans. For McCain’s remarks, see http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/opinion/the-cor rosive-election-and-the-newabnormal.html?action=click&pg type=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opin ion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT. nav=opinion-c-col-left-region. La violence et le sacré, p. 446.

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Chapter XIII: Suffering and Theodicy 1

2 3 4 5

6

7 8

9

10 11

12 13

“Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous, Thinking-of-the-Other, trans, Michael Smith and Barbara Harshaw (New York, Colombia University Press, 1998), p. 93. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid. Ibid., p. 93. The stress, here, is on its being intrinsically useless. Suffering does have a non-intrinsic use in the ethical response it calls forth from others. See ibid., p. 94. See https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Epicurus. The attribution occurs in chapter 13 (Ioan. Graphei, 1532, p. 494) of Lactantius’s De Ira Dei. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 66. Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, p. 139. The Torah, The Five Books of Moses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), p. 9. Confessions, p. 63. A typical expression of this doctrine occurs in Albert the Great’s commentary, Super Dionysium De divinis nominibus: “We say, however, that ‘good’ adds no reality to ‘being’ (ens); thus, the goodness of a thing is its being (essentia)—truth and unity are of this sort too—but [goodness, truth, and unity] add only a mode of signifying” (cited in Being and Goodness, The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology [Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991], p. 50). Gundissalimus presents an early version of this equivalence in his “De Unitate,” Die dem Boethius fälschlich zugeschriebene Abhandlung des Dominicus Gundissalimus De unitate, ed. P. Correns (Münster: Aschendorfechen Verlag, 1891). This text is available online at http://capricorn.bc.edu/siepm/DOCUMENTS/GUNDISSA LINUS/Dominicus_Gundisalvi_De_Unitate.pdf. Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 53. In his Monadology, Leibniz states that the mind of God, in its “ideas,” contains “an infinity of possible universes.” There

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20 21 22

23 24 25

must, he argues, have been a reason sufficient “for him to select one rather than another” to exist, a reason found “in the fitness or in the degree of perfection” of the one chosen. God, in other words, always chooses the best. Based on this, each “possible thing” has “the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves” (“Monadology” §§53-4, pp. 26263). The universe that actually does exist must, accordingly, have “the greatest possible perfection.” It achieves this, according to Leibniz, by having “the greatest possible variety, together with the greatest order that may be” (ibid., §58, p. 263). Order comes from God’s “adapting” each substance to every other, such that each gives a “reason” or cause for what occurs in the others (§52, p. 262). Variety comes from the plurality of different substances involved in this web of mutual determination. Each works to position all the others as uniquely situated perspectives on the whole (§56, p. 263). Darwin gives a biological equivalent to this view when he writes “Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (“The Origin of the Species,” p. 65). Given the interrelation of organisms, this being that Nature tends is, as was earlier noted, the totality of organisms as an interrelated web. It selects for the good of all creatures together. Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, p. 133. Ibid., p. 159. “Politics” 1253 a 5, ed. cit., p. 1129. “Ibid., 1253a 27, p. 1130. “Euthythro” (12e) in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), p. 18. Ibid. (14e), p. 21. “Useless Suffering,” p. 96. These translations from Job are taken from The Jerusalem Bible, Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1966. “Useless Suffering,” p. 98. Ibid. The Book of Job, trans Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 59. The New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 586) translates this: “when he tests me, I prove to be gold.”

268 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

26

27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

All translations from Isaiah are taken from The New English Bible. The translations from Paul are taken from The New English Bible. Cur Deus Homo, Bk I, ch. 12, trans. Sidney Norton (Chicago: Open Court, 1926), p. 26. Available online at: https://www.ba silica.ca/documents/2016/10/St.%20Anselm-Cur%20Deus% 20Homo.pdf. This, for Anselm, does not mean that he suffers enough but only that he does enough to pay our debt. The alternative would have Christ going through unimaginable horrors during his passion. Hebrews 10: 10-12, The New English Bible, pp. 286-7. Violence and the Sacred, p. 25. Ibid., p. 7. See “Euthythro”, p. 21. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 115. For him, it is, in fact, part of “a history of cruelty and sacrifice” (ibid., p. 112).

Chapter XIV: Embodiment and the Experience of the Divine 1 2 3 4

5 6

7

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 71. Ibid., p. 32. See ibid., pp. 40-42. “Phaedo” 65a, in Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), p. 101. “Phaedo” 66a, ed. cit., p. 102. “Therefore, Lord, not only are you that than which nothing greater can be thought, but you are also something greater than can be thought (quiddam maius quam cognitari possit). For since it is possible to think that there is such a one, then, if you are not this same being, something greater than you could be thought—which cannot be” (St. Anselm’s Proslogion, trans. M.J. Charlesworth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965] p. 137). Le « De ente et essentia » de S. Thomas d’Aquin, ed. M.-D. RolandGosselin, O. P. (Kain, Belgium: Le Saulchoir, 1926) p. 35; see

ENDNOTES 269

8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15

16 17

also Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis, distinction 8, quaestio 1, articulus 1. See ch. 32 in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One, trans. Anton Pegis (Notra Dame: University of Notra Dame Press, 1975), pp. 143-145. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1996), p. 106. Ibid., pp. 141-2. A Latin Dictionary, editors Lewis and Short, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 1610. “Oedipus at Colonus,” lines 36ff, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, in Sophocles I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 81. As the Bible relates their initial encounter, “… God called to him out of the [burning] bush: ‘Moses! Moses!’ He answered, ‘Here I am.’ And He said, ‘Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground … And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus, 3:4-6, in The Torah, The Five Books of Moses, p. 102). See Plato, Republic, 508d-509b, 518c “But when we come to the concrete thing, e.g. … one of the individual circles … of these there is no definition, but they are known by the aid of intuitive thinking or of perception; and when they pass out of this complete realization [of being perceived] it is not clear whether they exist or not” (“Metaphysics,” 1036a, ed. cit., , p. 799). Sein und Zeit, p. 240. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123.

Chapter XV: Flesh and Forgiveness 1 2 3 4

“Euthythro,” p. 18. “Metaphysics,” 1253 a 5), p. 1129. Ibid., 1253a 27, p. 1130. See “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 102-3. For Nietzsche, such universalia ante rem are

270 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

5

6

7 8 9 10

expressed “by music as the immediate language of the will” (ibid., p. 103). For us, what they point to is the flesh that makes every living being unique. This interruption inherently involves transcendence since it moves us beyond the universalia post rem to the universalia ante rem. It interrupts the categories that we draw from our comparisons of things and forces us to regard what is beyond or outside of such. A similar interruption involving transcendence occurs, according to Kierkegaard, when we see the Incarnation as involving “the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal” (“Philosophical Fragments,” p. 61). The fact that we cannot bring the two together forces us to transcend such categories. For Kierkegaard, “the ultimate paradox of thought [is] to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think” (ibid., p. 37). For us, it is to think flesh in its unique singularity. The translations of the Bible in this chapter are taken from The New English Bible. Totality and Infinity, p. 63. The Gift of Death, p. 115. Totality and Infinity, p. 118. Ibid., p. 91.

Afterword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 146. Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Erste Teil, p. 393. Ibid. The Will to Power, p. 275. Ibid., pp. 266-67. Logical Investigations, I, p. 147, fn. 1. “Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum Phänomenologische Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Nature” (May 7th-9th, 1934), in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Martin Farber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), p. 325. The full quote here is: „Man darf nicht die Verkehrtheit, in der Tat Verkehrtheit, begehen, im voraus unbemerkt die naturalistische, die herrschende Weltauffassung vorauszusetzen und dann anthropologistisch und psychologistisch in der Menschengeschichte, die Speziesgeschichte, innerhalb

ENDNOTES 271

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

der individuellen und Völkerentwicklung, die Ausbildung der Wissenschaft und der Weltinterpretation anzusehen als ein selbstverständlich zufälliges Geschehen auf der Erde, das ebensogut auf Venus oder Mars statthaben könnte.“ In translation: “One should not engage in the absurdity, the real absurdity, of presupposing in advance the dominating, naturalistic interpretation of the world. This is to regard, anthropologically and psychologically, human history—the history of the species, and, within the development of individuals and peoples, the formation of science and [its] interpretation of the world as something that, of course, occurred contingently on earth, something that could have happened, just as well, on Venus or Mars.” Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid. p. 314. “... stehe ich still oder gehe ich, so habe ich meinen Leib als Zentrum und ruhende Körper und bewegte um mich herum und Boden ohne Beweglichkeit. Mein Leib hat Extension, etc., aber keine Ortsveränderung und Unveränderung in dem Sinne, wie ein Aussenkörper sich als in Bewegung, sich entfernend oder nähernd, oder nicht in Bewegung, nah, fern, gibt” (“Grundlegende Untersuchungen,” p. 315). Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid. Ibid., p. 323. See Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 386. Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, p 124. Ibid., p. 123.

Index of Names Al-Saji, Alia, 261n21

Heidegger, Martin, 13, 130-131, 196, 241n4

Améry, Jean, 149, 151, 155-157 Anselm of Canterbury, 186, 193, 269n29

Heinämaa, Sara, 253n8

Aquinas, Thomas, 193, 196, 198

Hume, David, 163, 165

Arendt, Hannah, 136, 159,

Husserl, Edmund, 12-18, 20, 2333, 35-47, 51-55, 60, 63-69, 82-85, 105-111, 121, 126, 137, 141-144, 149, 156, 210, 211215, 228n10, 229n, 21, 229n23, 230n29, 231n8, 231n15, 232n19, 232n21, 232n22, 232n31-n32, 233n37n39, 234n41, 234n43, 234n45, 235n3, 236n4, 236n7, 237n20, 237n22, 238n24-n27, 239n28, 239n3031, 240n33, 240n35-n36, 240n40, 241n41-n42, 242n9, 243n17, 244n16, 249n8-n9, 250n10, 250n15, 253n7, 256n27, 257n28, 271n7

Hobbes, Thomas,

Aristotle, 53-54, 64, 97, 116, 127, 129, 136, 184, 241n4, 251n5, 252n18, 254n16. Augustine, 115, 116-118, 120, 124, 127, 181, 207, 242n15, Barbaras, René, 72-73, 76, 246n40 Bergson, Henri, 12, 227n4 Berkeley, George, 227n1 Bernet, Rudolf, 110, 254n11, 255n23 Brighi, Elizabetta, 262n2 Cerella, Antonio, 262n2 Chalmers, David, 14 Darwin, Charles, 77-78, 85-88, 95-96, 212, 248n59, 268n14

Ingarden, Roman,259n5 Jackson, Frank, 228n11

De Warren, Nicholas, 261n17

Jonas, Hans, 14-16, 58-59, 76, 9394, 180, 183-184, 229n19

Derrida, Jacques, 81, 90, 189, 254n19

Kant, Immanuel, 49-51, 53, 119120, 123, 142, 151, 183, 249n9, 259n9-n10

Descartes, René, 49, 67-68, 182 Dillon, M.C., 70 Durie, Robin, 254n19

Kern, Iso, 249n9

Edie, James, 37-85

Kierkegaard, Soren, 172, 265n54, 266n55, 271n5

Fichte, J.G., 233n33 Fink, Eugen, 142-143

Kortooms, Toine, 234, n45

Girard, René, 163-174, 187, 263n11, 264n15, 264n29

Leibniz, Gottfried, 49, 182, 267n13

Gundissalimus, Dominicus, 267n11

273

274 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS Levinas, Emmanuel, 68, 136-137, 146, 152, 179, 184-185, 208210, 245n24 Locke, John, 14, 54, 125, 242n16 Manzotti, Riccardo, 256n29 Mensch, James, 238n23, 245n24, 257n28, 258n11, 262n23 Merleau-Ponty, 13, 18-19, 51, 53, 68, 70-72, 96, 98-99, 106-107, 110-111, 115-116, 119, 122123, 128, 150-151, 199, 242n11, 245n21, 246n31, 246n40, 256n23, 256n25, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87, 203, 213, 270n4 Parks, Tim, 256n29 Patočka, Jan, 72-78, 87-89, 92-93, 131-133, 152, 193-194, 215, 247n43-n45 Plato, 184, 188, 195, 201-203 passim Poincaré, Henrí, 58, 100, 243n20 Rodemeyer, Lanei, 234n45 Sacks, Oliver, 107 Sepp, Hans Rainer, 91. Salvatore, Andrea,164, 173 Schmitt, Carl, 163-164, 169-173, 265n44, 265n52 Sophocles, 194 Toadvine, Ted, 70, Utley, Fiona, 261n21 Weber, Elisabeth, 261n17 Zahavi, Dan, 43, 240n34

Index of Subjects hard (mind-body) problem, 1415, 49, 113, status of, 12-16 stream of, 27, 37-38 structured by embodiment, 212, 215

appearing as such, 19, 73 actualization through motion, 75 and causality, 77-78 as complete original, 73 as implying subjectivity, 74, 126 original possibilities of, 74, 215, see apriori

constitution, body’s role in, 18, 29-30, 46-47 intersubjective, 44 facticity of, 83-85 of birth, death, 27-28 of the ego, 36-41 of objects vs. subjects, 36ff. of the body, 29, 47, 79 teleological, 84-85 temporal, 41ff. trust’s role in, 152

substance, 65 apriori, of appearing as such, 69, of flesh, 70-71 of life-world, 78 of motion, 72ff. of objective sciences, 78

being in, double relation of (intertwining), 18-19, 51, 68, 96-97, 119, 150 temporal vs spatial sense, 119120

death, 24, 26-27, 29-32, 81, 89, 108, 180 ego, action of, 44-45 affection of, 25-26 anonymity of, 52, 106, 110, 230n29 as a constituted center or pole, 37-40 as a fixed form, 40 as a process, 33, 35-36, 43-47 as the subject of consciousness, 37 as 0-point, 32, 38-40, 43 constitution of, see constitution community of egos, 35, 42-43

birth, death, and sleep as limit problems, 24-32, 45, 47, 81, 89, 197 causality, God’s, 197-198 mechanical, 12, 49, 55, teleological (final), 12, 55-57, 59, 76-77, 84,

consciousness, absolute, 110, 142 as ultimately constituting, 63, 142 beginning and end of, see birth, death, and sleep. denial of, 14, 60, 64-66, 69 dependent on impressions, 39 on the spatial world, 101 on facticity, 250n9 embodied, 68 facticity of, 83-85, 90, 211

embodied, 18-19, 29-32 nowness of, 28, 38, 40-41,44, 121 unique singularity of, 122 transcendental (pure), 17, 23, 27-29 embodiment, and newness, 130, 135-137 anonymity of, 109-110 as constituting vs. as constituted, 18, 29-31

275

276 DECISIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS as determining the presence of the now, 124-126 non-substitutability of, 109, 196-197, 201, 203 209 privacy, 68, 108, 110-112

epistemology, 16-17, 229n23. epoché, 137, 141, limitations of, 142 to life world, 66 to the sphere of ownness, 143144

evil, 180-186, 189, 206-208 evolution, 16-17, 77-78, 85-88, 95-96, 213, 248n59 existence, 41, 88, 92 flesh, 18-19, 51-52, 70-73, 98, 102, 130, 136, 150, 187 and forgiveness, 201-210 and the experience of God, 195198, 211 and transcendence, 198-200 see embodiment

freedom, 131-135 God, experience of, 194-198, 200 incarnation of, 200, 204, 208, 210 justification of, 180-189, 216-217 transcendence of, 172, 191-193, 208-209 unique singularity of, 193, 206, 211

horizon, etymology, 81 and facticity, 83-85 and life, 85-87, 89, 212 and motion, 87-89 as a one-sided border, 81, 89-90 determined by evolution, external, 73-74, 82 internal, 73, 82 world, 83, 211

interpretation, 130-131

intertwining, 70-72, 97, 99, 101, 128, 150-151, 153-154, 212, 215, 217, 256n25, 260n13, asymmetry of, 71 hand touching hand, 51-53, 7071, 107, 254n11 reversibility of, 70-72, 198 see being-in

lifeworld, 63, 66-69, 71-73, 78, 141, 146 living present, 28, 29, 42, 69, 121 reduction to, 40-41, 44

metabolism, 58, 76, 88-89, 93-94 mind-body problem, 49, 55-56, 58-60 motion, 38, 57-59, 72-73, 92, 100101, 125-127, 213-215, 251n5, 252n18 as actualization, 75-78, 87-89, 92-95, 99 as determining horizon, see horizon of evolution, 77, 88

natural attitude, 141-142, 215 and trust, 144-146, 161

natural selection, see evolution perception, 38 external vs. Internal, 49-50, 100, 124-125, 127

perceptual faith 51, 151-152, 154-155, 160-161, 245n21 phenomenology, 13, 16, 18-20, 24, 63, 78-79, 83, 84, 85, 9091, 137, 142, 144, 146-147, 216-217 asubjective, 93

place, of appearing, 18-19, 90, 106-107, 110-113, 123, 126, 157, 159 of the subject, 97-102

qualities, primary, secondary, 11, 14, 6568, 227n1

INDEXES 277 reason, 132-133, 136-137 crisis of, 64-66

relativism, 17-18, 65, 212-213, 215-216 religion, 164-167, 171-173, 187188 sacred, 194, 196, return of, 164, 174

sacrifice, 172, and flesh, 201-204 and forgiveness, 204-206 and the judicial system, 167168, as non-transactional, 202-204 defense against violence, 165166, 168, 264n15 economy of, 184-188, 201-202, 206-207 of Jesus, 173, 208, 210

self-identity, 105-106, alterity of, 110-112 as determined by embodiment, 106-108 indefinability, 109-110 paradox of, 113 privacy, 111-112

self-presence, 51-53, 128, 150 and nowness, 125-126 bodily, 122-124

self-touch, see intertwining, hand touching hand selfhood, embodied, 14, 70-71, 102, 111112, 126 defined by intertwining, 128, 149-150, 215

social change, 129-135, 137 solipsism, 143-144 sovereignty, Schmitt’s concept of, 170, 172173, 265n44

space, 50

and the subject-object dichotomy in relation to time, 47, 53-55, 57, 59-60, 101, 115, 123, 126-128, Poincaré’s conception of, 58-59, 99-100, 243n20 see place

subjectivity, ambiguity of, 23-24 environmentally defined, 96, 99-101 transcendental, 27, 29, 84, 249n9 ultimately functioning 63, 6769, 78

temporalization, 35, 40, 42-43 as defining existents, 28, 41-42 retentions and protentions, 27, 31, 39-42, 45, 126, 232n21

theodicy, and suffering, 180-183, 185-188, 207-208 of human evil, 184-185 of natural evil, 180-183

time, 50, 56, 100-101, 115-126 paradoxes, 53-54, 57 see space in relation to time see also temporalization

torture, 149, 156-157, 261n17 trust, and being-in-the-world, 149, 151-155, 160 and violence, 149, 156-160

violence, and transcendence, 171-173 natural, 163 political, 169, 173-174 religious, 164-168, 173, 187-188

ibidem.eu