Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of The Logos, Book 5: The Creative Logos Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts, Literature and Aesthetics [1 ed.] 1402037430, 1402037449, 9781402037436, 9781402037443

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LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS. BOOK FIVE

A N A L E C TA H U S S E R L I A N A THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME LXXXXII

Founder and Editor-in-Chief:

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS. BOOK FIVE The Creative Logos. Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts, Literature and Aesthetics

Edited by ANNA-T E R E SA T YMIE NIE C KA The World Phenomenology Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

1-4020-3743-0 (HB) 978-1-4020-3743-6 (HB) 1-4020-3744-9 (e-book) 978-1-4020-3744-3 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springeronline.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed in the Netherlands.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THEMATIC INTRODUCTION ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Metamorphosis of the Logos of Life in Creative Experience: Treatise in a Nutshell

xi

SECTION I THE BRAINSTORM OF CREATIVE EXPERIENCE PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL / The Ontopoiesis of Leonardo

da Vinci’s Brainstorm Drawings

3

PIERO TRUPIA / Phenomenology of the Countenance:

Portraying the Soul, Staging a Lived Experience

13

ANTONIO DOMI´ NGUEZ REY / Principios de Objetividad

Poe´tica

29

J. C. COUCEIRO-BUENO / Essential ‘‘Poiesis’’

49

ELLEN J. BURNS / Musical Progeny: The Case of Music and

Phenomenology

57

BRIAN GRASSOM / Art, Alterity and Logos: In the Spaces of

Separation

67

JAMES P. WERNER / Logos, Rationale and Desire in

Convergent Art Practices

79 SECTION II

THE WORK OF ART AND ITS EXPERIENTIAL RADIUS ELGA FREIBERGA / Phenomenological Interpretation of the

Work of Art: R. Ingarden, M. Dufrenne, P. Ricoeur

93

DAVID BRUBAKER / Painting from the Heart: Beauty, Moore

and Merleau-Ponty’s Wholes of Visibility v

103

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MOLODKINA LJUDMILA / On Phenomenology of Memory

and Memorial (In Terms of Architectural and Landscaping Creations)

113

˘ DA ˘ LINA DIACONU / Patina – Atmosphere – Aroma: MA

Towards an Aesthetics of Fine Differences

131

MAO CHEN / The Persistence of Phenomenological Time:

Reflections on Three Recent Chinese Films LAWRENCE KIMMEL / Notes on the Art of Memory

149 157

ALEKSANDRA PAWLISZYN / The Truth of Suffering (Levinas)

and the Truth Crystallized in the Work of Art

179

SECTION III VARIOUS AESTHETIC RAYS IN LITERATURE JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI / Articulate

Spontaneity and the Aesthetic Imagination

199

CALLEY A. HORNBUCKLE / Exploring Aesthetic Perception

of the Real in Iris Murdoch’s T he Black Prince

221

REBECCA M. PAINTER / Fiction and the Growth of Moral

Consciousness: Attention and Evil

235

JADWIGA SMITH / Phenomenology of Emotions: Aurel

Kolnai’s On Disgust and Jacobean Drama

259

OSVALDO ROSSI / Light/Shadow: Lines for an Aesthetic

Reflection

275

RAYMOND J. WILSON III / A Phenomenological Theory of

Literary Creativity: Ricoeur and Joyce

295

MICHEL DION / Basic Conditionings of the Inner and

Corporeal Life: Representations from Two Major Novelists of the 19th and 20th Century Literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust)

313

CHIEDOZIE OKORO / Phenomenology for World

Reconstruction

331

INDEX OF NAMES

357

APPENDIX / The Program of the Oxford Third World

Congress

361

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Presenting to the scholarly public this collection, the fifth and last volume gathering the work from the Third World Congress of Phenomenology, ‘‘Phenomenology World-Wide: Phenomenology of the Logos and the Logos of Phenomenology,’’ held in Oxford, August 15–21, 2004, I express my warm thanks to all those who helped to prepare and to carry out this marvelous Conference. First of all it is the initiative of William J. Smith who brought us to Oxford, who with his wife Jadwiga and Gary Backhaus have also performed with expertise the task of the local arrangements that merits our appreciation. Professor Grahame Lock of Queen’s College and Matt Landrus from Wolfson College must be thanked for their valuable contribution to the local organization. Tadeusz Czarnik, my personal helper, cannot be forgotten. I wish to express special thanks to Jeff Hurlburt, our secretary, for his assiduous and dedicated work in preparing this gathering. We are particularly pleased to see among the authors artists – bringing to this book a special flavor. The enthusiasm and expertise of the authors who joined us from the entire world – forty countries – made this Congress an epochmaking phenomenology event. A-T.T.

vii

A group of participants in front of Wadham College

THEMATIC INTRODUCTION

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE LOGOS OF LIFE IN CREATIVE EXPERIENCE T reatise in a Nutshell

Is it necessary to bring once more to the fore the creative functioning of the human being, since it has been discussed for over three decades as the central point of the new critique of reason in my phenomenology of life and in the programs of the World Phenomenology Institute, published in the Analecta Husserliana?1 It is indeed necessary! The reasons are, first, that being engaged in any sector of the studies concerning reality in its origins and genesis, we have to bring out over and over again the human creative function to treat it adequately. Every in depth inquiry concerning human beings and human reality will always come back to human creative powers in order to clarify its status quo. Second, our emphasis upon the nature of the logos as the subject of our five-book studies gathered from our Third World Congress at Oxford, brings human creativity to a quite particular focus which calls for new attention. Having so far unraveled the workings of human creativity from its elemental ciphering of the human significance of life at its incipient entrance into the human orbit, up to its accomplishments in human exemplary creative works,2 with the focus upon the genesis of reality and the nature of human reason, we can now succinctly trace the genesis/unfolding of the logos of life itself as, upon the wings of imaginatio creatrix, it undergoes its own metamorphosis toward ascending to its culminating Promethean heights.

1. TRACING THE GROWTH OF THE LOGOS OF LIFE FROM THE ‘‘LIVING AGENT’’ TO THE ‘‘CREATIVE SUBJECT’’

Along its progressive unfolding the living being is led by its logos toward the establishment of the uniquely human reality, with its world of life, man’s inward universe and the striving toward the infinite. But in order to perform this gigantic task of transformations, the logos of life itself progressively undergoes an essential intrinsic metamorphosis involving its entire functional network. This intrinsic metamorphosis will be our focus now. xi A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, xi–xv. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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As I have discussed elsewhere,3 the living beingness grows unfolding functions through the impetus, forces and directions of the logos of life following its ontopoietic sequence of life’s self-individualizing project. It grows while each of the constructive segments of the logos refers back to their common ‘‘trunk’’, to which all of the functions are tied by their innermost significance within the overall net of the ontopoietic sequence that they incorporate, forming what I have called the ‘‘living agent’’. The living agent serves the ontopoietic constructive devices of the logos as a vortex for its innumerable energies at work. With their growth in complexity, the living agent that coordinates them and controls their inward and outward situation also develops from the rudimentary sensitivity to the functional ontopoietic progress the spheres of sensing, experiencing, communicative and ‘‘manifesting’’ organs – like the brain – in order to process them. The living agent is formed by receiving, gathering and then distributing the innumerable functional segments into their appropriate constructive places. In the functional midst it is also throwing links, building cooperative devices among them in orchestrating their operations; it also issues new links toward incorporating newly emerging processes into a common pool. Its highest achievement in constructing such sentient organs are referential links through which (in various degrees) they aim at an outside referent to fulfill or complete their needs and thus project into their circumambient world. Along these lines lies already a prototype of the supremely significant factor which accounts for the constitution of the human world: the specifically human intentionality. But before human intentionality unfolds into its specific realm, the living agent-subject has to be transformed into a new sphere such that its control over the ontopoietic workings of the logos loosens up and leaves a place for the new factor of imaginatio creatrix entering, sua sponte, the game of life.4 The logos of life is prompted always by the Imaginatio Creatrix which with its forces and synergies inspires and carries along to their completion innumerable virtualities with their exemplary/seminal propensities and possibilities, trying to attune, to adjust each one’s applicability, first to the available situation and then to perfect it. These forces and synergies are mainly responsible for the wealth of our projects, ideas, tendencies and their competitive display. These creative forces are not anonymous, nor are they issued directly by the ontopoietic progress of individualizing life.5 Instead they proceed from the specifically outfitted human mind, crystallized within a human person, the final processor of the logos; however, this mind – and the person – is inversely the product of the logos’s creative forces at work.

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2. THE TURN OF THE LOGOS WHILE CREATIVE IMAGINATION ENTERS THE SCENE OF LIFE

Imaginatio creatrix emerging within the midst of the ontopoietic process of life marks a radical turning point in the orientation of life’s logos. It displays, in fact, a galvanizing impact upon the logos of life involved in its ontopoietic patterns of differentiations and dynamism. First of all, entering into the workings of the vitally oriented logoic functions of the living agent it dissolves their tight intentional orientation toward immediate performance of operations. Second, the imaginative wings lift the logos from the direct fitness-end-adjustment toward a variety of selective virtualities. From this there is only one step to the deliberative logos of the human mind with its own intellective intentionality. Partly partaking of the ontopoietic circuits of life’s unfolding and partly lifting itself with new intentional powers – having reached the intellective level of forming the constitutive world of life according to its universal standards – and expanding this constitutive proficiency through the deliberating and judgmental powers of the mind, the mind itself (being animated by the imaginative breath) becomes an instrument of promoting the forces onwards: it becomes a creative human mind. The human mind assumes henceforth not only the role of the operational vortex of the living being, and orchestrates the creatively inspired functional system of logoic strings and dynamisms, but in it the logos of life becomes – as mentioned above – crystallized in a unique type of selfawareness: the human person. It is the now creative logos which, as incarnated within the body/soul territory, stretches through the spheres which it constitutes: the human world, the human universe. By processing the functional system within the human person, it also processes its own creative metamorphosis within these dimensions of beingness itself. Thus we see how the logos of life, advancing from the original selfindividualizing script going along with the differentiation of types in an evolutionary course, is progressively loosening its type of ordering within the living beingness itself in a liberating system: the human creative mind. Within the human creative mind the logos of life launches a challenge to itself; it puts in question the validity and validation of its own significance. The response to this challenge has to be given from within. In this challenge lies the crucial achievement of the logos of life.

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3. THE CREATIVE VORTEX OF THE LOGOS’S METAMORPHOSIS OF SENSE

Pointedly we open the studies of our volume with a ‘‘brainstorm’’ within the creative agent who in this occurrence is meant to be the artist at the incipient point at which he/she launches into the creative process aiming at the creation of a work of art.6 As I have described in detail earlier,7 the creative yearnings burst forward in the midst of the habitual pursuit of living’s tasks and satisfactions, aiming at a radical revolt at the world of life within the individual being, at everything that is familiar therein and in which he/she sees his/her life inscribed. It is a yearning after an ‘‘other world’’, an imaginary sphere in which everything would be ‘‘different’’ and in which these yearnings could be satisfied. It is an innermost urge to redeem the insufficiency, the pointlessness of everydayness which fails to indicate any escape from the repetitiveness of the trivial course of life. The ‘‘brainstorm’’ is the initial outburst of this revolt against the limits of the hitherto valid significance of life with its horizons, within the creative human mind – person. Prompted from the inside by the logoic turmoil, the creative agent seeks to find and manifest his own version of the real while it animates and brings forth into action all the dynamism and threads of the creative mind. The aspiring artist seeks in his/her artistic endeavor to find a new sense of life, deeper, more authentic, more ‘‘true’’: better corresponding to his/her longings than the one he is living in. The creatively engaged logos explodes in a vertiginous interrogation seeking to reach beyond itself. Hence in the work of art we find the locus in which the radical metamorphosis of the logos of life finds expression. In the exemplary work of art, we find indeed the creative logos of life reaching the peak of its metamorphosis. Having challenged the validity of its hitherto accomplished endeavors it emits a new and unprecedented significance of reality. This new significance slowly enters into our experience of reality, and permeates it down to its elemental ciphering, transforming us in our existence over and over again. NOTES 1 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, L ogos of L ife, Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Analecta Husserliana, Volume XXIV, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, and numerous collected volumes of the Analecta Husserliana. 2 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘The Human Condition within the Unity-of-Everythingthere-is-alive and its logoic network’’, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXXIX, Dordrecht, Springer, 2005.

METAMORPHOSIS OF THE LOGOS OF LIFE

xv

3 Ibid., p. xvi and footnotes. 4 For the extensive work done in The World Phenomenology Institute and published in the Analecta Husserliana for the vindication of the primacy of imagination, cf. A-T. Tymieniecka, ‘‘Theme: the Triumph of Imagination in the Critique of Reason’’, pp. xi–xxi, in Imaginatio Creatrix – the Pivotal Force of the Genesis/Ontopoiesis of Human L ife and Reality, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXXIII, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2004. 5 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. ‘‘Creative Forces and Formation – Life’s Creative Matrix’’, pp. xxiii–xxv, in T he Creative Matrix of the Origins – Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of L ife, Book II, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXVII, 2002, and the afore-cited ‘‘The Human Condition within the Unity-of-Everything-there-is-alive and its logoic network’’, Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXXIX, Dordrecht, Springer, 2005, p. xxix. 6 Cf. The study of Patricia Trutty-Coohill, in this volume, pp. ... 7 L ogos and L ife, Book 1, Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Part 1.

William Smith

SECTION I THE BRAINSTORM OF CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

Patricia Trutty-Coohill and Shannon Driscoll

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL

THE ONTOPOIESIS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI’S BRAINSTORM DRAWINGS

Creative phenomenology enters spontaneously into the working of life in its circuits ... thus, we do not proceed by deciphering already ciphered scripts. On the contrary, we dwell in the ciphering itself. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka1

I am an art critic, so when I read philosophy, I test it in terms of the art I know. My philosophy books are annotated with lists of images. Among the most heavily annotated are those by Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, especially her latest book. L ogos and L ife Book 4: Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason (2000). Here the image that most struck me as analogous to her argument and also her writing style was Leonardo’s sketch for a composition for a Madonna and Child at the British Museum, a type of drawing that drawing expert Carmen Bambach calls ‘‘a great conceptual breakthrough for the history of art.’’2 Tymieniecka’s philosophy is very applicable to the situation of Leonardo’s brainstorm sketches, because, as Laurence Kimmel has explained, her philosophy calls for a clear view from within the interstices that form the patterns of evolving life. ... It does not aspire to a god’s eye view of reality, but develops a view from within; it takes the course of an immersion into the creative mix that constitutes the total experience of existence – the cognitive, emotive, and volitional activities of human mind and culture. ... it searches out the web of relations that together form the living tissue of a changing world. There are key moments in this form of inquiry that entail both intimate engagement and reflective distancing in order to discern the larger patterns of involvement in the creative process of which one is ... a part. These movements require an active sense of both existential imminence and rational ascendance.3

Leonardo’s compositional drawings, in which he tries to be a ‘‘second nature,’’4 take us to the heart of Tymieniecka’s focus on the L ogos of life; she, in turn, brings us right into the picture. ‘‘Phenomenology properly understood,’’ she says, ‘‘did not intend to invent a method, evidentiary or intuitive, but to devise an impartial way of clarifying the ways in which humans cognize/constitute their reality.’’5 3 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 3–11. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

4

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL LEONARDO’S DRAWING TECHNIQUES

Leonardo’s drawing techniques will prove an exception to Alfred Gell’s opinion that ‘‘the cognitive processes of any mind, especially over a whole biographical career, are inaccessible private experiences which leave only the most undecipherable traces.’’6 If, as Bernard Berenson wrote, Leonardo’s drawing is ‘‘perhaps as near to an approach to the actual transfer to paper of a visual thought as a man has ever achieved,’’7 we should be able to find Leonardo’s thought processes in them, especially in the messy, confusing ‘‘brainstorm’’ sketches that he worked with after 1500 where ideas literally pour onto the paper – with little precision – in an intuitive, stream-of-consciousness process of exploration. We have four times more drawings by Leonardo da Vinci than of the most prolific sixteenth-century artist.8 Hoarder he may have been, but these drawings must have been significant to him for he had to move them around in his many travels, from Florence, to Milan, to Florence, Milan, Rome and finally to Amboise where he willed them intact to Francesco Melzi, who in turn, kept them like relics.9 Drawings were lost in the dispersal after Melzi’s death, but still we have a rich deposit of evidence about Leonardo’s creative process, a process that would be extremely influential to the tradition of western art. Leonardo’s drawing method was revolutionary. As Bambach says, he insisted that the initial sketches be fresh, something quite new for the Renaissance.10 For master artists of the earlier Renaissance, drawing was a one-shot proposition; they were expected to compose works by assembling ‘‘finished’’ drawings for a composition. This is comparable to Ansel Adams’ technique where the photographs were so fully planned beforehand that a single shot was all that was required – or to Mozart’s reputed copying out whole scores directly from his mind. Andrea Verrocchio, Leonardo’s teacher, developed another technique. He made rapid sketches that capture a child’s varied positions (Louvre, Paris RF 2).11 Leonardo made drawings like this, as well as full, individual studies for compositions, e.g. the Metropolitan Designs for a Nativity or Adoration of the Christ Child, etc. (no. 17.142.1).12 The interest of this study, however, is his unusual technique13 of sketching using simultaneous multiple views in figures, e.g. an ink and wash over traces of charcoal Madonna and Child with a Cat (London, British Museum 1856-6-21 recto) or the Windsor Horseman on blue prepared paper of (mid 1480s, Royal Library 12358) where the effect of the alternate views is almost cinematographic, a neat trick when the medium is unforgiving metalpoint. By the

ONTOPOIESIS OF DA VINCI’S BRAINSTORM DRAWINGS

5

first decade of the sixteenth century, (as in the Rearing Horse in red chalk, Windsor, Royal Library 12336) Leonardo changes media; with chalks he can change the value of the line with the pressure and speed of his hand. The immediacy and cinematographic effect is enhanced because the chalk is more responsive to his desire to render an alive, moving force. If we turn to a sketch that is not from nature, his attempt to enliven a model is apparent. The Windsor T he Sea God Neptune Commanding His Quadriga of Sea Horses (Royal Library, 12570) is based on the central portion of a Roman sarcophagus.14 Giorgio Vasari tells us that it is a sketch made preparatory for a lost drawing for his friend Antonio Segni. Vasari characterizes it as ‘‘executed with such draftsmanship and diligence that it seemed absolutely alive.’’15 To instill life into the dead model Leonardo gives the sea horses multiple legs, and emphasizes their energy in three dimensions with multiple lines of varied density. He puts life into the composition, not by drawing the forms precisely, but by freeing them from the precision of the model, filling them with a sense of time and therefore movement. Leonardo himself explains that ‘‘copying without reason is like a mirror that imitates within itself all things placed before it, without cognition of their existence [emphasis added].’’16 Or in phenomenological terms, without conscious registration or experience of things. Although he was trained in the traditional Florentine manner, where drawing meant copying from accepted models, eventually Leonardo advised artists to stimulate their fantasia in an unusual way. Note his apology at the beginning of the passage: I cannot refrain from mentioning among these precepts a new device for the imagination, which, although it may seem rather trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless extremely useful in arousing the mind to various inventions. And, this is, when you look at any walls spotted with stains, or with stones of various patterns, if you have to invent some setting, you may be able to see therein a resemblance to various landscapes, graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills in varied arrangement, or again, you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of things, which you can distill into well-drawn forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.17

Leonardo not only used such ‘‘natural’’ stains to stimulate his fantasia, but for some compositions in the first decade of the sixteenth century, he generated his own stains. We call these ‘‘brainstorm’’ drawings. The practice became de rigueur in the sixteenth century. Vasari describes such drawings in the following way: ‘‘artists first drew schizzi (sketchs) which were to resemble the form of a stain (in forma di una macchia), meant as

6

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a rough draft for a compositional idea, to find the manner of the poses (per trovar il modo delle attitudine).’’18 Such a method, Kimmel explains, calls on the artist to engage his gift of mind, of logos, ... the ability to see through, not merely see as; [it] requires the whole being, not merely the cognitive faculties of reason. ... To integrate this range of creative activity, Tymieniecka develops the internal dynamic of the Logos of life as a process of ontopoiesis that is isomorphic with the relational structures of existence, of being and becoming. Ontopoiesis is also a point of individuation within existence, in which logos is a generative source of patterning change, always furthering life possibilities.19

THE ST. ANNE COMPOSITIONS

The British Museum sheet (1875-6-12-17) with sketches for a Virgin and Child with St. Anne and a Lamb among other images20 is ‘‘the most extreme of all his ‘brainstorm’ studies.’’21 This sketch is one of the many preparatory studies for a composition of a Virgin and Child with St. Anne and a lamb or St. John that Leonardo worked on in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Although the purpose of this paper is not to conjecture about the probable sequence of images that resulted in the two ‘‘final’’ compositions extant of the theme (others have):22 the Burlington House Cartoon (National Gallery, London) and the Louvre painting. At this point I want to concentrate on the similarities between the two so that you will see Leonardo’s aim: two seated women supporting a wriggling child who reaches outside the safety of their wombs to embrace his future – whether it be the lamb of his future sacrifice, or his cousin who would point him to ministry. Although our focus is on process and our criticism concentrates on the framed brainstorm sketch, we must look to the end to which the sketches tend, the Burlington House Cartoon, to understand the progress of the process. The logos of art is easier to fathom than the logos of life for we have evidence of the end toward which it tends. While we view life from a position of immersion in its complexity, we do not experience the complexity of the process in the completed work of art. We do not experience the effort the artist takes to attain the level the level of disegno he expects. Disegno, a Renaissance term that includes the senses of both drawing and design, is analogous to Tymieniecka’s Logos of Life, that is ‘‘the principles of measuring that are manifest in all phases of life’s evolution; ... contextualized even in its genesis.’’23 Martin Kemp’s analysis of the framing of the sketch emphasizes such contextualization.24 To

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7

understand the nature of the genesis we must look to the final stage: the Burlington House Cartoon. St. Anne is placed on the central axis. We know from other sketches, that Leonardo was determined to have the St. Anne figure act as the sculptural ground for the whole composition: appropriate for Anne traditionally is throne of the mother and child; she is the symbol of the Church. Pietro Marani argued that the Classical Muses found in Hadrian’s villa during Leonardo’s day influenced him; the axial placement of the matrix figure grounds the classical order.25 This is because, although he had a model, he refused to copy it directly. Rather, phenomenologically, he realized the disegno of the classical form and tried first to embody its substance rather than its form into a new context. And he intentionally chose the classical form to hold together the complex composition of two seated and interlinked women. In a sketch at the Louvre (Paris RF 460) we can see the major difficulty he found in placing the women’s legs harmoniously. In the eventual solution in the Burlington House Cartoon Mary rests against Anne’s lap and allows Anne’s legs, with the others, to provide a firm base for the significant movements above. In the Louvre painting, Mary sits across Anne’s lap so the legs are no longer parallel but perpendicular to one another. That we cannot work out fully the sequence of his instructions or practice in moving from sketch to cartoon does not concern us here, because that part of the process in less intuitive. We are concerned with the primary, spontaneous, most primitive phase of Leonardo’s process, the one that is closest to Tymieniecka’s generative logoi, the ontopoiesis of the design. It is this phase that most calls on the primal fantasia or imagination. In concentrating on the brainstorm process in light of her study of ‘‘Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason,’’ we apply Tymieniecka’s understanding of the Logos of Life to the creative process involved in one work of art. I will use the terms logos and disegno interchangeably. Disegno is a multivalent term, including drawing and design, and the artistic motivation to design. As Kathleen Haney suggests (p.c.) it is to say that the logos/disegno directs its manifestation in the completed work. IMPETUS: THE TRANSLACING CONTINUITY OF THE PROCESSIONAL LINE26

Leonardo started the sketch with black chalk, which is a memory record of Leonardo’s ‘‘proto-strategies.’’27 While it is impossible to see how or

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where he began, we can see that the chalk lines are not random, but are exploratory based on an entelical process. As he sketched with chalk, his general intention was to build a complex sculptural form, one that could incorporate the variety of movements, poses, volumes, etc. into the classicizing pyramid, full of life. To paraphrase Tymieniecka, within that snarl of lines we find the manifestation of life in its emergence, not in linear sequence, ‘‘but in all its generic as well as functional operations, with all the logoic strategies in place, all the connective strings properly tied in a specific vibration, in a spontaneous effort that has to happen all at once.’’28 The speed of the drawing ensures the ‘‘all at once-ness’’ of the genesis. The rhythms of the chalk drawings give us the ‘‘operational sense’’ by which the force of the disegno/logos of the sketches drives, but has not yet worked out, the cartoon.29 Through its capricious, willful, prodigal and profligate chalk lines, it showers ‘‘its gifts throwing them up in generation, growth, corruption. [Though at first it may seem so, the lines] are not haphazard. There is an intricate ‘logic’ in the patterning, the innumerable networks involved in the grand game of life we partake of and enjoy.’’30 What we are faced with in these chalk lines is a gemish. So it must have seemed to Leonardo when he paused to reflect on what he had done. He knew, however, that his drawing was, as Tymieniecka describes, ‘‘harnessed while in motion by a constructive measure, a harmonizing, structuring, generating seed sowing measure of equipoise’’ so that he could find the emerging disegno. CONSTRUCTIVE EQUIPOISE31

In the midst of his chalk exploration Leonardo paused to iterate its best possibilities in pen and wash. Tymieniecka describes this phase of creativity: When in our pursuit of the unfolding logos we reach the territory of its laying the groundwork for life, the bioscosmic circuits of its constructive intergenerative and seminal unfolding, we pause. Its impetus overwhelms us at this point. We are arrested by wonder. ... Since construction is its spring, the logos goes ever ‘‘onward’’; it implies the necessity of discrete continuity (disruption and recurrence), and its spacing and scanning implies the necessity of measure. Ultimately, the impetus of becoming implies the necessity of equipoise. ... While the impetus is life’s motor, equipoise is the basis of progress; in the manner of a fisherman, logos keeps hold of the line [the position of the women’s heads are almost set, as is John’s] when it throws out a hook to make a new catch’’ [the Child’s position is not settled; there are two positions for his head; the legs have not yet reached the disegno of the Burlington House Cartoon].32

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When he was nearly lost in the web of line, Leonardo needed to assess his plan again: with a stylus he impressed the significant forms from the ‘‘womb’’ of the chalk drawing on the recto. The composition appears in mirror image on the verso of the sheet, which, according to Carmen Bambach, served perhaps to ‘‘stir up his creative juices, ... [an] unusual, very prominent feature of his creative process [that] has been little discussed by scholars.’’33 The reversed image provides a new look, a symmetry by which he could evaluate what is needed. In this case, we see how vague are Anne’s legs, and how inappropriate is the position of the Virgin’s own right arm, a holdover from his much earlier Adoration of the Magi. And so, in Tymieniecka’s terms, the achievement of the Burlington House Cartoon is ‘‘the scale upon which the possibility of the All hangs holds in the balance of the original impetus, on the one side, and on the equipoise of the generative/constructive/creative logos, on the other.’’34 Tymieniecka’s logos of life can help us appreciate the results of Leonardo’s brainstorming. His drawing visualizes her thought: The balance of the impetus and equipoise is the innermost law of the logos, its First principle. This is the first principle of becoming and beingness, the first principle of the ontopoiesis of life. When we ponder the progress of life, from its initial outburst through its unfolding, we see a tremendous impetus sending infinite streamlets through life’s arteries ... an impetus that once in motion reinvigorates itself at each step and diversifies its proficiencies in ever new radiations. Yet life does not drive blindly or aimlessly; its constructive trajectory justifies its direction.35

FECUNDITY36 AND ONTOPOIESIS

Just like Tymieniecka’s prose, Leonardo’s great paintings have a certain open quality about them that makes them seem alive, and as alive, not complete, i.e., not dead as those of the ‘‘uncomprehending [non-intentional] mirror’’ described above. This magical quality is very clear, but reversed in the cartoon derived from the British Museum sketch. Even though the cartoon is a preparatory drawing, one that would be traced or impressed onto a panel, it seems finished. Nothing could be done to make it more perfect, more enchanting. A part of its enchantment is that it never allows itself to seem exhausted, used up, dead. It is not just the fact of the non-finito of St. Anne’s pointing hand. It is that it is not semantic, it seems never to be the last phase of the creative process:37 it does not close off the energy that created it.38

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The thready lines, the soft contrasts of paper and drawing media, the delicate modeling of the features seem to be elicited from a plastic architecture of unending holy love, a caritas by which the characters choose to follow the life of the Logos rather than a life of convenience. Fully human, fully grounded, they are fully immersed in the All. From the very genesis of their embodiment they have followed a ferocious plan of the Logos. It surges through and across their lives with all the force of the primal impetus and all the equipoise, balance, and symmetry of their resignations. Leonardo instilled all of this into the cartoon by touching lightly, by touching so gently that the final drawing is instilled with the quality of the ontopoietic energy of the brainstorm sketch, with the quest for the perfect expression of disegno, an undying expression of the Logos, the signature of the artist, human or divine. Siena College NOTES 1 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason, L ogos and L ife: Book 4, Analecta Husserliana Vol. LXX (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 19. 2 Carmen Bambach, L eonardo da V inci: Master Draftsman (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2003), p. 21. 3 Kimmel, ‘‘Logos: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Celebration of Life in Search of Wisdom’’, in T hinking T hrough Anna-T eresa T ymieniecka’s Logos and Life, Phenomological Inquiry, Vol. XXVII (October 2003), pp. 22–23. 4 See Codex Arundel, Ms. 263, British Library, London. 5 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 4. 6 Art and Agency: An Anthopological T heory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 236. Thanks to Matthew Landrus for this. Gell would describe his own technique of frission that began by, e.g. reading whole issues of Scientific American with avid interest: ‘‘they provided a series of ingredients which can be combined – with luck – by means of pattern-building intuition, to provide some kind of ... apparently counter-intuitive solution to some kind of problem which can be stated in a fairly restricted sort of way’’ (Art of Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 24.) 7 Berenson, T he Drawings of the Florentine Painters. Amplified Edition, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), esp. Vol. 1, p. 170. 8 Bambach, op. cit., p. 5. 9 There are many accounts of the dispersal of Melzi’s Leonardo hoard; see Jane Roberts and Carlo Pedretti, ‘‘The Critical Fortune of Leonardo’s Drawings’’ in Bambach, op. cit., pp. 78–109. 10 Bambach, op. cit., p. 22. 11 See Bambach, op. cit., pp. 252–55. 12 Metalpoint partly reworked with pen and dark brown on pink prepared paper, see Bambach, op. cit., cat. 45.

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13 Pietro Marani, L eonardo da V inci: T he Complete Paintings (New York: Abrams, 2000), p. 90. 14 Sarcophagus is from the early third century A.D., Gardino della Pigna, Musei Vaticani, which Leonardo could have seen in Rome at the end of the fifteenth century; see Bambach, op. cit., p. 513. 15 Giorgio Vasari, L e vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultore ed architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari, pittore aretino, con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaitano Milanese, 1568; (1878–85), 2nd ed. 9 vols, Florence 1906, Vol 4., p. 25. 16 Codex Atlanticus, fol. 207 (formerly fol. 75r-a); Jean Paul Richter, T he L iterary Works of L eonardo da V inci Compiled and Edited from the Original Manuscripts, 1883, 3d ed., 2 vols. London, 1970, para. 20. ‘‘Il pittore che ritrae per pratica e giuditio d’ochio, sanza ragione e` come lo spechio, che in se imita tutte le a se co: traposte cose sanza cognitione d’esse.’’ This note belongs to an early compilation of a ‘‘Proemio’’ for a treatise on painting. When planning his treatise in 1489, he put ‘‘great stress on the necessity of investigating the function of the senses to the point of incorporating perspective as part of anatomy’’ (Carlo Pedretti, T he L iterary Works of L eonardo da V inci, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, Vol. I, p. 110). 17 Paris Ms. A, fol. 102v (B.N. 2038, fol. 22v); Richter, op. cit., para. 508. 18 Vasari, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 174–77. 19 Kimmel, op. cit., p. 28. 20 The long descriptive title includes a list of all: Sketches for the V irgin and Child with Saint Anne; W heels, a Weir, Dam, or Bridge (recto). The verso contains a profile of a man and a composition of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne carbon-traced from the recto. 21 Martin Kemp, ‘‘Drawing the Boundaries’’ in Bambach, op. cit., pp. 140–154, esp. 151. See his comment that the framing enhanced the process of compression toward a more expansive sense of figures ‘‘breathing in the context of a more expansive landscape vista.’’ 22 See Bambach, op. cit., cat. no. 95. 23 Gary Backhaus in Phenomenology World W ide. Analecta Husserliana Vol. LXXX (2002), ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, p. 783. 24 Kemp, op. cit. 25 Marani, op. cit., pp. 258–64. 26 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 77. 27 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 36. 28 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 6. 29 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 37. 30 Tymieniecka, ibid. 31 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 6. 32 Tymieniecka, op. cit., pp. 38–39. 33 Bambach, op. cit., p. 51. 34 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 39. 35 Tymieniecka, ibid. 36 While in our analysis we have stressed the tendency of the logos toward the Burlington House Cartoon, we must realize that wombs like that of the British Museum brainstorm drawing can yield other outcomes, depending at what point the equipoise steps in, what individualizing direction it takes. For within the general principle of a sculptural pyramid, it is possible to generate variations, as would Leonardo’s students. Perhaps the line of generation of the Burlington House Cartoon was the result of previous such processes. 37 Tymieniecka, op. cit., p. 18. 38 Thanks to Laurence Kimmel for this phrasing.

PIERO TRUPIA

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE COUNTENANCE: PORTRAYING THE SOUL, STAGING A LIVED EXPERIENCE

What is the significance of the portrait in painting and, more generally, in art? Certainly not the reproduction of a face, as in a simple photographic document. At this moment I have in front of me a self-portrait, a dry-point, and a photograph of Antonio Ligabue, a twentieth-century painter, naive in language, but not in this work and, in general, in self-portraits. They have the solemnity of Gru¨newald and the Cranachs. This self-portrait of Ligabue contains less significant signs than the photograph, which, in its turn, contains less than the material face. And yet the portrait tells more than the face and the photo. Tells more, tells its better and tells something else. The features of the face are abundant in the photo, not posed in the act of signifying. The features of the face in the artistic portrayal are tense in a semantic attitude and are selected: only those that speak, and a particular speech at that. The face of the photograph has the typical absent expression that one usually has in front of the objective of a photo camera, as if the photographer had not intervened as director or artist to give a demeanour to the photographed person. In Ligabue’s photo the eyes are turned slightly upwards, the nose is abandoned, the lower lip dropping and the upper lip distended in its renunciation to express anything at all. The cheeks and the jaws are equally relaxed and inexpressive. But the expression is not neutral: an astonished anxiety characterizes the expression. The self-portrait has the same posture as the photo, a three-quarter view towards the right. Same person, more or less at the same date we have in the self-portrait the page of a text: but also a complex of strongly significant signs, both individually and together. As with nervous strokes of a burin, the cheeks have been profoundly signed: the same may be said of the two sides of the nose to express tension. The lips are contracted, the chin slightly protruding, the look is focalized on a precise object of the world external to the psyche, but within the I. 13 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 13–28. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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According to a possible reading, Ligabue contemplates his condition of a psychic sufferer – which in fact he was – from which he emerges through awareness and artistic creation. The photo shows us a sick person, the portrait someone who has been healed. In the words of Marino Mazzacurati, ‘‘He does not resign himself to his neurotic solitude, he suffers it, but wants to communicate with the world ... impose himself upon its attention, turn himself into a man and have the place and the space that are his due and which men deny him ... Ligabue is not ... a vanquished by the nonsense of his existence, but a pathetic, desperate, Promethean combatant and all his works, at the vertex, are the reflection of his interior reality in the scene of the world.’’1 What, then, is a portrait? It is a theatre scene, a ‘living picture’, an invention of the Florentine Renaissance feasts, but without the naivety of those first attempts. The portrait, entire or half-figure, is not a mere face. The hands integrate the face and contribute significantly to composing the attitude. One need only think of the open and protended hand of the Annunziata of Antonello da Messina,2 which denotes surprise and concern, while the left classically closes the hems of the veil. The protended right hand is a dissonance, a gash of human truth against the composure of the young woman’s face. The face is undoubtedly the point of convergence of the signification process of the portrait, but it is also a passage, be it even central and imperative, of a more complex text. The other passages are the hands, the other parts of the body and the posture. It is the corpus loquens of eighteenth-century physiognomics. What is the peculiar significance of these physiognomics? The current answer says: it represents the feelings of the personage. A naive answer: what sentiments? If a particular one, why that one? And why should the sentiments of an unknown person interest an undifferentiated public, universal in time and space? In the iconic painting and sculpture of the Middle Ages both vices and virtues were represented for the purposes of social didactics. Occasionally it was art, institutionally it was social communication. Artistic representation does not have extrinsic ends. But that does not mean a lack of contents and referential significance. Let us therefore say that the represented personage is the protagonist of an exemplary human event. He declares a way of being ideal. Valid for every concrete individual. This is certainly true for the portrait painting of Humanism and the Renaissance. In various postures, it declares the ideal of the homo novus, responsible for his destiny, elaborator and implementer of an exemplary

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project of life. A myth, undoubtedly, historically placed in the classical past, but inscribed in a culture, namely Humanist and Renaissance culture, open to the future. The personage becomes the incarnation of that myth which is of an axiological exemplariness. Contingent in aspect – dress, hairstyle, environments – the portrait is an incarnate value in which each one can reflect himself. In subsequent epochs this exemplariness, actantial in the greimasian sense, became more historicized and incarnated itself in various ‘actors’.3 In Romanticism the portrait declared the human condition as the drama of an unattainable ideal and in post-modern expressionism as the tragedy of being thrown away, geworfen in Heidegger’s words, and defeated. Art in general, and the portrait in a more direct manner, brings the absolute back into the contingency of the everyday, a redemption of the mere factuality of life that the poetry of the twentieth century programmatically denied: Brilla in aria una freccia, Si configge s’un palo, oscilla tremula. L a vita e` questo scialo Di triti fatti, vano Piu` che crudele. [Eugenio Montale, Flussi. In Ossi di seppia, 1920–27]4

What is here presented by the poet is a tragic human condition, but not an insignificant one. The very cruelty reveals a malign and even mysterious intention and the possibility of impetration. In all the epochs, in all the styles and schools, the portrait is human posture with respect to the drama or the tragedy of life. From the point of view of being read, the portrait, and figurative representation in general, is ‘‘text’’. It is an organic set of signs, or ‘significants’, that make a discourse. The first recommendation for a reading is therefore not to replace the discourse of the work by our own discourse. Limiting ourselves, rather, to making it speak, reading it. The most interesting reading levels are two in number. The first is purely passive: one exposes oneself to the work and notes its impact. One does not yet know what it wants to say, but we perceive without the least doubt that it has something to tell us. That is the most common experience face to face with a work of art that, intuitively, we deem to be valid. It is also the truest experience. It

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is the proof that the work contains a message and that it lives a life of its own; it is not a dead copy of reality. In its classical composure of the figure, the Renaissance portrait right from the first moment transmits a sense of distance. Immobility and immutability. It is as it is and could not be different. It is not an object of the world, but the manifestation of an idea incarnate in a personage of the world. This putting on the scene of true personages that nevertheless represent an ideal essence has been a characteristic of the modern figure in painting ever since Giotto. Availing ourselves once more of the greimasian model, we could say that the personages represented in pre-modern painting are ‘actants’, that is to say, general types, standard characters. This can be seen in an exemplary fashion in the figures that represent virtues or vices. In ‘modern’ painting, on the other hand, the personages are ‘actors’, real and existential interpreters of a lived experience, a project of life, a human vicissitude. Antonello’s Annunziata is a girl to whom something extraordinary is happening and to which she reacts in a precise and personal manner: disturbance – the protended hand – and, at one and the same time, acceptance, visible in the aware expression of the face and in the look that suggests an ongoing reflection. After the first certainty of finding ourselves face to face with a message contained in the work, we should not let ourselves be driven to interpreting it, but rather reading it. Not interpretation, because that would be the superposing of a discourse of our own on what the work, inasmuch as it is text, puts before our eyes. With some rare exception, it is art criticism that interprets. Be it clear, criticism provides us with useful information. But this information generally regards not the text of the work, but its collateral aspects, those enclosed in the peritext, hypotext, hypertext, context, together with information of a technical character about the material structure of the work. A first discourse about the work made by criticism, and a discourse that is not a reading of the work, is philological. It highlights artistic and cultural relationships and ascendancies, sources of inspiration, ideological and social determinants. An archetype is generally indicated and Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Mantegna are frequently mentioned. But they are of far too extensive an influence to be specifically useful. Observations are added on style, its absolute or relative originality and the evolutions and oscillations in the career of the author. Then something is said about

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the history of the work, for whom it was made and the influence it exerted, the passages of ownership and collocation and anything else that may contribute to identifying the work as a single object. Lastly, there is added a direct critical valuation, a measure of artistic quality understood as expressive or emotive force of the work. The critic tells us what sentiments the work arouses in him. He thus superposes a discourse of his own on the one that he should read or interpret. He considers himself invested with the role of a competent mediator sufficiently authoritative to take the place of the common beholder. But in this connection we have a judgment of Leonardo contained in one of his letters about the Gioconda (Mona Lisa). The portrait, so he says, shows the motions of her soul. ‘Motions’ and not ‘sentiments or emotions’, therefore the character, the spiritual nature. It is a good indication. Lastly, there is a mysteric interpretation: the critic interrogates the work like an oracle and gathers a response of universal validity to be formulated with some philosopheme or interpretative sophism. An example of this approach is to be found in the introduction of the editor, Ester Coen, to the catalogue of the Metafisica exhibition.5 Here is what she tells us about De Chirico: ‘‘... forms of great suggestion generated by the silent apparitions of deserted cities, manikins, enigmatic prospects. Unexpected and disquieting visions that unite elements of classical tradition with objects and spaces of day-to-day reality’’ (p. 13). Here we have a discourse that strikes without saying anything very precise about the referential significance of the work: what its signs evoke outside it. The indicated objects can be seen by all. But the question is: if they are significant, and if they are so, what do they signify? What do they speak of ? I repeat: the work is a text collocated within a system of relevant information items that furnish reading keys, but do not substitute the actual reading of the text. The critics do well to provide us with general information. But they should go further and pass on to reading the work. Relevant collateral significances are the analog ones present in comparable works (cotext): the profound semantic structures, like the isotopies and allotopies (hypotext);6 title or titles, date, origin (peritext); notes and comments of contemporaries or privileged witnesses, philological considerations (hypertext); lived experiences of the spectator in particular historical moments, his ‘encyclopaedia’, that is to say, his relevant knowledge (extratext). But all this is only the premise for the direct reading of the text that a work of art is.

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In a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, Vincent Van Gogh speaks to her about a self-portrait: ‘‘I shall try to see whether I can give you my portrait in writing. A grey-pink face, green eyes, ashen-coloured hair, a wrinkled front and, around the mouth, sparse and ligneous, a very red beard, disordered and sad. But the lips are full ... The head is on the background of a white-grey wall (isotopy of the grey). You will tell me that it resembles the death head in the book of Van Eden ... Be it even so. In short, it is so ... One looks for a more profound resemblance than the one sought by a photographer.’’7 The significant signs present in that self-portrait have the significance that was to materialize two years later with Van Gogh’s suicide. The portrait reading proposal here presented is referred to the Humanist-Renaissance period. Some mention will be made of the 14th century, when the art of the portrait acquired an autonomy of its own, and a bare mention also of the contemporary epoch with its crisis of the fundamental certainties and the dissolution of the personal identity. It will be noted that even in this moment of disgregation the portrait continues to exhibit a proud posture, to attest the taking of a personal position – be it even a tragic one – with respect to the world. The portrait as an autonomous pictorial genre took shape in the 15th century with Humanism. The Greeks and the Etruscans had already represented the human figure, but with a view to grasping its typicality and not its individuality. The 15th century portrait came to life, particularly in Tuscany, and could not have come to life elsewhere. Typicalization was the rule in Russia, in the Middle and Far East and the Byzantine world, because the obligatory narrative object was the social order, the accredited doctrine, the ethos and the collective way of life It was with the affirmation of the individualism of homo faber that the personal portrait concretely characterized by a way of life affirmed itself as an autonomous genre. Individuality and thematization of real life became the semantic cipher of the modern portrait. The pictorial scene is occupied by the figure in the foreground, often among the objects of its daily works, be it even a simple book. In the background the industrious cities or the countryside where contemporary engineering works can be seen – a bridge, a castle, a villa, a palace courtyard – or scenes of loisir like hunting. When it is desired to represent the figure of the personages as an absolute object, the background is empty or barely animated by the folds of a curtain.

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The modern portrait also comprises groups: corporations, benevolent associations, professional bodies. It is the pride of the new bourgeois class that knows how to govern its destiny and concedes itself the luxury of beneficence. Two examples: Jacob Jordaens, T he Artist’s Family, Madrid, Prado (1620–22) and Franz Hals, T he Governors of the Haarlem Hospice for the Poor, Haarlem, Franz Halsmuseum (1664). The message of the Humanist and Renaissance portrait is univocal. It is the message of Pico della Mirandola’s De Hominis Dignitate. For Pico it is the Creator himself who requires man to create his own dwelling and his own image. ‘‘Without being obliged by any limitation, you could determine them by yourself according to the powers I have placed in your hands.’’8 The bourgeois homini novi entrust the illustration of their status to their ordinary clothing and the objects and environments of their work.’’9 The sovereigns, on the other hand, entrust it to the splendour of their clothing and the symbols of power.10 These sovereigns exhibit – or attempt to do so, as Charles V in this latter case – sureness and will of power. The message of the homini novi, on the other hand, is industrious will and self-consciousness. The stipulation of the Humanist-Renaissance portrait as representation of a true person is due to Andre´ Felibien, for whom that which has to be represented is a concrete individuality.11 To understand the importance of the innovation one need only think that in the Middle Ages the figures of the Roman emperors were borrowed for the image of the monarch on coins, simply adding the name of the ruler concerned (principle of the translatio imperii). The personal characters were even represented by means of a codified animal typification (Bestiari). With Humanism this characterization by types and models was deemed to be insufficient and misleading. Only a life project and concrete public realizations could characterize a person and turn him/her into a personage. The first ascertained example of the faithful reproduction of the effigy of a personage is the portrait of a certain Timothy, possibly a musician, by Jean Van Eick.12 In the foreground of the painting one reads the attestation of the truthfulness of the effigy with the diction L eal Souvenir. Curiously, this realism was subsequently to be condemned in Hegel’s L ectures on Esthetics. The portrait had to be idealizing and therefore had to ignore the personal deformations that could be deemed repellent. A denial of the identity of the real and the rational defended by the same philosopher.

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Fortunately, the great painters did not let themselves be led astray. Let us here recall the masterpieces by Diego Velasquez representing the court dwarfs, in any case high-ranking personages: El Primo, Don Antonio el Ingles and Sebastian de Morra, all at the Prado. El Primo is represented between books, flipping through one of them. Don Antonio with a princely costume: a large lace collar, a feathered hat and a dog. De Morra is wrapped in a mantle edged with gold. What is more, not even in the representation of the royal family did Velasquez either hide or idealize.13 Let us now ask ourselves what is the role of the body in the aesthetics of the portrait. Elsewhere I spoke of ‘corpus loquens’, a model that can be conserved with some further specification. Angela Ales Bello affirms that ‘‘the living body – L eib and not Ko¨rper – is the instrument of the encounter between human beings’’ and therefore the pathway of the speaking spirit.14 She nevertheless goes on to note that the body can also be an obstacle to communication. ‘‘We are faced with ... an imperfection or an illness. The organs ... send a message that indicates an impossibility, a deficiency or an alteration ... a possible limitation of the spiritual activity ... thus commences the process by means of which the living body comes to lack and from L eib becomes Ko¨rper ...’’15 These observations are absolutely pertinent in ordinary communication. In artistic representation, on the other hand, spiritual activity even shines through a body adulterated up to the point of death. Art codifies a physiognomy of the spirit even in the text of a deformed, martyred, dead body as in the Passions. The Humanist-Renaissance portrait is the celebration of the homo novus. The act of the spirit represented by the artist is a life realized in accordance with a personal project. A representation that is not abstract, but bound up with that particular individual, with his ordinary body and the spirit that animates it. An individual inserted in an environment of everyday life, with a dress bound up with the person’s profession. The homo novus is certainly full of will to realize himself, but not absolute as in certain Roman statuary, nor idealized as in its Greek counterpart. In the Humanist-Renaissance portrait we have a will and a pride tempered by the detachment that at the time was thematized by Baldassare Castiglione as ‘‘grace and disdain’’ (sprezzatura that is studied nonchalance). It is found supremely in Bronzino’s figures, while Raphael’s

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portrait of Castiglione16 is a perfect illustration of the Renaissance gentleman, cultured and disdainful of all affectation. For the definition of ‘‘disdain’’ we have Baldassare Castiglione’s own words: ‘‘... having already on several occasions wondered whence there comes this grace ... I found an altogether universal rule ... namely to escape ... affectation and, to say possibly a new word, use in all things a certain disdain that hides the art and shows what is done and what is said to be done without toil and almost without thinking about it. From this, I believe, there derives grace, because we all know the difficulty of things rare and well done, so that in them facility generates most great astonishment’’.17 Baldassarre’s dress in Raphael’s portrait is sober, without ornaments and in tenuous colours; the hat is devoid of plumes, the collar low. The face is serene, but the expression is intense. A slight arching of the right eyebrow denotes the intensity of the attention. Baldassarre is in an attitude of listening. His look is live to gather the sense of what is being said. The lips, on the point of opening to speak and yet closed, underscore the efficacy of the listening. Let us now observe the hands. They are in perfect equilibrium, one on top of the other. Relaxed to signify tranquillity of soul and full control of the emotions. Let us now come back to the message, that is to say, the significance of the portrait. It is not the ever changing and contingent sentiments of the personage. It is what moves and orientates the sentiments that assures that they are those and not others. Gerda Walther speaks of ‘‘directioned sentiments’’. A locution taken from Pfa¨nder and reinterpreted in the light of the ‘‘fundamental essence’’ of the person.18 Even at the height of the fifteenth century the Flemings had not yet grasped the individualism that Giotto had already affirmed in Italy. Antonello da Messina learnt Flemish oil technique, but created strongly individualized and Giotto-like figures on account of the individualized realism as in the Portrait of a man who is smiling.19 On the other hand, the fifteenth century figures of Flemish painting are outside the world, by themselves, ecstatic in the face of their own spirit. Without any doubt they have artistic fascination, but are still medieval. To use the language of mysticism, they are ‘‘souls withdrawn onto their own foundations’’ – the absolute – whose perceived presence ‘‘suspends consciousness of time and the objects present’’. As compared with its Humanist-Renaissance counterpart, this is an absolutely passive soul.20

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The absorbed female figures of Rogier van der Weyden have their look turned downwards or sideways to avoid the world, the lips are tight, the nose and the cheeks expressively neutral. I draw these conclusions from two Portraits of Women by van der Weyden. One dates to 1435–40 and is to be found in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the other, which dates to 1460, is at the National Gallery in Washington. Nevertheless, even in the Low Countries the Middle Ages had by then been left far behind. In the first portrait the extremely thin right eyebrow is arched in the manner of a triangle; in the second the lips are no longer absolutely static. They are slightly projecting and a tiny fold moves the corners of the mouth. In both the figures the hands are in equilibrium, one on top of the other, but in slight tensions (in allotopy with the face). Two fingers are crossed in the 1460 figure. It is the new that generates a palpitation in the absorbed soul and barely distracts it from the vision of the absolute. The Italian Renaissance portrait is the culmination of its kind, unexcelled even to this day. Of the Gioconda it may be said that all the features are semantic. If one shows a detail of the figure – hands, mouth, eyes, forehead – to a group of persons, the greater part will recognize and attribute them correctly. They are those hands, those eyes, that mouth, that forehead. They are ‘one of one’ objects, not ‘one of many’. The Gioconda did not walk around with her forehead lowered in token of pudicity. She was a ‘shameless’ woman. Forehead high and look at the height of the look of others as only a man of character could do in those days. It shows without saying, a sure sign of ‘grace and disdain’. The Gioconda, too, was homo novus. The hands, crossed at the level of the pulse, have a different degree of slight tension. The smile shows awareness of herself and mastery of the vast surrounding world. Exterior world, not interior. The nose is robust, well planted and authoritative. The forehead has two slight lateral protuberances that stand out in an ample space. The eyes, lightly closed, behold the world with conscious attention. I shall not here dwell on the symbols that have been found in the background landscape. That would be a discourse extrinsic to the true, pictorial significance of the work that is a text and not a cryptography. Another ‘estranged’ figure of the Renaissance21 in a portrait is Bronzino’s L aura Battiferri.22 Wife of the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati, poetess translated into Spanish and admired by Tasso and Cellini, who were among her habitual visitors.

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The portrait in profile, in the ancient manner used for medals, accentuates the lean face, the rounded front, the aquiline nose is tense in the act of breathing. The bust is high and the neck lengthened more than normal with an acceleration generated by the ample and white collar that descends as far as the breast and strengthens the pallor of the face. The hands with their long fingers keep open a book and indicate a verse of Petrarch dedicated to Laura. A naive allegory. Even with these physical imperfections, rather, by virtue of them, Laura Battiferri is an absolute beauty. The neck advances in space and, consequently, the head is not in axis: the face occupies another space with respect to the body. The look is not turned ad spectatorem or ad orbem. The slight aperture of the mouth materializes the authoritative word of the poetess. The left hand, with the index and the middle finger unusually long, spread out on the page, accentuate the forward movement. A further forward push is provided by the veil of the collar and the lace on the left ear. It is the spirit of Laura that blows and drives towards the world and life. Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) is considered the inventor of the psychological portrait. ‘Psychological’ is to be understood as expressive not so much of sentiments, but rather of a definite personal individuality. The Portrait of a young woman in front of a white curtain23 has been overloaded with symbolic significances by critics. Be it clear, symbols in accordance with alphabets and codes that vary in time are present in Renaissance painting, just as they were present both before and after. But precisely in view of the generality of their significance, these symbols are not very useful for reading a specific work. A symbolic interpretation produces significances in accordance with a ratio facilis, i.e. obvious, and not with a ratio diYcilis, that is to say, original and specific.24 The ratio facilis is certainly not appropriate for reading ‘one of one’ works. Norbert Schneider, author of the volume Il ritratto nell’Arte25 dwells on the symbolic reading of the aforesaid work of Lotto. The curtain recalls significant rituals of sacred iconography. Surrounding the object like velum, it accentuates the mystery or reveals it like a curtain that opens. In Lotto’s work, as Schneider notes, behind the right-hand hem of the curtain one glimpses a lit lantern. It is the evangelical light shining in the dark, he says. The folds of the curtain denote a wind that is shaking it, sign of the restlessness that dominates the picture. But the curtain is

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closed and this indicates Lotto’s will ‘‘of wanting to reveal very little, almost nothing of the represented person.’’26 But, was the portrait not psychological according to Schneider himself ? The reading of the work is simpler, more direct and revealing only if one considers what can be seen in the painting and not what one imagines to be there. Let us therefore try to apply to this portrait a direct reading method, looking for signs and not symbols,. Materially, the curtain is a heavy damask. Its folds are the effect of its natural fall, a classical drapery. There is no wind effect; if there were, it would have to agitate the long hair of the young man, which is however firm and composed. Also the flame of the lamp is firm and even bent towards the left against the presumed wind. According to the evidence of the signs, the reading is therefore very different from that of Schneider. The curtain is not white, but of an ivory colour like the face of the personage (isotopy). It is isolated from the dark beyond the curtain against which the weak little flame is struggling. The expressive function of the curtain is therefore twofold: being the background of the personage in the foreground, in such a way as not to isolate the figure in the space of the scene and highlight its significances. These are at least two. The closed collar of the vest and the hat that frame the face are of an absolute black in an isotopic relationship with the space behind the curtain. The ivory-coloured curtain, which becomes reddish towards the right-hand margin, the ivory-reddish face, the flowing blond hair and the yellow-reddish flame on the extreme right, create an isotopic chain of light. Proceeding from the ivory to red, this is also a climax and contrasts with the other isotopic chain of darkness. The centre of the double isotopic chain, of light and darkness – the focus of the painting – is naturally the face of the young man. Turned suddenly to the right towards the natural light, it therefore contrasts with the little flame (the direction of the light is indicated by the shadow of the drapery). One may speak of a ‘jerk’ towards the right also on account of the intensity and the strong focalization of the alert and inquiring look. The eyelids are contracted, the forehead wrinkled, the nostril in tension and the mouth half-open in token of surprise. Agnolo Allori, or Tori, known as Il Bronzino (1503–1572) is the epitome of the spirit of the Renaissance. A literary man, an academician of the Crusca, a furnisher, Petrarchian and burlesque poet, researcher in matters of literary and pictorial languages.

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Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary, in those days founded the Academy of Design, considered the characteristic structure of Florentine figurative art. For Vasari, line, light and colour are the essential components of painting and have to be elaborated for themselves and not only as a function of the overall composition. Bronzino reached the summit in the treatment of these three components. Vasari’s audacious theory and Bronzino’s inaugural mastery made a beginning with the great event of the protagonism of light in Italian painting right through to our own days. The treatment of light also marks a substantial difference between the Italian and the French schools that, so at least it seems to me, has not yet been noted. Very briefly, the difference is as follows. The French paint with the light that gushes out from within the figures, the Italians paint with the light that, as it were, bathes the bodies and the things and moves and lives autonomously in the composition. In the macchiaioli the light is existential presence; things are lowered into it and the personages move and live in it. In the metaphysical painting of the early twentieth century the light became absolute presence, metaphysical in fact, to the point of rendering both things and personages mere revealers of it. It cannot therefore cause surprise that the personages, in this role, are simple manikins in accordance with the audacious choice of De Chirico. The light that envelops and models the figure in Bronzino’s portraits is metaphysical ante litteram. It renders the personage an absolute object. Sometimes Bronzino’s figure is placed in an architectural environment as in the case of the portrait of Ugolino Martelli,27 at others it is suspended in a uniform space of brown colour as in the case of the portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, placed against the dark of a niche.28 In the first case there is a sign-like continuity of colour and content between figure and background; in the second there is a clear detachment that isolates the figure in space and renders it semantically self-sufficient, an absolute object, a Platonic polyhedron. The pictorial perfection of the representation is a metaphor of the human perfection of the model. A perfection that is the point of arrival of a severe and constant process of self-formation. The book, open, with the fingers that indicate a precise point on the page is a frequent presence in these portraits. Bronzino was a Platonic painter: in the human figure he seeks the incarnation of the pure idea, the one of the Renaissance ideal. His person-

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ages are vertices of self-formation and set out to be a reference for the community. Ugolino Martelli was a twenty-year-old, who invested his few years in self-formation. We don’t know this from historians, but from his figure: he is reconsidering what he has just read in the Iliad, which he holds open in front of him. Ugolino is inserted in the context of the courtyard of his palace. In a corner the statue of David with the cut-off head of Goliath at his feet, to which have been attributed various symbolic significances. Plausible seems to me the analogy of the young age of the two heroes and between David’s feat and those that our personage proposes to accomplish. The overall architectural perspective formed by the different cornices and mouldings of the courtyard constitutes the cultural and social space of the personage. They frame and define him, together with the lectern in the foreground. That is the intellectual setting of the young humanist. We have spoken of the severity of Ugolino’s life. The dress and the beret are black, devoid of all ornaments. The rest is grey with slightly golden shades right through to the warm wooden colour of the lectern. But the face and the hands are points of absolute life, interior light of the spirit. The head is three-quarters turned, the look is intense, but not focalized on any particular object. It is not ad spectatorem, not ad orbem, not ad infinitum. It is an introverted look, eye of the mind that contemplates, meditating, the thought just grasped from the verse indicated by the index finger of the right hand. We immediately note an isotopic chain of form, colour and light between the pure ivory of the open pages and the one, gradually more reddish, of the hand and the face with a further subtle correspondence between the red characters of the page and the red of the lips that mentally repeat the verse that has just been read. The right hand is equally isotopic with the face. It rests on the edge of another closed book of Pietro Bembo, one of the masters of the style of Renaissance life. The Italian Renaissance portrait is the representation of an incarnate spirit. They are works that cannot be mistaken for each other, they are ‘one of one’ works. That is not the case of contemporary European, i.e. Flemish and German portrait painting. Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 or 1498–1543) had direct knowledge of contemporary Italian painting. Nevertheless, his portraits are in orbe, his representations take place between the personage and the objects of his daily life and work. Typical is the portrait of the Danzig merchant

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Georg Gisze. It is situated in his office amid shelves, ledgers, scrolls, stationery objects, boxes, a coin purse, balances and sealing tapes. Rank and success are attested by a splendid Eastern carpet that covers the table, a precious crystal vase with three carnations and his sumptuous attire. The hands are engaged with a document and are ‘by themselves’, just as the look is strongly focalized on an object outside the picture. The face is that of a man sure of himself, contented, in peace with himself and the world. A parchment on the rear wall proclaims in Latin the personage’s proud identity. ‘‘What you see is the image of Georg. His eyes are so vivacious and identical is the form of his cheeks. In his thirtyfourth year, of the Lord 1532’’. Albrecht Du¨rer (1471–1528) lived the Italian renaissance to the full, with repeated stays in Italy and the reading of the contemporary masters, as well as the theoretical studies of Leonardo and the treatises of Leon Battista Alberti. He himself was the author of theoretical writings about pictorial technique and architecture. In some of his self-portraits he identifies himself with the Ecce Homo,29 in others with the Saviour.30 He considered the artist’s creativity to be a divine attribute. He was a man of the Renaissance, but with a strong existential component, to which witness is borne by the theme of death and melancholy, to which he returned on several occasions. Du¨rer’s personages are ‘doers’ rather more than ‘beings’ The faces are tense, the looks are lit up and disturbed. There is elegance and intellectual level, but there is neither grace nor disdain. There is the drama of existence as anticipation of our contemporaneity. The Olympic poetry of the homo novus, the sprezza tura is peculiar of the Italic genius loci. (English version by Herbert Garrett) University of Florence

NOTES 1 Preface by Marino Mazzacurati to Cesare Zavattini (editor), L igabue, Franco Maria Ricci Editore, Milan, 1973, pp. 19–20. 2 1474–76, Palermo, National Gallery of Palazzo Abatellis. 3 In the semiotics of A.J. Greimas, ‘actant’ is the potential or categorical subject of a narrative action, ‘actor’ is the concrete individual who interprets it on the stage or in a story: the citizen, the burgher, the artisan, the artist, the peasant. But the Potato Eaters of Vincent Van Gogh are ‘actors’.

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4 An arrow flashes in the air/Becomes lodged in a pole, quivers and trembles,/Life is this squandering/Of trite facts, vain/And more than cruel’’ [Eugenio Montale, Flows, in Sepia Bones, 1920–27]. 5 Stables of the Quirinal Palace, Rome 27 October 2003 – 6 January 2003. 6 ‘Isotopy’ is the return in a narrative text of already expressed contents, ‘allotopy’ their negation. The presence of these narrative figures generates the profound unity of the text. 7 Fabrizio D’Amico (editor), Ce`zanne, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. L ettere dalla L uce, Linead’ombralibri, Conegliano, 2003, p. 164. 8 Cited in Oratio de hominis dignitate. 9 1532, Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of the Merchant Gizse, Berlin, Staatliche Museen. 10 1548, Titian, T he Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Mu¨hlberg, Madrid, Prado. 11 Cited in Paul Ortwin Rave, Bildniss, Stuttgart, 1948. 12 1432, London, National Gallery. 13 About 1656, L as Meninas, Madrid, Prado. 14 Angela Ales Bello, Il L inguaggio del Corpo V ivente; in Santino Cavaciuti, Adriana Dentone (editors), Il Corpo e le Emozioni, Bastogi Editrice Italiana, Foggia, 2003. pp. 97–113. 15 Op. cit., p. 112. 16 About 1508, today at the Louvre. 17 Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, Milano, BUR, 1987, p. 81, orig. 1528. 18 Cited in Angela Ales Bello, Fenomenologia dell’Essere umano. L ineamenti di una filosofia al femminile, Rome, Citta` Nuova, 1992, pp. 140–142. 19 About 1470, Cefalu`, Museo Mandralisca. 20 See the entry ‘mistica’ in Karl Rahner, Herbert Vorgrimler, Dizionario di T eologia, Herder-Morcelliana, Rome-Brescia, 1968. 21 ‘Estrangement’ is a rhetorical figure identified by the Prague School in the ’thirties. It consists of an unexpected presentation of a well known and stably codified subject or argument. 22 1555–60, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Loeser Collection. 23 1506–1508, Wiener Kunsthistorisches Museum. 24 Umberto Eco, T rattato di Semiotica Generale, Milan, Bompiani, 1975, p. 246. 25 Cologne, Taschen, 1995. 26 Op. cit., p. 67. 27 About 1537–39, Berlin, Staatliche Museen. 28 1540, Florence, Uffizi. 29 Bremen, Kunsthalle. 30 Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

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Al tratar Husserl la ‘‘indeterminacio´n’’ de las intenciones respecto del objeto intencionado, en el pa´rrafo de´cimo de la Investigacio´n Sexta de las Investigaciones L o´gicas, ve en ella todavı´a un cara´cter determinativo, por parado´jico que resulte. Se trata de la exigencia de un complemento au´n no determinado, pero que pertenezca a ‘‘una esfera definida por alguna ley’’ (Husserl, 1984: 573). Se refiere con ello, nos parece, a la capa ma´s tenue de la intencio´n significativa, pero tambie´n a la ma´s indefinida de la presencia fenome´nica en la percepcio´n gnoseolo´gica. Las intenciones se complementan mutuamente en orden a la captacio´n del objeto y cambian de perfil o escorzo segu´n se van asociando, sobreponiendo, configurando y trasmentando el objeto percibido. Supone ello que la intencio´n y la bu´squeda de su complemento, de la intuicio´n que la sature, ya se mueven en una o´rbita de orientacio´n u horizonte que, de algu´n modo, las despierta y dirige. Son entonces, decı´amos en un escrito anterior titulado ‘‘Ontopoe´tica del significante: El palpo del signo’’ (Domı´nguez Rey, 2004: 413), un tipo de sine´cdoque que expande, a su manera, el todo implı´cito, o una vertiente suya, un rayo, reflejo, en cuanto destino complementario. Sine´cdoque un tanto virtual. Pero en tal caso se trata tambie´n de un desarrollo o generacio´n larvaria, pues avanza en cierta medida el brillo de una luz au´n no del todo lograda, como un reflejo o efecto suyo au´n encubierto. Tratarı´amos, ma´s bien, con una emergencia metonı´mica. Y en esto consiste realmente la formalidad del signo lingu¨´ıstico al sustituir o suponer – supponere de G. de Ockham – la cosa designada o sus relaciones tanto objetivas cuanto subjetivas en la procesualidad del discurso, el cual adquiere un cara´cter pronominal, de pro-nombre. Partiendo de esta hipo´tesis, podemos decir que la simple noticia de algo, de una cosa, por ejemplo, lo mienta ma´s alla´ de sı´ mismo hacia el despliegue del horizonte implı´cito que lo contornea. El horizonte procede ası´ en lo notado como aquello a lo cual tiende y es adema´s principio atributivo de sus cualidades y predicados. Atributos y predicados son perfiles, escorzos, de la relacio´n interna en que ese algo esta´ inmerso. Descubrir este principio correlativo supone ahondar su fundamento, las condiciones ontolo´gicas de su comprensio´n. Espalda, pues, del objeto, como dice Ortega y Gasset, y al mismo tiempo apertura: sombra y rayo espectral, tensio´n intencionada cuyo proceso configura o va configurando 29 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 29–48. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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intuicio´n. Pero e´sta, el complemento intuitivo, ya ‘‘previo´’’ o intuyo´ en el tacto sensible, sea tacto real o sincre´tico, una profondeur al estilo de Merleau-Ponty o, para el lenguaje, el arco fonoacu´stico de la simbiosis dentro-fuera-dentro tanto del habla propia como de la ajena, siempre intersubjetiva (Domı´nguez Rey, 1998: 11; 2003: 56, 94). Dio noticia de. De ahı´ su ‘‘indeterminacio´n’’ como exigencia de complemento, sin que e´ste haya llegado au´n, pero, por ello, ya un modo de determinacio´n complementadora, sea e´sta, aque´lla, o simplemente el vacı´o intuitivointencional que la subtiende. Tal ‘‘indeterminacio´n’’ esta´ contenida en el valor del prefijo in y en los lexemas de tent-io y tuit-io, donde se marca ma´s la direccio´n y el impulso que el te´rmino intendido o captado, por tanto la indeterminacio´n del proceso. El estar en procede tendiendo a algo distinto de sı´ mismo. Tal proceso descubre o tiende un campo de visio´n intelectual, un horizonte inmanente anunciado siempre ma´s alla´ de su lı´mite. Se abre ası´ la dina´mica cognoscente. En cuanto tal, crea in-diferencia, pues la tuicio´n interna desmembra lo precedido, procedente y procesivo, procidemental. Lo diferido difiere en proceso y articula´ndose. La intuicio´n complementa en el acto mismo de recubrimiento, de confirmacio´n. Cubre dando rienda suelta y afirmando un flujo cognoscente en cuanto algo procedido, verificado: hecho verdaderamente realizado. En esto consiste el tacto intendido de la mente o el acto intencional de obtener sentido confiriendo al objeto su propia biologı´a interna. Pero este objeto se ha verificado en un in o ahı´ procedente, discursivo, subyacente: un campo de despliegue que configura un plexo de relaciones fundadas con el sujeto percipiente y el entorno ontolo´gico. Por eso in es algo ma´s que el punto del espacio, pues, sie´ndolo, al discurrir procesa un punto intencional predicativo, anterior al dicatum, pero tendente a e´l. El tacto original se manifiesta entonces como metonimia intendente: campo de despliegue donde lo percibido se configura desde una premonicio´n o aviso anticipado de algo: tuicio´n. Es lo acaecido en y acaeciendo como. Espacio y modo del acontecimiento. Espacio modal. Un como precategorial, ma´s bien, un tono, el modo tonal de ser-en la existencia o ser existente, un ente. No un A como B, aunque luego resulte ası´ desplegando en comparacio´n o meta´fora todo lo que ya acontece en A, o en B, pues el ente, igual que el te´rmino, no se da aislado en, sino en posicio´n prefija, anticipadora, dina´mica. En es la marca inicial del proceso, el ‘‘puntoespacio’’ de la constitucio´n dina´mica. A es como B porque uno y otro te´rmino contienen el mismo modo o tono de configuracio´n, y no porque coincidan implı´citamente en su diferencia. Indifieren o difieren en un

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mismo punto de procedencia espaciotemporal. Por eso Husserl habla, creemos, de una indiferencia secreta de la saturacio´n intuitiva de la intencio´n en un momento o instante de identidad, la ‘‘unidad en sı´ indivisa’’ de intencio´n e intuicio´n, de donde procede nada menos que la articulacio´n membrada del tiempo, lo diferente en cuanto ‘‘miembros desplega´ndose en el tiempo’’ (Husserl, 1984: 571). La ‘‘unidad indivisa’’ difiere en tanto une e identifica. Tan pronto el prefijo in – he aquı´ el tiempo – procede configurando la cadena de articulaciones membradas, los fonemas, monemas, sintagmas; tan pronto in se descubre como punto del ser-en, el punto institucional de su estar siendo, surge el subfondo ide´ntico, e indiviso, como di-ferencia heideggeriana del Da-sein, con guio´n intermedio, que es cifra de ese acto in nuce, originario, o vibracio´n resonante de conciencia. Por ello representamos la igualdad lo´gica, o matema´tica, con un signo paralelo (=) o guiones transicionales cuyo canal intersecto dibuja, delinea, el tra´nsito del flujo ası´ iniciado en lo indiviso de su unidad hacia otra cosa ya latente y antepredicativa. El momento de la coincidencia intuitivo-intencional resulta, pues, punto o taxia expansiva, vibratoria. Al in de la conciencia debemos atribuirle el campo sine´rgico o la tensio´n sina´ptica de las dendritas en el flujo quı´mico de la relacio´n intra y extracelular. Heidegger interpreta el guio´n de la di-ferencia como espacio de luz acaecida en el entre o entretiempo – Inzwischen (inmitten, unterdessen) – y la marca de la palabra interna, en consanancia con Herder, como tercero – ‘‘Das Merkmal, das dritte’’ (Heidegger, 1999: 47) – y aunque lo refiere precisamente al signo en tanto avanza hacia el conocimiento – ‘‘zukommend an-erkennen’’ – y como posible, »Als«-Ermo¨glichung!, el primer como ascendente que nos adviene lanza´ndonos – ‘‘»als« auf uns zu’’ – recordemos a san Agustı´n, y que es, adema´s, el punto tempoespacial en o en tanto que, su cara´cter de tercero alude ma´s bien a la exterioridad naciente, al instante precisivo, pero sin recalcar el a priori de latencia, como si no existiera fondo, o e´ste fuera ano´nimo, de algu´n modo presente, aunque todavı´a no desvelado, un ente cuya presencia no se funda, a pesar de todo, en la nacencia del ser, ahondando ası´ la diferencia ontolo´gica. La distincio´n, cuya ranura o entre es luz, consiste en presentar de nuevo como estando contra o colocando delante para obtener la verdad del ente en cuanto tal: ‘‘re-praesentare als Gegen-sta¨ndigung, vor-stellen -auf die Wahrheit des Seienden als solchen’’, pero an˜ade: ‘‘Aber nicht in der Gru¨ndung des Seins’’ (Heidegger, 1999: 145). El tercero vendrı´a a colmar el intersticio del ‘‘guio´n’’ si no ahondara de nuevo su diferencia en el mismo hueco que lo constituye. Cuanto se

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re-presenta, lleva consigo esa marca de pliegue o ranura de luz que ensombrece. Por eso no es un tercero de suma u orden, sino ma´s bien, a nuestro juicio, aquello que, iluminando la ranura, deja entrever la procesualidad o el feno´meno del ente en su diferencia abismada respecto de la fundacio´n del ser o Sein heideggeriano. Es un tercero gnoseolo´gico que no se explica sin una paridad, al menos, de uno y uno, pero hasta el uno seguirı´a siendo tercero si de su entidad luminosa se trata. ¿Un tercero, entonces, o´ntico ma´s que ontolo´gico? ¿Un tercero fundante, como en la semio´tica de Ch. S. Peirce, no matema´tico, puramente fenome´nico? Respecto de la fundacio´n estarı´amos en una trinidad pura de mutuos efluvios, pero sin personalidad entitativa, o muy naciente, pues la Historia, el Tiempo, comienzan entre el ‘‘als’’, el ‘‘auf ’’ y el ‘‘zu’’ antes citados. Serı´a cuestio´n de conjunciones y preposiciones, es decir, de intersticios. El paso de la antepredicacio´n donativa y eferente de existencia, lo que somos siendo-ahı´-en por el hecho simple de existir, a punto precisivo de discurso interno de la conciencia, no queda al margen del existir y descubre, ma´s bien crea, como otro instante privilegiado de actitud suya natural – ser lo que se es – como su modo natural de acontecer percibiendo, crea, decimos, el modo ser del ente, un modo articulante. Es el verbum mentis de san Agustı´n, la palabra mental, el Logos plato´nico, ‘‘Das innere wort als Merkwort’’ o Merkmal einer deutlichen Besinnung, de Herder, marca refleja comentada por Heidegger (1999: 15, 20, 128) en tanto ge´nesis y luz del ser y del conocimiento. No una palabra clo´nica, repetitiva de lo dado, sino naciente, pregnante. Pero tampoco como lugar o molde de una repeticio´n o presentacio´n doblada, sino una re-pre-sentacio´n en la que distinguimos tres instantes procesivos, a saber: volver o dejar de nuevo disponible el campo adviniente de la sensacio´n, pues ha entrado en otra fase suya constitutiva. Espacio abierto: lo habiendo-se del ser irrepetible, de tal modo que el efecto re ya habla, aunque sea posterior, de un antes acaecido como base o vibracio´n aperturienta de algu´n modo conocida como anticipo – pre – de un asentamiento o sujecio´n dada en el preciso instante de ser re, de volverse en situacio´n abridora, desde sı´ sobre sı´ misma. Y no para repetirla, sino abrie´ndola ma´s, pues empuja e inquiere: procede. Ası´ nace lo sujeto, con fondo desprendido. La surgencia articulante del verbum mentis gemina su impulso tensivo vie´ndose – tuicio´n interna – diferente en lo mismo y uno en lo diverso. Esa distancia interna, primero crı´tica y luego metacrı´tica – se desarrolla hasta formalizarse lo´gicamente – se llama ser. Decimos llama porque nombra el acto mı´nimo o unidad cua´ntica del acontecimiento mental:

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ser. Ser naciente, ser lo sentiente, lo que nace en uno como Da-sein o seren del ser-ahı´. Lo que pudiera ser un truismo gnoseolo´gico y lingu¨´ıstico – ası´ lo considera E. Coseriu (2003: 143–144) – resulta acrecimiento interno del sentir procesual en cuanto modo entitativo o ser suyo especı´fico. Por eso Husserl ve en el feno´meno vivencial de unirse, complementa´ndose, la intencio´n y la intuicio´n del objeto una relacio´n a priori o posibilidad antecedente que todo lo dado tiene de identificarse, incluso inconscientemente, con algo en el proceso en el que queda y esta´ inmerso. Posibilidad a priori de sujetarse, de ser sujeto. No algo prendido a un esquema que repetimos, sino aquello surgente en el punto constitutivo de ser-en o estar-ahı´, de vivir, vivenciarse preposicional y adverbialmente. Las preposiciones y adverbios adquieren un valor especial en la constitucio´n objetiva como fondo suyo o modo de incidencia. La preposicio´n anticipa y dispone la posicio´n subjetiva, el instante del sujeto. El adverbio indica, por su parte, el campo de constitucio´n verbal, el cara´cter verbo de todo nombre, la procesualidad o acontecimiento que encierra. Refieren la relacio´n interna de la posicio´n y del modo de procedimiento. Lo mismo podemos decir respecto de toda clase de pronombres y determinantes, pues son marcas procesuales del discurso inherente al verbum mentis para concretar partes o para retomarlas y preanunciarlas. El determinante centra, concreta, como su nombre indica, parte de la direccio´n en que el proceso indeterminante abierto por la presencia ha de conducirse. Y el pronombre descubre, a su vez, la eferencia nominal del proceso. Son ´ındices o indicadores fo´ricos del efecto re del espacio interno naciente o ya tiempo interior de la conciencia constituyente. El hecho de que remonten o anuncien aquella posibilidad a priori antes citada so´lo les an˜ade la direccio´n ana o cata, para arriba o abajo, ascendiendo en el discurso o continua´ndolo. Ası´ expuesto, el in inicial se ha convertido en germen del discurso en cuanto espaciotiempo vibrante de la conciencia. Bajo tal aspecto, san Agustı´n acertaba al descubrir su presencia en tanto revelacio´n singular acaecida en uno mismo dadas las condiciones pertinentes del conocimiento. El verbum mentis se vuelve repeticio´n de lo dado o lenguaje constituido so´lo como memoria del sentido naciente, que es tambie´n un modo procesivo de memoria. Eso nos hace hablar o articular lo sentido, la vivencia de lo naciente, la experiencia creativa de lo nuevo, el sentirnos diferentes, diferidos en cuanto seres singulares irrepetibles. Por tanto, lo repetible del lenguaje se debe a que evoca la nacencia originaria. Repitiendo hacemos presente lo nuevo que subtiende el acto mismo de repeticio´n. Y ası´ acontece tambie´n, a su vez, en la representacio´n cognos-

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citiva. No clonamos lo sabido. Actualizamos el espaciotiempo del ser in nuce. Las palabras se replican unas en otras con volteo de vivencias que renuevan, viene a decir san Agustı´n, el tiempo que repliegan, pues subyace en ellas una originalidad naciente. En el in de la intencio´n intuitiva, o viceversa, de la intuicio´n intencional, descubrimos una vis dicente de la cosa o algo suyo dicibile despertado en el hecho sensible de su captacio´n, el tacto sentiente de la res. Ası´ distingue san Agustı´n la cosa, res, de verbum considerado como mocio´n admonitoria o palabra interna del conocimiento, el verbum mentis (De Diale´ctica, 12,12). Es la forma interior del intelecto, su concepcio´n formal: el concepto. Los sensibles de las sensaciones externas se interrelacionan sina´ptica y sine´rgicamente, podrı´amos decir, y sus funciones se funden en la accio´n discursiva del conocer. Entonces, los funtivos de la sensacio´n, el ver, oı´r, tocar, oler, sentir, no actu´an por separado, sino en convergencia, y e´sta ya es la funcio´n unificadora de pensamiento, donde, dice san Agustı´n, ‘‘utrumque unum est’’ (De T rinitate, XV, 10, 18). El concepto o palabra interna ve y la visio´n – intueri – habla al tiempo que, hacie´ndolo, conserva, retiene, guarda. Tal era el significado primitivo de tueor: guardar. El filo´sofo la denomina tambie´n ‘‘palabra pensada’’ – cogitando dicere – que profiere o dice ‘‘la boca del corazo´n’’, y por tanto tambie´n hay pensamientos que son palabras cordiales: Quaedam ergo cogitationes locutiones sunt cordis, que debemos entender adema´s como voces del sentimiento (De T rinitate, XV, 10, 17 y 18). He aquı´, pues, el fondo real de la objetividad ası´ constituida. El verbum mentis, el concepto dicente del intelecto, se fundamenta en un rumor previo que se hace patente como si de un palimpsesto o escritura secreta se tratara: el secreto o escrito invisible de la sensacio´n en lo sentido. Lo oculto habla, es verbo, si le prestamos atencio´n debida. Lo decible de la res o cosa es vis verbi, impulso dicente que, en un estadio distinto y posterior, resulta lo significable o los significabilia de lo sentido y ası´ concebido. Al tacto o taxia inicial del sensible le corresponde otro intelectivo en la raı´z nosc de noscere, que es la misma de nomen (De Magistro, V, 13). Al conocer, nombramos. El nombre culmina el proceso cognoscente en cuanto te´rmino de una admonicio´n dada en el acto sensitivo. Al sentir o tener noticia sensible de algo; al experimentar lo sentido, se produce en la mente algo formable y au´n no formado: hoc formabile nondumque formatum. Y esto formable es interrogativo – nos preguntamos en que´ consiste – e indefinido, algo ası´ como la irrequietud suscitada por un conocimiento au´n no determinado, pero que se sabe determinable.

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Sabemos que se forma algo en nuestro interior, lo sentimos, pero au´n desconocemos su identidad. Lo formable au´n no formado se mueve entonces a voluntad de una a otra parte como abeja o mariposa cuyo instinto busca el polen y liba en una, otra flor, hasta que encuentra la sustancia apetecida. Es quiddam mentis nostrae, un algo mental que fluctu´a aquı´ y alla´ segu´n las cosas se nos presentan en una u otra parte. Tal ‘‘insecto’’ mental, ası´ podrı´amos denominarlo, liba o se detiene al contactar lo conocido, cuyo tacto es nada menos que el acto captante de su omnı´moda semejanza: atque inde formatur, eius (de lo conocido: quod scimus) omnimodam similitudinem capiens (De T rinitate, XV, 15, 25). Esta captacio´n representa para nosotros la nacencia metonı´mica del conocimiento, pues se trata de algo totalmente semejante: T unc enim est verbum simillimum rei notae, de qua gignitur et imago eius (De T rinitate, 15, 12, 22). Es, por lo dema´s, una semejanza filiativa, no so´lo ica´stica, pues remite tambie´n a nacimiento. Es verbum ya verdadero, donde verdad quiere decir de notis rebus exortum. La palabra interna es la cuna del pensamiento, la cunabula verborum de los estudios diale´cticos de san Agustı´n. Tanto el conocimiento como el nombre, ambos extensiones de la misma raı´z nosc a trave´s de las notas que integran lo conocido y nombrado, se implican para san Agustı´n metacrı´ticamente al conocer y nombrar. El nombre se nombra nombrando como el conocimiento se conoce conociendo, si bien allı´ como algo ya objetivo, con lo cual el hecho de nombrar se distancia de sı´ mismo originando un espacio intelectual au´n susceptible de engendrar ma´s nombre, ya hacia dentro, aunque luego resulte hacia fuera en la locucio´n nominal. ¿Co´mo podrı´a, de otra manera, declinarse y relacionarse con otros nombres, sobre todo los puramente discursivos, sin referente co´sico, tales preposiciones, adverbios, determinantes, conjunciones, pronombres y morfemas verbales? En el se del nombrarse hemos de ver, por tanto, algo ma´s que el simple hecho de la palabra repetida al pronunciarla. Se refiere al proceso, a la accio´n surgente del verbum implı´cito. Este ma´s o plus del acto resulta colateral al efecto – ble del cognoscible o aquello formable que, partiendo de un punto, instaura una relacio´n admonitoria ma´s alla´ de sı´ mismo – efecto tambie´n meta´ del conocimientosin determinar ni conocer au´n el polo o te´rmino relacionado. Es lo intendido, el proceso puro del despliegue, el decurso del conocimiento o la constitucio´n procesiva de lo que van siendo ‘‘los silos de la memoria’’, depo´sito o tesoro suyo construido en la experiencia cognoscitiva (De T rinitate, XV, 12, 22).

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El efecto se, pronominal, del nombre, el nombrar algo nombra´ndose, remite tambie´n a la metonimia del conocimiento o tacto dicente de la palabra interior. Nunca se nombra igual, sino cambiando de nombre a medida que avanza en el discurso. La distancia procesiva de sı´ a sı´ – se – del nombrarse es siempre otro nombre de fondo filialmente semejante al primero. Ası´ se constituye el signo en tanto dictio del conocimiento. El verbum agustiniano enuncia, profiere el nombre de lo nombrado, pero lo trasciende nombrando tambie´n el pensamiento dicente. Y al proceder ası´, crea un a´mbito interno o espacio cognoscitivo de nominacio´n constituyente: el nombre refleja ma´s nombre. La mirada nominal – ver que habla, ojo que escucha, dice E. Le´vinas – es la intencio´n cuyo complemento se da en lo intuido por la inteligencia como despliegue de su funcio´n cognoscente. He ahı´ aquel punto indiviso de la unidad indiferente que, no obstante, difiere, segu´n Husserl. El conocimiento y la constitucio´n nominal del lenguaje suponen un impulso o movimiento meta´, una traslacio´n interna – fora´ – que So´crates advierte en la frone´sis o en la noe´sis del flujo mental. Las cosas recibieron sus nombres en la corriente del devenir, afirma el filo´sofo griego, y el comprender va conjuntamente con ellas, pegado a su traslacio´n en la conciencia, sin distanciarse ni adelantarse al feno´meno de su aparicio´n (Cratilo, 411c, 412b). De ahı´ que los nombres sean signos de lo real concebido como traslacio´n o derrame, pues ‘‘se evade en secreto de sı´ mismo’’ y, con e´l tambie´n, debemos suponer, el nombre que nombra la realidad (Cratilo, 439d). Plato´n no resuelve en el Cratilo, de modo concluyente, las aporı´as oscilantes entre la tesis del cambio o fijeza del nombre respecto de la realidad nombrada, es decir, si el nombre asume el cambio de la naturaleza y el impulso del pensamiento o, ma´s bien, la identidad de una, otro o ambos en un nuevo feno´meno de presencia real. Ahora bien, del contexto de la exposicio´n cabe deducir que el nombre, al menos el acto nominal originario, se crea esponta´neamente al conocer las cosas. Considera tal hipo´tesis, entre otras, pero deja la solucio´n abierta a la inclinacio´n por una u otra serie de argumentos. Tal vez sea esta apertura la respuesta, el debate mismo sobre algo que no sobrepasa la exposicio´n de las condiciones que lo posibilitan, como un caso especial de lo que en lingu¨´ıstica denominamos estructura paradigma´tica primaria. Los te´rminos que la integran, aquı´, en el caso expuesto, los argumentos y tema debatido, se implican mutuamente sin que uno prime sobre otro. El dia´logo, la forma de lo dialogado, serı´a entonces la u´nica respuesta posible. La forma

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interna del Logos subyace en el contenido mismo del tema propuesto al dia´logo. Y en la Repu´blica (VII, 518c), Plato´n designa a la facultad del pensamiento, el ‘‘talento de pensar’’, como o´rgano de la potencia espiritual del hombre. Al dirigirse a la realidad, ese acto se convierte en luz germinante. Luz cuya raı´z designa en griego tanto el foto´n luminoso como la fone´ articulada, el nombre. El pensamiento es el o´rgano de la potencia cognoscitiva y experimenta una conversio´n a partir de todo cuanto llega a e´l muta´ndose: se articula en luz. Una conversio´n que resulta tambie´n un arte de proyeccio´n hacia el objeto: un me´todo. Y se realiza con el concurso total del cuerpo y del alma, es decir, con lo que hoy denominamos supuesto cognoscente. Plato´n advierte que esta conversio´n no se refiere a la de la mirada en acto sensible de visio´n, algo ya de por sı´ natural, sino a la luz o Bien obtenido en el proceso, la bondad del Logos, del pensamiento articulado o de la palabra pensante, tal la forma interna del dia´logo que procede entre los contertulios. La escritura, palabra sellada, es aquı´ el escenario del Logos, del habla. Pero el ‘‘talento de pensar’’ nunca agota su potencia por mucho que se transforme y convierta con me´todo en lo pensado a medida que evoluciona en el decurso de la realidad fluyente. Hasta los intersticios, la distancia virtual entre la conciencia y lo cognoscible, adquieren valor mental de dia-logos. Ası´ se explica la contemplacio´n de la luz germinada al contacto con la realidad, una visio´n contemplativa que se sostiene pensando el cambio incesante. La forma del cambio tambie´n es luminosa, de bondad intelectiva. En la implicacio´n ´ıntegra del complejo anı´mico a la hora de ejercer el ‘‘talento de pensar’’ debemos entender asimismo el acto de nombrar las cosas, pues sin nombre, al menos sin algu´n tipo de incisio´n -el hombre no puede entender de otro modo partiendo de los datos de que dispone-, serı´a imposible la conversio´n del o´rgano hasta volverse soste´n firme o punto imantado de luz que ilumina la realidad. El nombre serı´a entonces, si esta expansio´n suya resulta cierta, el acto fundacional del conocimiento, pero un nombre dotado tambie´n de energı´a interna. Un tacto intelectivo siempre originario, pues origen indica aquı´ la ge´nesis de ese acto fundacional, no el comienzo histo´rico de la marca fundada, perdido ya en el recuerdo inmemorial – hablamos de ella, la son˜amos – de una aurora naciente. Resume Heidegger al respecto con fondo de Herder: ‘‘Der Ursprung ist noch nicht gefunden, sondern nur die Stelle eines Entsprungenen, ein ‘Entsprungenes’ gefunden, wo etwas vom Wesen der Sprache sichtbar’’ (1999: 148). ¿Que´ otra cosa recordamos sino la apertura

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de luz, au´n nublada, en el fondo de la conciencia, rescoldo naciente de un soplo invisible? El concepto plato´nico de conversio´n atan˜e tambie´n, creemos, a la unidad pensamiento y lenguaje – dia´noia y lo´gos – diferenciado el primero en cuanto dia´logo del alma consigo misma y sin el apoyo de la voz y, el segundo, en cuanto la misma corriente anı´mica que pasa por la boca en comunidad de sonido articulado (Sofista, 263e). Platon sabe adema´s que el sonido vocal es cuantitativamente infinito (Filebo, 17b) y que, articulado, tiene matices transicionales, intervalos que delimitan unidades concretas: tono grave, agudo y uniforme – el fundamental de la fonologı´a moderna. Los sonidos ba´sicos ya esta´n estructurados conforme a unidad integradora, lo cual implica, a su vez, distinciones, acordes, metros, ritmos, etc. La conversio´n del pensamiento en ruido articulado (who´ ccoz) y voz (wvng´ ) supone una serie de intervalos sensitivos o de representaciones imaginativas que traslapan, al mismo tiempo, juicios, y, por tanto, matices de grado cualitativo en la afirmacio´n acorde o negacio´n desafinada. Pero la conversio´n interna del pensamiento afecta adema´s a su proceso de realizacio´n como lenguaje interno. La memoria opera en el alma igual que las sensaciones. Hay en ella un escriba grama´tico (crammateu´ z) que graba el discurso de las cosas procurando un cierto grado de verdad o falsedad afectiva: opinio´n o noticia suya. Al escriba lo acompan˜a luego un pintor que encuadra la noticia o primer objeto dado a la percepcio´n en la perspectiva del lenguaje interior de la conciencia. Al considerarlo ası´, el pintor lo distancia – suspende, decimos hoy – de sus condiciones sensibles y mentalmente lingu¨´ısticas convirtie´ndolo en imagen de las cosas que el alma ve ya en sı´ misma (Filebo, 39a-c). Son dos, pues, los hombres que imprimen sus grafos en la pizarra de la memoria anı´mica, un escriba o grama´tico y un pintor. Las ima´genes de e´ste lo son de cuanto el alma ya se ha dicho a sı´ misma con los grafos del primer escriba. ¿Y que´ otra cosa escribe e´ste y pinta aque´l con sus trazos a no ser la incisio´n o circuncisio´n de la realidad en la mente, sus marcas mentales? Ası´ acontece el proceso de discernimiento (Filebo, 38c). La conversio´n del sonido natural en voz asimismo afectada de naturaleza no resulta extran˜a a este discurso interno, el cual ya implica un proceso de lectura mental. Ası´ se convierte tambie´n el gramma del grabado sensible en visio´n objetiva de la cosa a trave´s de un cristal que se forma en ese instante procesivo. Una imagen ica´stica no necesariamente reproductiva, pero sı´ representacional, como sucede en la lectura. De lo dicho nos interesa resaltar, tanto en Plato´n como en san Agustı´n, el impulso cognoscitivo, el proceso interior, traslaticio, de la atribucio´n

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y del pensamiento, la espontaneidad deducible del nombre como marca del flujo cognoscente y el derrame secreto de la realidad enunciada. Por el nombre, y con e´l la subjetividad ası´ sujeta, respira la ausencia presente de las cosas en ‘‘los silos de la memoria’’. Y tanto el verbum mentis o la vis verbi de san Agustı´n como la luz cognoscitiva de Plato´n vienen a ser, ma´s que resultado fijo de un proceso, bien ‘‘fruto de la traslacio´n’’ – foras one´sis, dice So´crates (Cratilo, 411d) – con semilla, pues, germinante, bien matriz conceptual de ge´nesis foto´nica. Todos estos te´rminos, puras meta´foras, refieren el germen fe´rtil de la novedad creadora, la filiacio´n de la mente, como se advierte asimismo de forma clara en el Banquete. La luz ilumina un a´mbito germinante. Es vibratoria, el germen mismo, e imanta, como el sonido. Ambos se mueven incesantes sin otra fijeza que la claridad perceptiva de cuanto se mueve tambie´n en ella. Existe, pues, una sustancia invisible continuamente formable y, por tanto, evanescente. El pensamiento y el nombre, el Logos, trasladan en su constitucio´n el devenir al que se refieren. Son metonimia pura, la forma formable y formante, el punto de expansio´n intensiva, ‘‘la realidad y su sombra’’, tı´tulo con el que Le´vinas definio´ este instante huidizo anclado en el punto de encuentro con la realidad germinante. Para nosotros, este instante – tacto fo´nico o foto´nico – es la tangencia cua´ntica del a´tomo poe´tico, cuyas formas expanden intensivamente la vibracio´n secreta de la realidad como ritmo que tacta la alternancia de sus formas. Y ası´ como el Bien trasciende en luz la mocio´n del pensamiento, ası´ el ritmo ahonda la sustancia del mundo. El poema abre el fondo originario del pensamiento en forma de dia´logo o escena objetiva de la mente. Queda el espacio drama´tico, la propuesta, el lanzamiento. San Agustı´n dice en un momento preciso de su exposicio´n que, al conocer, lanzamos algo indeterminado, y de modo voluble, a unas y otras cosas hasta que contacta lo conocido. Un tacto intangible, no obstante, o un tocar las cosas como quien llega a un lugar nuevo y ve, respira, visita, siente su espacio: Et tunc fit verum verbum, quando illud ( ... ) ad id quod scimus pervenit (De T rinitate, XV, 15, 25). Es, pues, una vivencia. Pero el verbo que usa para designar este lanzamiento doble, sin embargo u´nico, hacia las cosas y hacia nosotros mismos, es iacto, frecuentativo de iacio, que significa echar, lanzar, proferir, fundar, etc. Sobre las cosas que conocemos lanzamos algo formado en la mente, pero tambie´n somos lanzados por ello hacia la constitucio´n del fundamento que sostiene, en ese mismo instante, las cosas en la conciencia. Fundamos la objetividad partiendo del impulso elativo que sentimos en contacto con el mundo. Y no es que e´ste nos transfiera algo que no poseamos ya, pues somos

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tambie´n parte suya, sino que sentimos latir su fuerza creadora al sabernos en contacto con las cosas. Esto presupone que al lenguaje lo asiste una expresio´n conceptiva o, ma´s bien, que e´l mismo es la concepcio´n expresiva, la presio´n fo´rica o marca tempoespacial del impulso cognoscitivo. No es ajeno a esta mocio´n. La marca expresiva sella el efecto fo´rico consecuente a la taxia inicial del sensible. Ası´ como el concepto se concibe verbum mentis desde lo externo a trave´s de los sentidos, concibie´ndose vuelve al sensible como vibracio´n del supuesto cognoscente, aquel impulso plato´nico del cuerpo y el alma, por entero, en la conversio´n del o´rgano a soste´n contemplativo de luz dada en el proceso, que no es la cosa ni el pensamiento en sı´, sino algo nuevo, lo ma´s luminoso de la realidad: el Bien (Repu´blica, VII, 518c). No concebimos tal sostenimiento sin marca expresiva alguna. Y como el pensamiento no se agota nunca siguiendo la mocio´n de las cosas y la conversio´n lo vuelve u´til y servible, como dice Plato´n en ese mismo pasaje, la marca expresiva, lo que hoy denominamos significante, acontece en la conversio´n de la facultad intelectiva o el efecto -ble de aquello mo´vil e inquieto, formable, que se determina, segu´n san Agustı´n, al convertirse o llegar – pervenit – a lo conocido. El significante se nos muestra entonces como la ex-presio´n interna del acto mental y elativo del sonido en cuanto marca conceptiva del pensamiento. Marca que puede ser una cualidad, dı´gase conge´nita o congrue, con N. de Cusa, Ortega y Gasset o Santayana, o un cualisigno, con Peirce, o una instancia, un a´mbito cualitativo que convierte – hay potencia para ello – el sonido en significante o elacio´n cognoscitiva sonora. Por ello pudo decir W. Von Humboldt, en consonancia con Herder y Hamann, que el lenguaje es el o´rgano del pensamiento, incorporando ası´ a la accio´n intelectiva el proceso significante. Las precisiones lo´gicas del decurso cognoscente aislado del significante, del concepto sin matriz de expresio´n verbal, sin el a priori de espacio y tiempo, del punto del grafo y del sonido, pintura y mu´sica conjuntamente, que Hamann entrevio´ en el significante como intuicio´n poe´tica del pensamiento, proceden a posteriori o semasiolo´gicamente, con un fondo hermene´utico de Auslegung, donde se situ´an la Lingu¨´ıstica y la Reto´rica. Abstraen de la actitud natural un nu´cleo lo´gico que prescinde del natural expresivo de la concepcio´n, pero no de la esponta´nea del concepto, como hace G. de Ockham (Summa L ogicae, I, cap. 1) pretiriendo el hecho de que la captacio´n mental es codonante en el inicio, en la mocio´n noe´tica de la aprehensio´n de la cosa, como e´l mismo dice, pero tambie´n en el proceso germinante y su fruto, pues crea algo nuevo: la ex-presio´n. Y esto so´lo podemos comprenderlo in nuce, onomasiolo´gicamente, es decir, situa´ndonos en la objetividad

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metonı´mica o traslacio´n interna del afecto, de la passio o intencio´n del a´nimo. Desde esta posicio´n, el significante acontece como marca expresiva del conocimiento. El enfoque resulta, pues, diferente, segu´n nos situemos en actitud creadora, poe´tica y conceptiva, o simplemente receptora, sumidos ya en el organigrama del lenguaje y sus usos mu´ltiples. Semejante a e´sta es la consideracio´n de Ockham al explicar la naturaleza del signo entendido doblemente. Por un lado, su aprehensio´n nos da el conocimiento actual de la cosa, no el primero suyo, sino el que tiene despue´s del que habitualmente se le asigna segu´n la costumbre; por otro, se crea para sustituir a algo diferente que e´l mismo trae, no obstante, al conocimiento – pro illo suspponere – o para an˜adirse a una parte de la proposicio´n o diferenciarse en las partes mismas de que consta el discurso. Allı´, en la primera forma, el signo significa el valor actual que se le asigna incluso sobre el que habitualmente posee. Le pertenece, pues, la actualidad de significacio´n, lo cual implica un conocimiento tambie´n doble, el de la cosa segu´n el uso acostumbrado y el que adquiere en el momento de la aprehensio´n de acuerdo con su instancia expresiva. Dispone de una capacidad de actualizacio´n hic et nunc siguiendo el proceso del discurso. Y la voz, el sonido articulado, dice Ockham, significa aquı´ ‘‘naturalmente del mismo modo que cualquier efecto significa al menos su causa’’. Ahora bien, en la segunda forma de consideracio´n, la creativa, el signo supone algo que llega con e´l al conocimiento y tal suponer es una creacio´n que lo sustituye por la cosa o es an˜adida a algo sin referente co´sico, o incluso sin ‘‘significacio´n definida’’, pero que ya contribuye al proceso fundante de la proposicio´n o del discurso, como sucede con los sincategoremas y las partes de la oracio´n. En tal caso, la voz ya no es signo natural de ninguna cosa, dice Ockham con toda razo´n. Pero esto no implica que el vocablo no siga siendo natural respecto de lo ahora designado como formacio´n propositiva, aunque no se refiera ya a una cosa, porque ni la proposicio´n ni el discurso son algo co´sico. Su voz ‘‘significa naturalmente’’, pues se trata de lo que significa. El objeto supone la referencia trasladada en la mente como relacio´n suya conceptual. Puede ser ella misma el te´rmino relacionado, ella en cuanto punto relativo a otro te´rmino sin correlato co´sico, es decir, ella misma sin denotado que la sature, o incluso la relacio´n en sı´ sin polos concretos, como mera objetividad o simple campo de objetivacio´n. En tales casos, incluida la capacidad de actualizacio´n inmediata, se muestra, creemos, su fondo genuino, originario. No precisa regresar al comienzo de su historia para ser, vivir y fundar su origen.

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He aquı´, pues, el subfondo de la palabra ob-iectum en cuanto sustantivo derivado del supino de ob-icio, a su vez procedente de ob-iacio. El supino es, como caso nominal, la parte nombre del verbo. El objeto resulta entonces la accio´n mental lanzada-ahı´ para su consideracio´n, lo que acaece delante del intelecto y despierta su consideracio´n proyectiva. Incluye el acto ponente y las nociones adverbiales ‘‘delante’’, ‘‘en frente’’, pero desde ‘‘dentro’’, dadas en el prefijo ob-, que es preposicio´n de acusativo. El objeto declina la accio´n mental en instancia finita de ‘‘acusado’’ o acontecido ante uno, lo sujeto, lo puesto o arropado debajo de los acontecimientos. Todo ello presupone, a su vez, darse cuenta de algo previo o tener noticia suya como lo puesto ahı´ en frente. Imaginar al sujeto aislado de la posicio´n ahı´ supondrı´a precisar una relacio´n real. La actitud esponta´nea implica que somos partes del mundo en una correlacio´n de sensible a sensible pasando por el proceso mental del objeto, sintie´ndolo. Fuera del sentir no hay ‘‘frente’’ o ‘‘fuera’’, pues sentimos que somos no siendo todo lo que sentimos. Pero en tanto la accio´n misma de la mente que transcurre en estado acusativo, el objeto lleva la marca expresiva de la conciencia. Marca natural ya entrevista por Nicola´s de Cusa como cara´cter congrue de la relacio´n de la mente con la forma de la cosa. Tal es la contemplacio´n objetiva o instante formal cuya formalidad ya resulta nombre entendido tambie´n en la tradicio´n tomista como forma – species – que concluye -acusativo- el acto de conocimiento: vocabulum naturale ut actus ex actu, leemos en el ano´nimo De Natura Verbi Intellectus (cap. II). Un tacto mental. Una cosa es el nombre impuesto a las cosas arbitrariamente, reflexiona N. de Cusa, y otra el vocabulum naturale que todo nombre implica (Idiota de Mente, Cap. II, 64, 6–7) en cuanto acto de nombrar o dar nombre a algo, hacerlo acusativo de una accio´n mentalmente supina. La forma lleva consigo el nombre, dice el Cusano –‘‘et verum sit formam adducere vocabulum’’ (Ibid., 59, 6–7; 64, 2–3). Se trata de una forma nueva sin imagen reproductiva, como la de la primera invencio´n de una cuchara tallada en un trozo de madera sin ejemplar previo. La relacio´n de la mente con la cosa abarca el transcurso formable del concepto, cuyo lı´mite es el verbo: ‘‘et verbum est terminus actionis intellectus’’, leemos de nuevo en el ano´nimo tomista. Partiendo del sentido y de la forma (species), el verbo o vocablo se engendra en e´sta culminando y superando su proceso formable respecto de la similitud con la sustancia de la cosa. La virtus quidditatis substancialis es ma´s surgencia que reproduccio´n ica´stica de la cosa en el conocimiento. Actu´a como la vis de san Agustı´n, la virtus operativa de santo Toma´s y la vis vocabuli de N. de

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Cusa. Frente a la imagen, o a lo que de ella queda en el concepto, la inteligencia forma su palabra (verbum) al entender, de tal modo que ella, la palabra, es su acto de autorrevistimiento al proceder ‘‘in generatione ad formam substancialem (rei)’’. El acto de entendimiento ‘‘induit enim se, et hoc est verbum sui, cum se intelligit’’ (De Natura Verbi Intellectus, cap. II). Poco importa que debajo de estos planteamientos este´ la comparacio´n del verbo humano respecto del divino, y en e´ste la triple relacio´n trinitaria, de la que el trinomio sema´ntico serı´a un reflejo gnoseolo´gico, si el ana´lisis ası´ realizado nos descubre la frontera relacional de la palabra respecto de la imagen tradicionalmente cognoscitiva y su aporte esponta´neo como palabra surgida en la mente. La imagen ya no es nada sin la marca surgente que clausura un proceso que la trasciende. En la palabra hay un aporte nuevo respecto de lo recibido. La oscilacio´n indeterminada de aquel algo de la mente lanzado, segu´n san Agustı´n, de una a otra cosa hasta que llega a lo conocido, donde se determinan, atraviesa un largo trecho en la historia de la Filosofı´a y en la fundamentacio´n de la Poe´tica. Lo formable au´n no formado oscila sin pausa en su movimiento voluble: quod hac atque hac volubili quadam motione iactamus (De T rinitate, Xv, 15, 25). Son movimientos de libe´lula, oscilaciones del instinto intelectual dirigido a las cosas. Ası´ acontece con las ima´genes del fantasma demiu´rgico del sensible activado por el entendimiento agente y posible en cuanto formas o especies, impresa y expresa, en el lı´mite de la percepcio´n y concepcio´n medieval del conocimiento. Entrevemos aquı´ la actividad intelectiva de Aristo´teles – la entelequia – y la germinacio´n vegetal de san Agustı´n: semillas. La fantası´a va adquiriendo cara´cter de germen dina´mico, pues origina las ima´genes activadas luego como formas formantes por la doble accio´n, agente y pasiva, del entendimiento. El germen imaginativo trasciende incluso al concepto, sobre todo a partir de la influencia del empirismo y racionalismo kantiano en el movimiento roma´ntico e idealista. Se crea ası´ una frontera claroscura entre los lı´mites mocionales de la sensacio´n y los perceptivos del entendimiento, entre el fantasma o fondo nebuloso, sombrı´o, de la imagen, y las formas de ahı´ abstraı´das en cuanto principios formantes de los conceptos y categorı´as. Al incrementarse el efecto frontera de la percepcio´n sensitiva, aumenta tambie´n el intermedio de luz y sombra, del conocimiento y su indeterminacio´n. Las larvas de la imagen o fantasmas, el engendramiento aristote´lico, la germinacio´n de las semillas agustinianas – modelos imaginativos del proceso del sensible en torno al germen biolo´gico y vegetal, respectivamente – dejaban entrever,

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primero, la apariencia fenome´nica de las formas, y, segundo, el germen del origen del conocimiento. Era cuestio´n, pues, de reinterpretar esta apariencia germinativa, para lo que se retorna a esquemas y sı´ntesis tanto plato´nicas como aristote´licas, pero insistiendo ma´s en el subfondo del fantasma o germen imaginativo de la sombra. Este proceso adquiere rango definitivo con la Aesthetica in Nuce de Hamann. Tal vez el resumen sincre´tico ma´s adecuado respecto de sus precedentes – vuelta a Grecia del idealismo alema´n – en Herder, Hamann, Gerber, Hegel y Nietzsche, sea el realizado por E. von Hartmann, quien deja esbozado adema´s el esquema estructural de la Fenomenologı´a y Hermene´utica. La percepcio´n retiene y activa la apariencia sensible, el feno´meno, en la fantası´a o estadio doblemente germinante de la conciencia. Rescata de continuo el fondo subyacente y oscuro de la conciencia, de tal modo que el complejo sensitivo se esclarece cada vez ma´s creando un contexto au´n ine´dito de interpretacio´n y clarificacio´n conceptual o de sentido, de gran relieve luego para el grupo hermene´utico con Schleiermacher a la cabeza. Tal regreso al fondo, o a la cueva de las sombras, refuerza el claror de la forma o principio cognoscente. La conciencia adquiere ası´, o ma´s bien manifiesta una actitud productiva que mejora las formas en ella surgentes segu´n el aporte dina´mico y procesivo del subfondo de la apariencia. Recordemos ahora el cara´cter formable de aquel algo voluble en la conciencia, segu´n san Agustı´n, y su indeterminacio´n previa al anclaje de la apariencia en las formas conocidas. Para Von Hartman, tal instante es este´tico y, la accio´n que lo refleja y trasciende, bella. La presencia aparente es real, pero inconsistente, pues regresa – he aquı´ la Ru¨ckkehr, el retorno al origen – al inconsciente y de tal retorno surge la formacio´n eide´tica. Lo latente se desvela como idea germinante y ası´ se configura el objeto en la conciencia, donde confluyen la realidad aparente, el inconsciente y la forma efectiva. El feno´meno nos descubre ası´ un ‘‘contenido ideal’’ que se va explicitando a media que su contorno y entorno desvelan la idea implı´cita en la representacio´n. El concepto ya posee un germen este´tico que lo impulsa. Pero aquı´ sucede algo importante para la consideracio´n de la objetividad poe´tica. El ‘‘contenido ideal’’ es indeterminado y precisa complementarse mediante aportes intuitivos y ajustes constantes. He ahı´ la necesidad interna de concretar aquella forma au´n formable, el ansia de tacto, de ambiente, de alcanzar – pervenit – au´n en vuelo algo determinado, pero orienta´ndose ya hacia tierra.

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Pues bien, una de esas funciones intuitivas la ejerce la palabra con su forma sensible y la representacio´n que contiene. Hamann habı´a introducido en la palabra el a priori del sonido y el contenido lo´gico de la representacio´n, dota´ndola, como Herder, de fundamento poe´tico y de rango eide´tico, lo que W. Benjamı´n denomina despue´s Das Wort als Idee. Al mismo tiempo, la obra realizada pasa a ser un Ersatz del conocimiento, de la Idea, como tambie´n sucede luego en R. Ingarden. Hamann entrevio´ adema´s en la raı´z de las palabras el tronco comu´n del conocimiento, sensibilidad e inteligencia – Sinnlichkeit und Verstand – dividido en dos raı´ces, vola´til una, el aire – L uft – y so´lida otra, terrestre, apresada aque´lla mediante la sensibilidad acu´stica y trabajada esta otra, invisible, con la inteligencia (Hamann, 1999: 286). Von Hartmann, por su parte, considera que el contenido significante o representacio´n de la palabra, indeterminada como la idea misma, se concreta mirando hacia su raı´z etimolo´gica, que orienta la intuicio´n del concepto y la satura combinando, unas con otras, las formas de las dema´s palabras en la oracio´n, discurso u obra. En la palabra confluyen, pues, la indeterminacio´n conceptual y la orientacio´n intuitiva, que configura la obra. A las palabras las asiste, por tanto, una intuicio´n virtual y su ‘‘efecto poe´tico’’ consiste en extraer y potenciar el ‘‘contenido ideal’’ latente. Tal acto desvelador contribuye, a su vez, a formar un nuevo contenido, con lo que subyace siempre una emergencia formal o el feno´meno de constitucio´n objetiva del ‘‘efecto poe´tico de la accio´n’’. La poesı´a manifiesta el proceso de retorno al fondo implı´cito de la sensacio´n y este decurso funda el principio formal del contenido, sobrepasado, no obstante, por su propia formacio´n en la bu´squeda incesante de intuiciones. Tal proceso representa, adema´s, la ‘‘accio´n recı´proca de la palabra’’ (Hartmann: 1887, 716–717, 718–719). He aquı´, pues, parte del trasfondo fenomenolo´gico de la relacio´n intencional y su complemento intuitivo en Husserl, pero tambie´n el interregno hermene´utico de los vacı´os, la tensio´n expectante y la proyeccio´n interpretativa del lector en el texto, que equivale a decir del sujeto en el objeto, la Einfu¨hlung. La indeterminacio´n constante del contenido, el fondo formante tanto de la idea como de la palabra, lo cual las funde en un tronco comu´n de raı´z doble; los vacı´os intermedios entre la forma poe´tica, ideante, y su trasfondo inconsciente; las matrices, que no ideas innatas, del espacio – luz – y del tiempo – sonido – segu´n san Agustı´n y Hamann, con diferencias en ambos, evidentemente, etc., nos situ´an ya en los precedentes fenomenolo´gicos de Schleirmacher, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger y Ortega y Gasset. Von Hartmann avanza incluso la fusio´n cua´ntica del

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sujeto y el objeto al convertir la proyeccio´n sentimental de la Einfu¨hlung en goce aute´ntico o ‘‘todo sentimental’’, pues cubre tambie´n la distancia entre la apariencia y su fondo latente, ideal. Ma´s que un fundamento ontolo´gico, la forma revela ası´ uno ontopoe´tico, ya que la referencia al sujeto se confunde con el sentimiento real del fondo (Hartmann, 1887: 68). Es ahı´ donde Ortega y Gasset situ´a tambie´n el plasma fundente y antepredicativo de la objetividad lı´rica (Ortega y Gasset, 1987: 247–263). Tal fondo emocional es la raı´z del impulso y germen de la forma constituyente y del contenido ası´ determinado. Pero tanto la idea como la palabra que la contiene esta´n dotadas de una configuracio´n indefinida, ma´s nubla que clara. De aquı´ que avance y proyecte un horizonte de posibles y actuaciones, matizando la advertencia inicial de Plato´n sobre la estructura de la episte´me, cuyo decurso, hepome´ne – seguir las cosas en su movimiento – recomienda no distanciarse de ellas ni anticiparse corriendo delante (Cratilo, 412a). La primacı´a del fantasma sobre la luz deslizante de los contornos formales requiere ahora un Orgelpunkt o culmen que satisfaga el avance o proyecto de contenido que las formas anuncian en su formacio´n incesante. Los datos recibidos se agrupan en torno al centro de la palabra y e´sta se dilata en orbes y radios que se compendian mutuamente en frases, oraciones, complejos lingu¨´ısticos que concluyen en obras. Todos ellos giran alrededor de un centro intuitivo, conce´ntrico, de representaciones, donde se genera un significado dominante (Hartmann, 1995: 200). Lo que llega como nuevo no deja reposar a lo ya establecido. Unas palabras presionan a otras, de tal modo que apenas tienen tiempo de adquerir un valor individualizado. Cada palabra contiene un principio de respuesta a una llamada surgida de predisposiciones cerebrales o Hirnpra¨dispositionen. Es incluso reflejo de esta actitud interrogativa. Pregunta respondiendo. He aquı´ el principio de la hermene´utica, del estructuralismo, la base de los campos sema´nticos, conceptuales, el fondo del generativismo lingu¨´ıstico, etc. La forma poe´tica despierta de este modo un horizonte de asociaciones determinantes que revierte sobre las palabras convocadas, mejor au´n, despertadas – ‘‘wachgerufen’’ – y las situ´a en la posicio´n correspondiente de la frase, verso o poema. Las precede, pues, un hueco o, ma´s bien, una tensio´n dada en su horizonte de expectativas. Nacen interpretadas, pues lo cubren, o lo intentan. Son tal intento. El objeto se nos revela entonces como la palabra cuya voz implı´cita es germen de conocimiento. La completud o saturacio´n intuitiva de lo intencionado implica una premonicio´n que procede y avanza admonitoria marcando el pliegue de la trasla-

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cio´n, conversio´n o decurso, donde se configura la emergencia significante como presio´n fo´rica de conocimiento, lo cual presupone una elacio´n conceptiva del sonido. La intuicio´n saturante confirma o plenifica otra previa que la anuncia de algu´n modo a trave´s de la mocio´n que promueve en el sensible ta´ctil como intencio´n significativa. La marca o pliegue acontece adema´s en periodos rı´tmicos de cohesio´n, sinte´ticos y analı´ticos, como los nominales, atributivo y explicativo, de inherencia y adherencia, en sentido husserliano. La objetividad poe´tica instaura, por tanto, el cuerpo rı´tmico de la conciencia creadora. UNED, Madrid

BIBLIOGRAFI´ A Agustı´n, Obras Completas, III. Obras Filoso´ficas, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. Madrid, 1982. __. Obras Completas, V. Escritos Apologe´ticos (2°). L a T rinidad. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid, 1985. Augustinus, De Diale´ctica. Dordrecht, 1975. Coseriu, Eugenio, Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie, A. Francke Verlag, Tu¨bingen, 2003. Cusa, Nicola´s de, Opera Omnia, Vol. V, III, 2. Idiota de Mente. In Aedibus Felicis Meiner, Hamburgi, MCMLXXXIII. Domı´nguez Rey, Antonio, ‘‘The space of the other’’, en Analecta Husserliana, L IV, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 1998), pp. 3–26. __. El Drama del L enguaje, Edit. Verbum, Madrid, 2003. __. ‘‘Ontopoe´tica del significante: El palpo del signo’’, en Analecta Husserliana L XXIX, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 2004), pp. 393–418. Hamann, Johann Georg, ‘‘Metakritik’’, en Sa¨mtliche Werke, III Band. Schriften u¨ber Sprache, Misterien, Vernunft, 1772–1788, R. Brockhaus Verlag Wuppertal, Antiquariat H. P. Willi, Tu¨bingen, 1999. Hartmann, Eduard von, Philosophie des Scho¨nen. Zweiter systematischer T heil der Aesthetik, Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, Nachdruck der Ausgabe von 1887, Leipzig. __. Philosophie des Unbewussten. Speculative Resultate nach inductivnaturwissenschaftlicher Methode. Driter T eil: Das Unbewusste und der Darwinismus, Nachdruck der 123. Auflage von 1923, Verlag Dietmar Klottz, Eschborn, 1995. Heidegger, Martin, Vom Wesen der Sprache. Die Metaphysik der Sprache und die Wesung des ¨ ber den Ursprung der Sprache’’, Vittorio Klostermann, Wortes. Zu Herders Abhandlung ‘‘U Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Edmund Husserl, L ogische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Zweiter T eil, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1984. Ockham, Guillaume de, Summa L ogicae, I, St. Bonaventure, New York, 1974. Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, ‘‘Ensayo de este´tica a manera de pro´logo’’, en Obras Completas, V I, Alianza Editorial-Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1987. Plato´n: Oeuvres Completes, I, II. La Ple´iade, Gallimard, Paris, 1950.

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__. In T welve Volumes, V III. T he Statesman. Philebus. Ion. Harvard University Press, London, MCMLXXV. __. In T welve Volumes, V II. T heaetetus. Sophist. Harvard University Press, London, MCMLXXXVII. Sutton, Thomae de, De Natura Verbi Intellectus (Opusculum authenticitate dubium), Textum Taurini 1954, revisado por E. Alarco´n y Societas CAEL (http://www.una.es/filosofia/ alarcon/amicis/index.html).

J. C. COUCEIRO-BUENO

ESSENTIAL POIESIS

PROEM

The West’s encounter with science has forced us to approach poetry and thought separately. Heidegger spoke of isolated mountains, from the summits of which poeticisation and thought face each other. Reducing this distance, and bringing it within our reach represents a real and daunting challenge for us. Husserl’s1 discovery of the phenomenology of the life-world has contributed to smoothing the path that may lead us to the means of bringing poetry and thought closer together. The L ebenswelt phenomenology refers to phenomena such as those experienced in real life, and puts forward the philosophical idea of looking into their immanent structures, in what can be considered as a clear move away from merely factual evidence. Consequently, the concept of the ‘life-world’ will act as the starting point for the recovery of the unity that formerly existed between thought and poetry. Nevertheless, it is necessary to discuss the vicissitudes of the Greek concept of poiesis and its relevance in the modern world. I

Jakobson2 defines the poetic function as one of the factors involved in verbal communication (the projection of the principal of the equivalence of the selection axis onto the combination axis). He sees this function as being at the centre of the message itself, the message simply as message and therefore totally unyielding to poetry. In keeping with this line of argument, he goes on to condemn any attempt at reducing the scope of the poetic, claiming that this is not the sole function of verbal art, accepting however that it is its predominant and determining function. All other functions are considered subsidiary and accessory. The poetic function is therefore seen as the linguistic function, whose principal mission is to penetrate deeper into the basic dichotomy of sign/dichotomy and extend beyond the limits of poetry. And it is precisely at this stage that the poetic functions enter into a state of reflection upon linguistic expression, resulting in the referentiality of the object, the infor49 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 49–56. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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mative content or the value of truth. In other words, it exerts an influence on each of the conditions of general validity that stand outside the poetic language. An expression can only be considered poetic to the extent that it acts as a guide for the linguistic medium and the actual linguistic form it assumes. We must bear in mind the fact that what distinguishes poetical language is its capacity to create worlds. This capacity is the result of the process of division initiated in the poem itself, since poeticity represents the thorough reappraisal of each of its components, rather than mere aesthetic adornment. J. Cohen3 claims that the particular function of poetry is to violate the standard separations traditionally accepted by language. However, it is not a matter of destroying the message, as the poet employs language for the purpose of expression. His approach consists of creating a specific means of understanding and comprehension in the recipient that lies beyond the merely obvious and analytical, provoked by the quotidian message. Consequently, poetry can only remit us to language when an act of transgression takes place: it destroys ordinary language for the purpose of reconstructing that language on a higher plane. As a result, the acknowledgement of the semantic relevance brought about at a sintagmatic level by lexical mutation may lead to the study of the new referential values, inextricably linked to the innovation of meaning. II

At this stage it is appropriate to look more closely at the genesis and development of the conceptual binomial poiesis/poetry. In Protagoras (339a), Plato writes the following in reference to various messages exhibited by the Sophists: ‘‘I believe that the most fundamental part of education involves being learned in the art of poetry, in the words, being capable of understanding the poets’ message, of distinguishing between the good and the bad in their writings and being able to explain why when asked’’. It is important to bear in mind the fact that we owe the Sophists their specific contribution of providing a structure for the inventio as poetic art subjected to a series of pre-established rules. As a result, they structure their poetry – the metre, rhythm, alliteration, etc. – turning it into a means of expression of a didactic and magical nature (we must remember that the Greeks considered the poets to be the first educators).

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In Gorgias (330a), Plato considers poetry as a part of the logos, thereby eliminating the restrictions that separated it from prose. In Ion (533e), we find the repeatedly glossed ‘divine possession’ of the poet, which implies the condemnation of poetry as knowledge. Yet in Phaedrus, poetry is seen as a knowledge strategy capable of reaching abstract truths and ideas (244e, 245a, 247d, 262c, 270d). Consideration must also be given however to Plato’s definition of the concept of poiesis in Banquet (205a a-c): ‘‘(...) You know that the concept of poiesis is somewhat broad, as everything that is the cause of something, whatever it may be, passing from not being to being (...)’’. Accordingly, poiesis is a creative activity capable of provoking the passing from not being to being, due to its ontological and specific nature. We can therefore put forward the idea that in the opinion of this Greek master, poetry, is defined as a part of the general creative activity involved in poiesis. In L yses (117b) poetry is directly linked to knowledge. Indeed, when referring to poetic knowledge, the philosopher clearly states the following: ‘‘(...) these poets, who are our fathers in wisdom’’ (117b). In Phaedrus (245a), referred to above, he clearly raises poetry to educational and cognitive heights: ‘‘The third degree of mandes and possession comes from the muses, taking a tender and pure soul, awakening it to the joys of song and all types of poetry, and by glorifying the thousands of deeds of the ancient masters, educates those that are still to come’’. When poetry becomes politics – as in T he Republic – it reaches the stage chosen by Plato to sever the ties between poetry and philosophy. In Poetics, Aristotle offers a theoretical approach to literary genre or the types of mimesis. He studies and establishes the various categories of the tragedy which, in his opinion, depend on mimesis (namely the poietic reproduction of human actions). Mimesis is the reproduction of reality that indicates the quickest means of creating a story, plot or intrique (mythos). The poet is required to follow this method in a more direct manner: ‘‘The poet must be the artifice of plots rather than verses, as he is a poet through imitation, and therefore imitates actions, and if on certain occasions he deals with actual events, then this does not make him less of a poet, as nothing can prevent certain actions from reflecting reality and possible events, which is the sense from which they are dealt with by the poet’’ (1451b). According to Aristotle, the poet is a creator intrique and the reproducer of events. His epistemoligical status is clearly established in a magnificent passage from Poetics: ‘‘(...) It is, moreover, evident from what has been

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said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more Philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular’’ (1451b). In addition to all of the above, further consideration must also be given to the importance conferred upon poetry by the courts of law of the ancient classical civilisations. In his work Against T imarchus, Aeschines states that Athenian orators speak before the State’s law courts, where they attempt to prove written law. Yet to an equal extent they also invoke the sentences of the poets, where no written laws exist to guide them. The Greeks considered a verse by Homer to represent the most authoritative argument, an idea sustained by the philosophers themselves. Indeed, Plato’s criticism in T he Republic is that the word of the poet is taken as law. Nevertheless, in his later study of the education of the guardians, he does in fact consider poetry as an essential source of paideia, as it is considered to be the expression of a higher truth (T he Republic, 337A). III

The production of the inherent meaning of poetry lies in the prescription of the poet as the creator of intrigue with a view to what may occur. This provides us with an insight into hitherto unknown dimensions of reality, both in terms of its capacity for division and the elimination of the ordinary reference. This particular capacity of the poetic function allows us to be transported to a reference governed by the heuristic capacity for fiction that is inherent to re-description. As a result, poetic discourse confers a preobjective world upon language, in which we are immersed since birth. The poetic function, poetry, will therefore bring us closer to the function of art seen as ‘desautomatisation’ (Slovsky).4 In the other words, the mission of art will consist of renewing the perception mechanism. From this perspective, regular actions become automatic, which will complicate the process of capturing the true dimension of the object. Or to put it another way, art has a tendency to free us from our perception of an object in its standard dimension.

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H. R. Jauss5 develops the concept of poiesis from the perspective of an essential aesthetic/productive experience similar to the Hegelian concept of art, according to which man can satisfy his need to exist and be present in the world, and to have a sense of belonging through artistic creation, and by eliminating the strange coldness of the outside world and turning into a work of his own making. Jauss is aware that recognition of poietic activity appears during the literary revolution of the 18th century, managing to demand that man’s production is indeed his own, and that poietic knowledge is capable of creating a hitherto inexistent world, and not merely a second and more beautiful nature. Kant, in his Kritik Urteilskarft, 1780 (Critique de la faculte´ dejuger, 1982),6 refers us to the fact that poetry is precisely ‘‘the art of conducting a free game of the imagination as a matter of understanding’’. It is considered to be analogous with philosophy and literature. Just like the poet, the philosopher also produces his own forms and invents words, in accordance with the needs of this thought. Heidegger,7 in Ho¨lderlin un das Wessen der Dichtung, situates thought (Denken) as posterior to metaphysicsm deeply embedded in poetry. A movement of thought that favours poieis and in which the understanding of Dichtung (poetry) constitutes not only an attempt to overcome the mythical/philosophical conflict, but also to specify the relationship between the poetical and the philosophical. All this is set against a background of the identification of Dichtung which is language itself (die Sprache) and its capacity for apophanticity and early enlightenment: the capacity to speak and occasionally utter mythos and logos simultaneously. In addition, Heidegger considers poetry as the natural medium for the full restitution of truth, that which is established by the world and which shows things up in a new light. According to this German philosopher, language is the ‘home of being’ (Ueber den Humanismus)8 and constitutes the place where the history of being takes place, guided by the linguistic images of the world that govern the ontological pre-understanding of the being. From this perspective he establishes the relation between the language of metaphysics and that of poetry, taking it beyond mere calculative thought, and considering that only memories (Andenken) are capable of repairing the oblivion of being, and which must be considered as the original source of poetry. Heidegger considers that the poetry of Holderlin or Rilke represents the opening up of the origin of discovery, and therefore goes beyond metaphysics. Poetry represents the only alternative to the evident difficulties caused by subjectivity philosophy.

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Poetry (Holzwege, 1950)9 is not restricted to merely reflecting what has been given, nor to creating accurate language at the service of scientific criteria, but actually assists in shedding light upon them. In truth, what really attracted Heidegger to poetic and artistic language was the fact that is contains the truth in this full sense of unconcealment. The work of art ‘‘situates truth within the work’’. It activates the very truth of the entity, since ‘‘truth as a means of revealing and concealing the entity takes place following its participation’’; in other words, truth is poietic, ‘‘as what the poet utters and considers as being real’’. Active truth lies in the work of art (which is essentially poetry), the development of truth that opens up the world and holds it against the dark background from which it has emerged, and which represents the revelation of the work of art. Here, what is preserved is its origin, its source and its origination based an what is not present. In the work of art, it is poetry that creates the full sense of truth, revealing things in a new light, with a new sense of luminosity, rather than delving into that which has already been brought to the surface, and leaving things as the are, untouched and in their place. Heidegger demonstrates the proximity of thought and poetry, based on the fact that the alter is essentially a question of thought. In this sense, instead of representing the deliquescence of language, poetry actually constitutes the struggle of language to break its bonds and restrictions in order to venture off in search of adventure and the open (the open is seen as the set of everything that contains limits and restrictions). Poetry enables those entities that dare to face a pure reception to enter as subjugates, to the extent that they may freely continue with their forms of multiple attraction without encountering any difficulties: ‘‘The poet undoubtedly refers to joint existence through the use of the name ‘Nature’, ‘Life’, ‘the open’, ‘all reception’; and furthermore, the standard mode of metaphysical language calls the ‘being’ to this fully rounded set of existing elements’’ (1950, 250). In this magnificent paragraph, Heidegger captures the idea that poetry sees the being of all things as an adventure, a risk, through the indirect manner of referring to the being of things. In the light of this overview of various proposals, it can be claimed that poiesis, the poetic function, is an act focused on itself that can be divided in order to allow for the genuine creation of the world, by searching for the unicity of meaning through referenced ontologisation. This poetical reference brings about a break in everyday language, as the common reality shared by fiction and poetry leaves them open to new

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possibilities of being-in-the-world, merely because they are directed towards the being. Everyday reality is therefore metamorphosed in favour of what could be referred to as the imaginative variations that literature exerts upon reality. We are now therefore a long way from the vision of poiesis as a mere literary adornment. It is in fact quite the contrary, revealing to us a truth experience of the world to which otherwise we would be refused all access. CLOSING REMARKS

It is worth bearing in mind the consideration that it is through poetry that the word reaches its full state of plenitude. Consequently, poetry is not restricted to converting what has been said into the present, but instead presents itself in all its sonorous reality. A sonorous reality that is inextricably entwined with its meaning. In other words, poetry is quite simply the confluence of ‘world’ and ‘spirit’. A poet has the ability to express what everyone feels yet is incapable of uttering. In this sense, he is someone whose writings and style enable him to collect and transmit everything that is present in direct and immediate speech: intonation, modulation, coloration, tone, emotion, etc. A poet’s value lies in his capacity to write with all the linguistic force that exists in the real exchange of words. A linguistic force that in the case of poetry is so overwhelming that the reader becomes permanently ensnared. Poetry is the palpable proof that the plenitude of writing consists not only of being read, but, and more than anything else, of being heard (interiorly). A text can be considered as poetical essentially when a refractory relationship exits between the so-called ‘reality’; or at the very least when it exists on a secondary plane. As a result, poetry acquires its value, its claim to validity, regardless of its explicit content, due to the fact that it does not exist in order to satisfy a supposed need for ‘information’. It does not attempt to transmit in formation, as this information is information that inevitably transmits far more than any possible transmission of information. Poems exist to remind us that the essence of the world is communicable merely through the world itself (in contrast to scientific procedures with all its vulgarity, obviousness and banality, etc.). This said, poetry is always directed at a whole that our finite and limited nature prevents us from fully capturing. In all events, we must

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remember that poetry has its own sovereignty, which we do not call into question, but instead questions us. The classics have taught us that the importance of poetry stems from its capacity to point towards an ethos, standards of behavior and the historical example seen as the very highest of paradigms. In this sense, the importance of poetry will lie in its capacity to mould and form types of men. Poetry is the only linguistic form capable of guaranteeing the preservation and stability of what has been transmitted, and which consisted of the rhythmic word skilfully organised according to metric and verbal models, each with sufficient power and force to retain the essence of the information. Prose is incapable of such an activity, as each narrator adopts a different style in order to relate an event. To put it succinctly, poetry means allowing the ‘rhythm of the words’ to speak to us. We may conclude by stating that poetry confers upon the human being everything that reality has taken away. L a Coruna University NOTES 1 E. Husserl, Die crisis der Europaischen W issenschaften un die ranszendentale Pha¨nomenologie (Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1962). 2 R. Jakobson, Ensayos de poe´tica (Madrid: FCE, 1977), p. 130. 3 J. Cohen, Structura de language poe´tique (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 4 P. Slovsky, T eorı´a de los formalistas rusos (Madrid: Signos, 1970), p. 80. 5 H. R. Jauss, Experiencia este´tica y hermeneutica literaria (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), p. 20. 6 I. Kant, Critique de la faculte´ dejuger (Paris: Vrin, 1982), p. 228. 7 M. Heidegger, Erla¨uterung zu Ho¨lderlin Dichtung (Frankfurt del Meno: Klostermann, 1971). 8 M. Heidegger, Ueber den Humanismus (Frankfurt del Meno: Vitorio Klostermann, 1974). 9 M. Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt A.M. Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), pp. 110–251.

ELLEN J. BURNS

MUSICAL PROGENY: THE CASE OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND MUSIC

Music is ... a hidden arithmetical activity of a mind that does not know it is counting. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz a hidden metaphysical activity of a mind that does not know it is philosophizing. Arthur Schopenhauer the hidden philosophical activity of a mind that does not know it is listening. Fred Kersten1

Compared with the multi-millennial history of music, phenomenology is a relative newcomer to the landscape of human endeavor.2 Despite its youth, the breadth of topics and geographic range – as indicated in the program of this congress – attest to the value and efficacy of the methodology as a philosophy of mind, and of life itself. My aim in this paper is to illustrate the familial relationship between phenomenology and music and to suggest that, within the boundaries of Anglo-American musicology, these ‘‘family members’’ are not always on the best of terms. Despite the tension, we will see that the application of this twentieth-century methodology to the study, teaching, composition, and performance of music is a logical – if not a ‘‘natural’’ – development. The genealogical key is Carl Stumpf, a prodigious father figure in psychology, philosophy, and music. Considered the ‘‘grandfather’’ of phenomenology, he was a student of Franz Brentano. Through Brentano’s influence, Stumpf concluded that phenomena were the primary data for psychology; hence his famous adage, ‘‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’’3 His first publication studied visual and especially depth perception.4 Appointed as the director of the Berlin Psychological Institute in 1894, he sponsored the Third International Congress of Psychology in 1896, where his phenomenological inclinations were foreshadowed by his focus on an interactionist rather than a psychophysical parallelistic understanding of human psychology and perception. By the end of the nineteenth century, Stumpf shifted from the perceptual study of visual art to that of music with his volumes entitled T on 57 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 57–66. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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psychologie (1883 and 1890). During this period, Brentano sent Edmund Husserl, his youngest student, to Carl Stumpf, his oldest student. They became close friends, and Husserl enthusiastically incorporated Stumpf ’s many suggestions in the formation of his own descriptive concepts. The theme of Husserl’s Habilitation thesis5 already showed him transitioning from mathematical research to reflections on the psychological source of the basic concepts of mathematics. One cannot help but see a parallel between the phenomenological study of mathematics and music.6 Continuing his research on tone psychology, Stumpf founded the journal Beitra¨ge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft in 1898 where he reported his experiments in music perception. Stumpf ’s phenomenological theory was based on examinations of experiences as they occurred without trying to reduce experience to compartmentalized elements, all the while emphasizing that the experimental study of sensory and imaginal experience precedes the study of mental functions.7 Thus he drew into psychology his own version of phenomenology, from which emerged an experimental psychology. This experimental psychology served as a mediator between traditional disciplinary concerns and identities in both philosophy and psychology, and the appeal of modern empirical research addressing fundamental questions in philosophy. The hallmark of phenomenology – moving from theory to practice – is evidenced in the next phase of Stumpf ’s career, which spawned his third intellectual child: comparative musicology, or ethnomusicology as it is called today. After founding the Berlin Phonogram Archive in 1900 at the Berlin University’s Psychology Institute, he acquired recordings collected in Africa in an attempt to continue his psychological investigations of musical experience, which gave rise to the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology. While philosophy has acknowledged Stumpf ’s roles as psychologist, phenomenologist, and musician, the discipline of music has yet to grasp the relevance of his interdisciplinary progeny and his pivotal role in the development of phenomenological philosophy in music. T he New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a standard reference work, only refers to him as a ‘‘German psychologist, acoustician, and musicologist ... [who] ... became the true founder of comparative musicology. While phenomenologists have developed a discipline based on his intellectual model of music, musicians know him primarily as an acoustician and budding ethnomusicologist. Phenomenology, moreover, rates only a marginal note in Claude Palisca’s article on theory and theorists in the Grove dictionary. A ‘‘first

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cousin’’ of phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, did merit inclusion in the sixth edition of the work. It was subsumed into a general discussion of psychology in music in the seventh edition. When not omitted altogether, responses have been negative, ranging from apathy to supercilious rejection across musicological lines. Recent philosophies of music and art – by Gordon Graham, Vladimir Janke´le´vich, Peter King and Aaron Ridley, to name a few – ignore Stumpf and phenomenology. Only in Roger Scruton’s T he Aesthetics of Music8 are phenomenology and Stumpf mentioned in a short breath. But it does take one’s breath away! Referring to Stumpf ’s first volume of T onpsychologie, Scruton mocks the notion that we experience the rising and falling of melodic line as phenomenal, not geometric events, and considers the notion that we experience such pitch levels physically to be absurd. Insults are not limited to Stumpf, however, as he rebukes C. C. Pratt9 and Paul Hindemith10 for their agreement with Stumpf, before dismissing the philosophy entirely: ‘‘the premises of phenomenology are as dubious as those of Schopenhauer’s idealism, accepted, like Schopenhauer’s, for the ease with which they deliver results and not from any persuasive argument’’ (96). This follows Scruton’s assertion that W. F. Kant and G. W. F. Hegel were ‘‘deaf ’’ to music and his confidence that the works of Suzanne Langer and Nelson Goodman have been so successfully disproved that he need not take the time to rebut them (viii). Lewis Rowell, reviewing Thomas Clifton’s landmark phenomenological study of music, Music as Heard,11 suggests that while the method can ‘‘bring fresh new insights to bear on the reception of music,’’ phenomenology can also ‘‘encourage an indulgent and narcissistic preoccupation with one’s own reactions and idiosyncracies.’’12 In a sweeping generalization, Rowell asserts that Clifton’s method is not ‘‘the way in which most people listen to music, and I know it is not mine’’ (121). In his 1996 article ‘‘Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime,’’ Kofi Agawu suggests that phenomenology was essentially ‘‘a thing of the ’70s’’ (my phrase) as he has not seen Clifton’s – much less latter-day phenomenologists’ – name in ‘‘the new musicology footnotes.’’13 Is it surprising, then, that in the past decades few papers on this topic have been delivered at national and international musicological and music theory meetings? It is a sad irony that music has yet to apply without reservation a method developed in part from understanding the experience of its own raw material. While musico-phenomenologists plying their skills have not flourished in the eyes of ‘‘mainstream’’ musicology, phenomenology as a method for

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describing the experience of the musical arts has more than established itself in intellectual waters not too distant from music. Phenomenological applications reported in periodicals now number in the hundreds. Metatheoretical discussions and musical analyses, often invoking Husserl’s work in time-consciousness, have been the topic of numerous titles, the most significant of which include Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard (alluded to above) and Lawrence Ferrara’s Philosophy and the Analysis of Music.14 Theoretical discussions15 consider formal16 and harmonic17 aspects of musical analysis. Phenomenological analyses of individual works range from an opera by Mozart,18 string quartets by Beethoven, as well as piano pieces by Chopin and Liszt appearing in articles and/or dissertations.19 Monographic studies on the works by Beethoven and Mahler appeared in the 1980s as well as investigations of phenomenology as metatheory,20 theory,21 and as a method to analyze individual works.22 As much twentieth-century music dispensed with the traditional notions of melody and harmony, a number of investigators – Judith Lochhead principal among them – considered phenomenology a useful approach for works by such modern composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, Oliver Messiaen, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. Also applied to the inherent problems of musico-literary arts, phenomenology was the focus in a study of the opera libretti of Hugo Hoffmannstahl.23 Beyond mainstream classical music, phenomenological methodology has been applied in the interpretation of such significant subfields as rock,24 metal,25 jazz,26 and the music of other cultures. In ‘‘Knowing Fieldwork,’’ Jeff Todd Titon defines phenomenology as a ‘‘ground[ing of ] knowledge in the world of lived experience.’’27 He suggests further that post-1960s ethnomusicology, newly aware of historical distortions and constraints imposed by colonialism, observational distance, and class and gender-driven assumptions, has been able to draw on this Continental philosophical tradition to critique its approaches to the study of musicin-culture. An overview of the activities confirms that Titon has grasped the significance of the method: a descriptive analysis emphasizing ‘‘lived experience’’ and the ‘‘reflexive’’ interaction of observer and subject (94). Titon continues with a synthesis of phenomenological and post-modern methodologies as he calls for a ‘‘concern for history and power relationships,’’ a commitment to shared authorial voice, the ‘‘deconstruction of boundary concepts,’’ and ‘‘cultural advocacy’’ by scholars on behalf of their subjects (92).

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Emphasizing that the act of observation – whether by an ethnomusicologist, music historian, or music educator – is equally an act of participation, he suggests that the scholar’s best hope for a less-distorted, more self-aware (e.g., ‘‘reflexive’’) approach is to accept the ‘‘fuzziness’’ of actual lived experience – the fluidity of definitions and the mutability of boundaries between ‘‘artifact’’ and ‘‘process,’’ between ‘‘observer’’ and ‘‘participant,’’ even between ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘object’’ – and to locate the focus of analysis on how these boundaries are negotiated. Music becomes one tool in a range of cultural behaviors which help people – both players and listeners, both subjects and observers – make sense of their shared experience (98).28 In addition to interpretative activities, phenomenological applications in music are multi-faceted, as it has been applied to the composition and performance of music. The Danish composer Per Nørga˚rd (b. 1932) has developed a phenomenological approach to composition, based on Goethe, by ‘‘letting phenomena speak for themselves without looking for some explanation ‘behind’ them.’’ As Nørga˚rd reported in a 1979 article whose title translated into English is ‘‘Growth – as Leitmotif and Process.’’29 The concept of sonic growth paralleling nature can be heard in his occupation with new structural approaches, including a serial system or musical growth principle, which can be compared to the symmetrical formations of nature. This way of composing has been compared with fractional geometrical forms – edifying structures in an indefinite, hierarchical system – and is most evident in his Third Symphony.30 Other avenues of phenomenological composition can be seen in ‘‘Ambient’’ music. A loosely defined genre, it incorporates elements from jazz, electronica, ‘‘new age,’’ modern classical music and even musique concre`te. Its sonic ‘‘profile’’ is dominated by an overarching atmospheric context.31 First coined by Brian Eno in the late 1970s, its aim was to design music that would envelop the listener without drawing attention to itself. Ambient composers, or sound designers, see their forerunners in Eric Satie, best known for his suite of Gymnope´dies, and Edgar Vare`se. While purely ambient music is traditionally beatless, the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a reconciliation of rhythm with the dreamy, meandering reverb of the first wave of ambient music. Under the guise of various styles, ambient electronica (sometimes referred to as ambient techno or ambient dub) saw the birth of a new wave of electronic music. Phenomenology is not a stranger to this style of composition, as witnessed in a 2-CD compilation by Free Zone called Phenomenology of the Ambient.

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Sergiu Celibidache (1912–1996) and his school illustrate the phenomenological methodology in performance. Celibidache’s performance practice, informed by phenomenology, demanded attention to the myriad details that would yield the total effect of the work. His career, however, was bittersweet. While it was generally conceded that he was a great musician and conductor – better known, in fact, among connoisseurs of music – his uncompromising demands did not allow him to travel among the ranks of world-renowned conductors. He would, for example, expect twenty rehearsals with orchestras for whom he was guest conducting. The ‘‘jet set’’ conductors, on the other hand, required only one or two. During the twenty rehearsals, Celibidache taught the orchestra about philosophy and crafted with them what he called ‘‘epiphomena,’’ which yielded a total and enriched effect. In the most intricate passages of music, for example, the tempi were not dictated strictly by metronome markings. To do so would have the same effect as the proverbial bull in a china shop. His first opportunity to publicly air his performance philosophy was as a substitute conductor for the NWDR Radio Orchestra, in September of 1951. The review in the Hamburg press appreciated his approach: ‘‘His conception was dominated by a sense of rhythm not rigidly linked to the beat, but expressed as a living, dancing sense of movement. ... To this he added a sensual arid incandescent fantasy of sound with no hint of fogginess, combined with the greatest attention to the plasticity of each musical phrase.’’ As we listen to the first couple of minutes of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, remember that this was a 1951 live recording for radio, using simple microphones and no editing. Despite the unsophisticated sound technology, it is clear that Celibidache achieved a successful synthesis of the chamber and symphonic properties of Brahms’ writing. Unlike many of the successful, ‘‘jet-set’’ conductors of his day, he did not sacrifice the inner voices to the melody instruments. Compared to Herbert von Karajan’s 1975 performance of the same work, remembering that this is a more sophisticated ‘‘studio’’ recording with ample miking and editing, lines are sacrificed to the violins even when the melodic line, based on intervalic motion, becomes accompaniment as the intervals become exaggerated. The octave and minor seventh skips (measures 21–26) leading to the bridge are most certainly not melodic. To emphasize them, particularly in the hands of unskillful violinists, is to suggest that Brahms transformed an intervalic melody full of yearning into a donkey’s bray. This lends credence to Celibidache’s quote during an interview recounted in the New York T imes: Von Karajan

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had much in common with Coca-Cola. He was popular throughout the world but has little taste.32 In addition to conducting, Celibidache held two annual intensive seminars at Mainz University, where he applied phenomenological and Zen philosophies to music, and taught his approach to the next generation of musicians. As a result, young conductors and performers were ‘‘transformed from rigid human metronomes to musicians who move, beat and breathe with the innate natural rhythmic flow of the body.’’33 Celibidache’s heritage is rich and vital: the Association Celibidache sponsors an orchestra, L ’Orchestre des Re´gions Europe´ennes, which continues to perform works in accordance with his philosophy. The International Music Academy, located in France, continues to provide workshops applying phenomenological method to chamber music and orchestral and choral conducting. While Celibidache generally eschewed recordings – he compared them to going to bed with a picture of Bridget Bardot34 – it is interesting to note that he preferred to entrust his heritage to his students. His humanity and uncompromising quest for musicality demonstrate that his devotion to music transcended self interest. Certainly he could be viewed as a musician of good will in the strictest of Kantian terms.35 In conclusion, Anglo-American musico-phenomenologists seem to be lost on that Pirandellian stage, seeking an ‘‘author’’ who will provide them a venue. In the meantime, we can take heart by evidence of the global acceptance and development in such subdisciplines as ethnomusicology, composition, and performance. Like Carl Stumpf almost 110 years ago, perhaps we, too, will find a balancing act between traditional musicological concerns and the appeal of modern empirical research in addressing fundamental questions of our total experience of music and ourselves. T. S. Eliot echoes our aim in ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ from T he Four Quartets: ... music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

State University of New York Albany NOTES 1 Leibniz’s and Schopenhauer’s phrases are quoted in translation by Fred Kersten in his introduction to Alfred Schutz’s ‘‘Fragment on the Phenomenology of Music’’ (In Search of

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Musical Method [London: Gordon and Breach, 1976, 1, 11 and 20 respectively). Leibniz’s Latin original, ‘‘exercitum arithmeticoe occultum nescientis se numerare animi,’’ was quoted from his 1712 letter to Christian Goldbach by Schopenhauer in T he World as W ill and Idea (6th ed., tr. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1907, 1:331). Schopenhauer’s original Latin, ‘‘Music est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi’’ may be found on page 342 of the same volume. Kersten’s adaptation appears in his introduction to Schutz’s fragment (In Search of Musical Method, 20) 2 While we generally consider the term as originating with Husserl’s publications of the early twentieth century, the earliest uses of the term occur in the study of religion and mathematics. Christoph Friedrich Oetinger (1702–1782), a German pietist, incorporated the term in his study of the ‘‘divine system of relations,’’ while the mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77) used it in his theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge to distinguish illusion and error. 3 C. Bowman and P. Brownell, ‘‘Prelude to Contemporary Gestalt Therapy.’’ Gestalt 1, 4 (Autumn, 2000). http://www.g-g.org/gej/4-3/prelude.html ¨ ber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1873. 4 U ¨ ber den BegriV der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen, Halle-Wittenberg: Friedricks 5 U Universitat, 1887. 6 See opening quotes. 7 D. P. Schultz and S. E. Schultz, ‘‘A History of Modern Psychology.’’ Gestalt Psychology, 7th ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt-Brace, 2000, 101. 8 Albert Welleck and Berthold Freudenberg, ‘‘Stumpf, (Friedrich) Carl,’’ in T he New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), xxiv, 307. 9 Roger Scruton, T he Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 10 Author of T he Meaning of Music: A Study in Psychological Aesthetics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931). 11 Author of A Composer’s World: Horizons and L imitations (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1952). 12 New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1983. 13 Lewis Rowell, review of Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology, by Thomas Clifton, T he Journal of Aesthetic Education 20, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 119. 14 Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to Musical Sound, Form, and Reference ([New York]: Excelsior Music Publishing, 1991). Clifton T he Journal of Aesthetic Education 20, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 119. 15 General methodological discussions include: Joan Stambaugh, ‘‘Music as a Temporal Form’’ (Journal of Philosophy 61 [19641: 265–80); Effamae Foster, ‘‘A Phenomenological Study of the Foundations of Music’’ (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1972); F. Joseph Smith, ‘‘Musical Sound as a Model for Husserlian Intuition and Time-Consciousness’’ (Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 4 [Fall 1973]: 271–96); Peter Benary, ‘‘Komplementarita¨t als musikalische Prinzip. Ein Beitrag zur Pha¨nomenologie der Musik’’ (Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung 255 [October 1976]: 59–60); Robert Shearer, ‘‘A Philosophy of Aesthetic Value in Music’’ (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976); Friedrich Jaecker, ¨ berlegungen zu den Grundlagen des Fachs ‘‘Systematik oder Pha¨nomenologie? U Musiktheorie’’ (Musik und Bildung 9, no. 3 [1977]: 133–41); Charles Smith, ‘‘Towards a Phenomenalistic Account of Music’s Performances’’ (In T heory Only 12 [1977]: 17–29); Jo Ellen Jacobs, ‘‘Toward an Ontology of Musical Works of Art’’ (Ph.D. diss., Washington

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University of St. Louis, 1977); Sheryl Lynn Floyd, ‘‘A Phenomenological Account of Aesthetic Perception and its Implications for Aesthetic Theory’’ (Ph.D., diss., Vanderbilt University, 1979); Wilhelm Baethge, ‘‘Systemdenken und Denksystem: Zu Problemen der systematischen Musikwissenschaft’’ (Beitra¨ge zur Musikwissenschaft 22, no. 3 [1980]: 164–67); Judith Lochhead, ‘‘Some Musical Applications of Phenomenology’’ (Indiana T heory Review 3 [1980]: 18–27); Manfred Angerer, ‘‘Musikanalyse auf dem Wege zur Synthese?’’ ¨ sterreichische Musikalische Zeitung 36, no. 9 [September 1981]: 460–65); Lawrence (O Ferrara, ‘‘Allowing Oneself to be Moved: A Phenomenology of Musical Evaluation’’ (Qualitative Evaluation in the Arts 1 [1981]: 125–51); idem, ‘‘Richness or Chaos: Toward a Phenomenology of Musical Interpretation’’ (ibid. 2 [1982]: 197–208); idem, ‘‘Phenomenology as a Tool for Musical Analysis’’ (T he Musical Quarterly 70 [Summer 1984]: 355–73); Michael A. Pelt, ‘‘Being Attuned: An Ontological Analysis of Music’’ (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1983); Douglas R. Bartholomew, ‘‘A Phenomenology of Music: Themes Concerning the Musical Object and Implications for Teaching and Learning’’ (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1985); David Lewin, ‘‘Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception’’ (Music Perception 3 [Summer 1986]: 327–92); Lawrence Ferrara, ‘‘Music in General Studies: A Look at Content and Method’’ (College Music Symposium 26 [1986]: 122–29); and Ana Margret Magnusdotter, ‘‘Toward a Phenomenology of Music’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987). 16 For formal applications, see Peter Faltin, Pha¨nomenologie der musikalischen Form: Eine experimentalpsychologische Un tersuchung zur Wahrnehmung des musikalischen Materials und der musikalischen Syntax (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979). 17 For harmonic applications, see Gottfried Scholz, ‘‘Music Analysis and Its Limits,’’ ¨ sterreichische Musikalische Zeitung 36, no. 9 [September 1981]: 450–60), and Yizhak (O Sadai, Harmony in Its Systemic and Phenomenological Aspects (Jerusalem: Yanetz, 1980). 18 See my ‘‘The Dialectical Structure of W. A. Mozart’s Die Zauberflo¨te: A Phenomenological Analysis,’’ Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1994. 19 See Lawrence Kramer’s ‘‘The Mirror of Tonality: Transitional Features of NineteenthCentury Harmony’’ (Nineteenth-Century Music 4, no. 3 [Spring 1981]: 191–208) for discussions of Beethoven’s string quartet, op. 18, no.6, Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, and Liszt’s Nuage gris. For analyses of Beethoven’s op. 59, no. 1 string quartet and Seymour Shifrin’s fourth string quartet, see Judith Lochhead’s ‘‘Some Musical Applications of Phenomenology’’ (Indiana T heory Review 3, no. 3 [Spring 1980]: 18–27), Manfred S. Frings discusses Chopin’s Etude, op. 25. Hugo Goldenzweig also analyzes Chopin in ‘‘The Chopin Etudes: A Schenkerian and Phenomenological Analysis’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1987). Many phenomenological applications concentrate on twentieth-century works as well as provide the basis for interdisciplinary studies. For an overview of twentieth-century applications, see Judith Lochhead’s ‘‘The Temporal Structure of Recent Music: A Phenomenological Investigation’’ (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1982). Also, see Ronald Sadoff ’s ‘‘The Solo Piano Music of Charles Ives: A Performance Guide’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1986), Antonio Serravezza’s ‘‘A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Works of Arnold Schoenberg’’ (Journal of Musicological Research 4, no. 1–2 [1982]: 1–19), Paul Sung-Il Kim’s ‘‘Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux for Solo Piano: A Phenomenological and Style Analysis’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1989), Bruce Anderson’s ‘‘The Solo Piano Music of Elliott Carter: An Analysis and Performance Guide’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1988), Michael Chanan’s ‘‘Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples (T empo 155 [Winter 1970–71]: 30–33), and Donald Pirone’s ‘‘The Solo Piano Music of Karol Rathuas’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1984). Wolfgang Hufschmidt’s ‘‘Musik

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als Wiederholung: Anmerkungen zur Periodischen Musik’’ (in Reflexionen u¨ber Musik Heute, ed. Wilfried Gruhn [Mainz: Schott, 1981], 148–68) includes discussions of Steve Reich’s Drumming, Terry Riley’s In C, as well as compositions by Beethoven, Schumann, Ravel, Satie, and Cage, literature by Thomas Mann, and painting by Jackson Pollock. 20 See In Search of Musical Method, ed. F. J. Smith (London: Gordon and Breach, 1976), F. J. Smith, T he Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music (ibid. 1979). 21 See Haig Khatchadourian, Music, Film, and Art (London: Gordon and Breach, 1985). 22 See David B. Greene, T emporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1982); idem, Mahler: Consciousness and T emporality (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984), and Joanna Goldstein, A Beethoven Enigma: Performance Practice and the Piano Sonata, Opus 111 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). 23 See Werner Pfister’s ‘‘Hofmannsthal und die Oper’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Zurich, 1979). 24 Lee B. Brown, ‘‘Phonography, Rock Music, and the Ontology of Recorded Music.’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 361–372 and ‘‘Feeling My Way: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes – A Plea for Imperfection.’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 113–123. 25 See Sandy Robertson, Meat L oaf, Jim Steinman and the Phenomenology of Excess (Omnibus Press, 1981) and Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. 26 Lee B. Brown, ‘‘Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity.’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 353–369. 27 In Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, eds., Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford UP, 1997, 87–100. 28 My thanks to Christopher Smith, Assistant Professor of Music History and Literature and Director of Vernacular Music Center at the Texas Tech University School of Music for sharing his expertise on this topic. 29 ‘‘Vækst – som ledebillede og som proces,’’ in Per Nørga˚rd artikler 1962–82, ed. by Ivan Hansen. Copenhagen: I. Hansen, 1982. 30 Helle Rachback, ‘‘Per Nørga˚rd.’’ http://www.ewh.dk/en/_composer.asp?id=21#works. 31 ‘‘Ambient Music,’’ in W ikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ambient_music. 32 Recounted by Harold C. Schoenberg in ‘‘Celibidache Arrives at Last and Speaks His Mind,’’ New York T imes (26 February 1984): H23. 33 As observed by Soo Kian Hing in ‘‘Sergiu Celibidache (1912–1996),’’ T he Flying Inkpot. http://inkpot.com/classical/celibidache.html. 34 Jay Nordinger, ‘‘The Silent Conductor,’’ T he Weekly Standard (Washington, D.C.) 3, no. 47 (24 August 1998): 37. 35 I am happily indebted to Max Lifchitz, Professor of Music at the University of Albany (SUNY), for information about Celibidache and for his encouragement for this project.

BRIAN GRASSOM

ART, ALTERITY AND LOGOS: IN THE SPACES OF SEPARATION

PART I. IN THE BEGINNING In the Beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God And the Word was God. John, 1:1

As a text, few written words could be as enigmatic as those in the opening sentence of St. John’s Gospel. They are made all the more puzzling because the words themselves refer to words, or specifically the Word. This powerful evocation has intrigued and inspired people through the two millennia since it was first itself called into being by its writer. It is not surprising that John, in his Gospel, should go on to affirm that God existed ‘in the beginning’ and that ‘without Him was made nothing that was made’ and further that the ‘light shone in darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.’ Whether we agree with him or not the logic of these statements appears sound and the metaphors perfectly in accord with their intended meaning. But where the text, and the meaning, and the logic become difficult, and remain obscure, is with those few opening lines. They offer us the identification of ‘God’ with the ‘Word,’ and the Word as God. The Word is both with God, and is God. This is the logical difficulty, to grasp how two things can be one but separate, and be both separable and inseparable at the same time. We might also ask why God, who according to John, created everything, should be limited to a single concept such as a word? Surely it would have been simpler for John to say that there is only one God, that He existed in the beginning, made everything there is, and that in Him is the life that is the Light of men, a light that shines also in darkness. This is a beautiful and poetic utterance, and needs nothing more to qualify its meaning. Why the concept of the ‘Word’, and its insertion at the beginning of the text? The key to understanding the meaning of this passage of Christian scripture may lie in the etymology of the Greek word ‘logos’, used in the original text. The basic meaning in translation of that word is ‘speech; 67 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 67–78. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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word; reason.’ It can also mean ‘that by which the inward thought is expressed; the inward thought itself, reason, a proposition or position;’ or the ‘Word, comprising both senses of thought and expression.’1 Hence its dictionary definition is the word (or signifier); the inward thought (or signified); or the combination of both. In different contexts it can also signify ‘the pre-Socratic principle governing the cosmos; the sophist topic of rational argument or the argument itself; the Stoic rational principle of the cosmos – nous – the power of activity and regeneration; the Judaic creative word of god that communicates with mankind – divine wisdom in Hellenic Judaism; the Christian creative word of God, incarnate in Jesus.’2 In these last senses it reverts to its original meaning of ‘word’, but by now richer in intentionality and profounder in signification. But this profundity, I would suggest, already existed tacitly in the original word. That is, the simple meaning of logos as ‘word’ carried with it for the Greeks a deep well of association and implication that helped it gather further subtler meaning in the course of its etymological evolution. The role of the word, from the beginning of human time, has been to express as sound something in the world (some external object), or an inner thought, feeling or concept. Thus it has been from the beginning a fundamental and integral part of human life. Altogether words form a system of communication which is profound, subtle, proven and experienced as life itself ... Without it, life as we have known it is inconceivable.3

Apart from the spoken or written word, the signifier can be expressed visually, either by gesture or by graphic representation. In all of these ways something that has presented itself empirically to human consciousness is re-presented by its linguistic sign. With the re-presentation to consciousness of the thing by its word comes a re-creation of the signified, through the resonance of the word and its associations conveying meaning according to the context. This is why a carefully chosen word is extremely important, especially in poetry. The close relation to both consciousness and the power of creation perhaps makes it easier to understand why the Greek word ‘logos’, meaning ‘word’, should through time have come to signify the ancient concept of a life-principle that the Greeks believed existed, but that by its very nature could not adequately be expressed in words, and which might logically and paradoxically have been the ultimate goal of verbal expression, if not indeed of invocation.

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To give a word for something is to bring forth that which was latent and unexpressed – to manifest that which exists, but until the moment of the word’s utterance has been un-manifested. The inference of this is that the chosen word would have to be in perfect accord with that which it represents. To represent something as all-embracing as the life-principle might not be possible by means of words alone, even by the word L ogos. And this brings us back to John. To represent the life-principle perhaps what is needed is a life. Therefore, to represent God, the Logos or lifeprinciple, the ‘word’ that is needed – the crucial, the perfect word and signifier – is a life, an exemplary life. The living narrative of that life would surpass any other representation and would be a perfect expression of the otherwise inexpressible life-principle. It is not difficult to see how John would have thus used the traditions of the Greek, Judaic, and Hellenic philosophies to inform, as he does several verses on in his text, his idea of the life of Christ as the Word ‘made flesh’ – a life and a consciousness that perfectly expressed God: A logos at one with the Logos. PART II. THE SPACES OF SEPARATION

Theologically this makes perfect sense, and as a concept it is familiar to us through the logos, or account, of theology and religion. But when dealing with theology or religion we run into some of the same problems that we do when dealing with philosophy – the words that we use to convey meaning are imprecise. Moreover, in order to be understood they are assimilated by the mind as a rational construct, and this arguably compromises their deeper communicative power. One might say they lose their oneness with the Logos. This is perhaps why Socrates was apparently dismayed at the proliferation of writing in Athens. At the same time, defining something with words, or giving an account of it, as no doubt St. John had to agree, is the principal form available to us of recording and expressing thought. The assignation of the word logos to mean an account or explication of something, particularly a philosophy, becomes important here. The problem is that when the words are set down in graphic form, recorded as writing, the gap between the eidos, the original inner image, and its verbal expression becomes greater. The word and its expression of thought become fixed in time as a text. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida the text accrues many characteristics peculiar to its graphic dimension: the phantom of ‘presence’ and the status of authority; the ornamentations of inscription, such as introduction, preface, signature; and most importantly the combination of these

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with the implicit and paradoxical necessity of supplement – i.e. no matter how comprehensive the thesis it cannot say everything about its subject and there will be something left out. The text is never complete, or whole. In this way the text contains the elements of its own self-contradiction. The ultimate inadequacy of the textual construct of words to convey full meaning is a phenomenon made explicit by Derrida: Pure repetition, absolute self-repetition, repetition of a self that is already reference and repetition, repetition of the signifier, repetition that is null or annulling, repetition of death – it’s all one. Writing is not the living repetition of the living.4

The inference here for logos as an account, whether of theology or philosophy or anything else, is that it is a finished product. It cannot evolve in and of itself, without its author. It is not a living force, and cannot be treated as such. According to the logos, or the spoken and written account, of Phenomenology, the Logos or life-principle is essentially creative and progressive. The crisis of our present culture would seem to be that our account, or logos, of our relationship with life has become separate from the account that the life-principle wants to give of itself. The relativism that is the result of an overly rationalistic way of thinking has led to a loss of meaning, and this is indicated by our present relationship to the word. For example, we have in our culture built up concepts based upon definitions and interpretations generated in logo-centrism. If we take for example a word like ‘democracy’; we think we know what it means, but in fact it means very different things to different people. It meant one thing in Classical Greece, something else in eighteenth century America, a different thing again in the universal suffrage of modern Western society, an almost contradictory meaning for twentieth century socialism, and has entirely different and fluid associations for the democracy of the People’s Republic of China. This slippage and imprecision in meaning has in turn led to the very casual use of words, and to relativism and cynicism. Here the difference lies not in word translation or structure, but in what our perception of democracy is, what is signified in our consciousness. That perception is brought to mind, or re-presented, by the word: but there is a gap between the idea and its expression – there is no unity of signification. As Derrida5 would point out, this is not a result of translation, because translation pre-supposes that there is an exact and corresponding signifier/signified in different languages as also to different human subjects, inferring the existence of a ‘transcendental signified’. Rather the active

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medium is not translation, but transformation. Interpretation is a creative and dynamic activity, and from a phenomenological point of view it is arguably the subjective experience of the recipient transforming the word creatively that gives it meaning. This creative transformational power may be, as we shall see later, that which is harnessed and utilised by painting and poetry. Plato was at pains to explore in the Cratylus the possibility of the essence of things being expressed by their names, through the voice and through writing as sounds made into letters and words. Socrates. How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much – that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.6

He concludes rather that words are an artifice akin to painting, which can produce only a semblance of the true reality. At the same time and for a similar reason, in the Republic,7 he famously excluded painting and poetry from the ideal city-state, as poor instruments for the pursuit of virtue and truth, and which could in fact work in opposition to them. Ironically it is a version of the logos of Plato’s dialogues that form the basis of much of our western culture. The order of being, originating with the unseen, un-manifested ideal, is a metaphysical principle that underpins western thought. It relegates to a given that being is understood within thought; (it was not until Heidegger that an attempt was made, or perhaps revived, to deal with the question of Being itself ). And one could draw an analogy between this and the treatment of the written word, as at once the basis of civilisation and paradoxically the cause of many of its ills. There is thus, in a sense, a parallel to be found between the city (or civis) and written text. And there is a co-relation between the progress of logo-centrism and that of civilisation. The rationalism of the enlightenment led to the quest for a rational political, scientific and social solution to the problems of life, and the predicament of the human condition. This has led to progress, but also to an increase in human suffering, and to barbarism unparalleled in history in the conflicting systems or ‘isms’ that had their apotheosis in the last century and under whose shadow and effects we still live. Clearly the word has never been further from its source in meaning as it has in the last hundred years, nor with the concurrent advances in technology, the consequences so terrible. And at present the process is being repeated yet again, this time within the oppositions of unfettered materialism and religious fundamentalism, both utilising the word and technology to achieve their aims.

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Brian Grassom, City II (detail), 2001.

The separation of word and meaning can be and is the cause of endless trouble. But it may be that, in the space of separation, in that gap of uncertainty which exists in the text, there is also a glimpse of hope, of another kind of meaning, which goes beyond the word and that the word in its context of simple, rational construction does not convey. Thus what needs to be expressed is felt almost at the point of our failure to express it in words. The word needs at the very least to be re-considered. And it can only be re-considered when it is allowed to act only as a reminder of what we already know phenomenally, not as an object of knowledge in itself. I would suggest that this can only come about through pause, contemplation, and silence: and this reflection – this acceptance of difference – may be the basis of reconciliation, as well as the source of real knowledge. But it is essential to first realise that the gap, the space of separation, exists. Having realised this, it can be explored. What we will find there cannot be wholly anticipated, and its transcription will be problematic; although again it is simply human nature to attempt to do both. PART III. THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN

On the other hand – attempting to re-consider the word, retrieve it from ‘death’ and ‘repetition’, re-claim its heritage and its beginnings in light – to search for the right word is fundamental to human expression. It is connected to the search for the fulfilment of truth, as indeed is the quest

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for the utopia of civilisation. The ignorance of truth appears to be part and parcel of the human condition, as is the search to find it. It is a prerequisite for knowledge that there exists a prior state of non-knowledge, or unknowing. With words this search and fulfilment inevitably involves logic – as the words fall into place grammatically they make the sense that is required. The structure of the text, its order and syntax, follow a logic that is apprehended and understood by the mind. But much more than this is the meaning expressed, that which as we have seen lies somehow beyond. That has to make sense too. And the more sense it makes the more we feel that a truth is being uncovered, or recovered from somewhere where it has existed unattended, neglected, obscure or unknown. There are two aspects of the nature of knowledge that become apparent here through the use of the word. The first appears through considering the Greek word for truth – aletheia. Part of the word is lethe, which means forgetfulness, oblivion. So truth to the Greeks did not mean something entirely new. The word implies a remembering, or uncovering. It is anamnesis, remembering that which was evident to the soul before its descent into the body. The idea of truth, or wisdom, being something that is not so much discovered as uncovered, not so much acquired cognitively as revealed intuitively, the idea that in wisdom we are re-discovering something that we know already, has echoes not only in religion and philosophy, but also in art and literature. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring W ill be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.8

There is a real sense in Eliot’s poem of seeking, and when we have sought and found we are able to recognise the moment of fulfilment because what has been found is somehow familiar to us: It was known to us before, but was not revealed or clarified. Eliot had a great love of Dante. In his Purgatorio, after a long and arduous ascent of the mountain of spiritual cleansing, Dante crosses the waters of the stream of L ethe, and experiences the forgetfulness of all wrongs, and the remembering of all that is good.9 In these examples, and in this mode, which we may call poetic, the word somehow achieves a synthesis of form and meaning. It directly communicates in the imagination the eidos that is the true image of the signified, and moreover can only do so when the recipient is in a mode to receive it. Its dependence upon rational construction has been

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reduced. As such the poetic word is less likely to be misinterpreted. Either it is understood, or it is not. Its transformation has already been effected by the peculiar alchemy of art. Secondly, with words we see the play of the manifest and un-manifest that is implicit in the use of language. Before the thing is brought to mind by the word, there can be no doubt that it must have existed already, not as a ‘transcendental signified’, but as a phenomenon out-with immediate consciousness. There is a bringing into consciousness, a bringing into light (and life), of the thing by the word. This principle is also fundamental to knowledge, as even the most mundane fact exists before it becomes known: knowing is an act of discovery, not invention. And that something exists before it is known, and can be known and subsequently forgotten but still exist, carries the metaphysical implication of the temporal and the eternal. In these respects the utterance of the word brings into being the thing it represents, vivifies it, by presenting it to human consciousness.10 At the same time it is an uncovering of the truth that is already known, a reminder of what actually exists in truth – an agent for aletheia, bringing forth, invoking, that which was hidden. Thus being and truth become synonymous. Through the logos of painting, the artist brings into the light a form that exists in shadow. He uncovers a truth – he makes something that is true to the form that asks to be brought into being. Again, the process of making the artwork is an evolution of being, often dictated by its own progress. And this is why others can appreciate the completed work – because they recognise that it seems the artist had to use that particular line, that particular colour, shape, and composition. As the writer finds the word, the crucial word, the only word that will do, so the artist finds the right form, dictated also by the progress of the work itself. This is the true craft of art – not how it is made, but the bringing into being of something in the way that it has to be.11 This is the manner in which the Logos of art – aesthetics – works, or you might say Logos works through art. And it does so by logos, by the word, the form, by uncovering or revealing that which has to be revealed in the particular way that is commensurate with itself. Where these two aspects of knowledge converge, the uncovering and the making manifest, we recognise two aspects of phenomenology implicit in the Greek phainomena – ‘the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to light. Sometimes the Greeks simply identified this with ta onta (beings).’12 The metaphysics that govern western philosophy, and

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also cognitive thought, language and many other things, are also implicit in the logos, or account of phenomenology. The problem is that even when phenomena are reduced to subjectivity, the beings that are ‘brought into light’ by implication must exist somewhere else before they become apparent or known. Heidegger tried to emphasise logos not as reason or account, but as a ‘making clear’13 within his discourse, and to question the meaning of Being rather than assuming it as a static known entity in time. But even in Heidegger’s discourse, the mystery of subjectivity remains, as does the separation of logos from Logos. PART IV. THE LIVING WORD

To say, as I did earlier, that the un-manifest is made manifest by the word is to subscribe to the Platonic theory of Ideas; that is that these Ideas or Ideals exist in a transcendent world which remains unseen, and can never be perfectly manifested. And this principle of metaphysics lies at the core of the way we think. We have already seen how the poetic word can in a sense bring into being that which is signified. Therefore it is an essentially creative act. Furthermore it is an act that takes place in time. The word as a creativeact-taking-place-in-time, itself transcends the static notion of the Idea. This act of creation is in tune with an evolving principle of life. The word depends for its resonance upon the past of associations but somehow escapes the past by re-creating it in the present. As soon as the poetic word is uttered a phenomenal world is created in the consciousness of the percipient. Moreover, the word is born afresh each time it is used, never having exactly the same meaning as before, acquiring and disseminating new associations, transforming itself, carrying new life. Having these attributes it can be not only analogous with life itself, but almost synonymous with it And in a sense it (the word) is life and gives life.14

And in this mode the word, in painting or poetry, takes on a radiance that is its own essence. It is direct communication, not as the repetition or representation of a concept, or a concretion lacking in life and movement, but as a living, creative act occurring in time in the consciousness of the percipient, at one with itself at the time it is uttered, leaving no trace or vestige behind as mere logos or repetition. When this happens it is because there is a synchronism between the imagination of the

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recipient and what is being signified by the word – the two become one. Similarly, there is a merging of the knower and the known. Time and space drop away, and the signified has its existence as truth, and its truth as existence. ... when distance, and even the distinction of knowledge – be it only the distinction between knowing and the known in the consciousness of self – disappears without leaving any traces.15

In this sense the word is no longer simply representative. Neither is it the sum of its constructive elements, syntactic, descriptive or phonic. It is something altogether different, completely new and yet somehow familiar. As such it belongs to Alterity. PART V. ALTERITY – ( BEYOND THE) SPACES OF BEING

If we look at a painting by Vermeer, we can see in operation logos as art indirectly articulating the ineffability of Being. In this instance Alterity is

Johannes Vermeer: T he Music L esson. The Royal Collection © 2005, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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manifested, as that which belongs to Logos but cannot be expressed as logos. In the light and calm of Vermeer’s interiors, an ontological discourse is eternally taking place. The pictorial narrative is uncertain, enigmatic, and the painting as mute and silent as the life of the painter Vermeer. The artifice of composition, colour, the logos of art, has been skilfully crafted to achieve – stillness. Optical clarity both sharpens and blurs the edges of being. The images have travelled through time, losing something of their temporal context but nothing of their immediacy. This immediacy is paradoxically a transcendental phenomenon, transcending the very process of time – by fixing a moment in space, and traversing the gaze of centuries. The images are not immediate in the same way as, say, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. There is a blurring, a softness, that removes them from the world of sense that they so faithfully appear to represent. This shift of focus displaces attention from the narrative of the picture, to beyond the depiction of space, and the moment in time. If this is indeed the case, then what are we looking at in Vermeer’s clear and tranquil light? Perhaps we are seeing light itself, which silently pervades all, but is manifested only by the objects it illumines – making visible the invisible, and bringing a world into being. The same light illumines our own world; and the light of Being that silently and invisibly permeates Vermeer’s world, illumines our consciousness. Gray’s Art School, T he Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, U.K. NOTES 1 Paraphrasing, from T he American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton & Mifflin, 2000. 2 Ibid. 3 Sir Laurens Van der Post, A Walk with a W hite Bushman, in conversation with J-M. Pottiez (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 268. 4 J. Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p.136. 5 Cf. J. Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 20. 6 Plato, ‘‘Cratylus’’, T he Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), p. 113. 7 Cf. Plato, T he Republic, 2 vols., trans. P. Shorey (London: William Heinemann, 1956), Vol. II, pp. 419–433. 8 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Little Gidding’’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974). 9 In Dante’s Purgatorio crossing the waters of L ethe brings a blessed forgetfulness, and a blessed remembrance. Whilst reading an account of purgatory or any other experience can

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never be the same thing as experiencing it oneself, somehow the imagination is able to transport the reader into what might be described as a simulation of the experience. There is a point in reading at which the words and the page melt before the eyes, and the reader is involved with images. 10 This is close to Berkeley’s philosophy concerning subjectivity. 11 It is interesting to bear in mind the original meaning of the word craft, from the AngloSaxon kraft, meaning power. The act of creation is a power indeed. 12 M. Heidegger, Basic W ritings, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 73. 13 M. Heidegger, ibid., p. 78, ‘Logos lets something be seen (phainesthai), namely what is being talked about ... ‘ 14 Van der Post, op. cit., p. 268. 15 E. Levinas, Alterity and T ranscendence (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 9.

JAMES P. WERNER

LOGOS, RATIONALE AND DESIRE IN CONVERGENT ART PRACTICES

Logos is defined in a number of different ways, depending on which school of thought it stems from. Dictionary.com tells us that in preSocratic philosophy, it was the principle governing human reasoning about the cosmos. It has also been described as the topics of rational argument or the arguments themselves. In Judaism the logos pertains to divine wisdom, and in Christianity too the word of God is itself captured in translation through human reason. In the Stoic sense of the word it is the source of all activity and generation and is the power of reason residing in the human soul. When we question the logos of phenomenology, are we asking if phenomenology can construct a definitive wisdom, as religions suggest they have done? Or are we suggesting that logos and reason are synonymous and reason is inherent within the human soul as in the Stoic definition? Taking all this into consideration, Logos seems to be a form of understanding that is presentable within the confines of human reason. Yet the definitions also suggest that the nature of the logos always escapes a definitive human rationale. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggests that the unexplainable will always be an indefinable ontological dilemma. He labelled this the conflict of the ‘Big Other’. In one sense it is the power of social existence that forces us to conform to cultural rules of humanity. This force within humanity subjects us to never being in total control of the effects of our actions. In other words, we can never be totally accountable for what we do because we are always influenced somehow by something that constructs our humanity and the society we are forced to be part of – the unexplainable presence of forces outside the sphere of human sense and understanding. Once recognized, human nature tends to categorize this unexplainable, uncontrollable concept about humanity within other institutions, i.e. religion, mythology, and in the Adornoian sense, its complete degradation through the systems of instrumental rationality. In noticing the ‘Big Other’, we strive to alienate ourselves from it. Eventually society becomes separated entirely from its concept by way of its externalization. In the past, societies held strongly to religious beliefs and tamed the need for rationale, quite happy to accept a divine logos as explanation. But since the introduction and advancement of science and especially a 79 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 79–90. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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social system of productivity, religious ideology has fallen by the wayside. The inherent value of the object has become a superior focus. When an individual is able to grasp the concept of the ‘Great Other’, its inconsistency in the eyes of rationality forces them to alienate themself from it and eventually separate entirely from its concept, replacing its concept with fantasy.1 This fantasy is accounted for by modern society in the superior value of objects. Phenomenological research can provide no true/false answers, no definitive logos that fits within the boundaries of an ‘enlightened’ mind. In order to do so, phenomenology must abide by the rules inflicted by the governing conceptual etiquette of reason, and thus cannot fully live up to exposing that which resides outside of reason. By the definitions of logos, a logos of phenomenology is a paradigm through rationality. A number of theorists account for this dilemma. One is Lacan and he has offered an explanation for the unexplainable as I have just mentioned. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the body and mind work as partners. The evidence of the perceived thing lies in its concreteness and our physical relationship to it. In this experience we experience a truth real to our senses, not just the mind. But we are always limited to the constructs of human perception, our empirical phenomenological relationship to things. Reason must be bound by this final truth. There is no chance for noumena understanding, outside of ourselves. Thirdly, the concept of the ‘unpresentable’ is outlined to us by Jean Franc¸ois Lyotard. He attests to an unexplained, unpresentable essence that escapes explanation through our lack of adequate presentation. However, Lyotard suggests that an aesthetic coherence exists within artworks that transcend the values of verbal explanation. Art provides a gap filler, so to speak, between reason and the unpresentable allowing us to approach the essence of a logos that constantly attempts to evade presentation and complete explanation. ‘‘Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least ... they must be assigned the task of healing it.’’2 Adorno suggests that society would die without the happiness that art objects bring to it. Martin Heidegger proposed a future of technological domination with the strong possibility of destruction via technological creativity gone array. He attested that art could provide the insight to what he called aesthetic revealing, the nemesis of a technological revealing. Through art, humanity could see through the wavering path of technology.

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I

What is the essential, internal event that art brings forth in us; the defining essence of art that makes it so powerful that theorists claim it can shift the tides of culture and keep society from dying? Convergent art – the merging of scientific methods and art – raises much debate in a culture torn between new technological means of creativity, and traditional art practices. Convergence, by definition, includes any type of scientific inquiry or method used in conjunction with art. Therefore the term convergence encompasses a broad range of artistic representation that can be categorized as such. A common misconception is that convergent artwork is limited to graphical, digital forms of presentation. This is partly due to the idea that all art that uses convergent media is convergent art. However, by definition convergent art expands far beyond the limitation of digitally reproduced representations and encompasses any art that mixes with science. Recently the focus on audience interaction within art has increased as a result of the rise of interactive digital forums. Computer simulation has evolved into a medium that allows a narrative to exist between the audience and the work. Interactivity in computer generated art is becoming more temporally immersive and, as a result, audiences are requiring more physical interaction to take place within the framework of digital representation. While this includes everything digital, it is not limited to it. Digital representation has influenced the expansion of convergence allowing interaction within art to take place both inside graphical forums and out. In this essay I discuss the interpretation of convergent practices in art and the conflicting rationale and desire that drives society to pursue them. The vague requirements for categorizing art as convergent allows countless approaches to be accepted; therefore, the possibilities of classifying contemporary art as convergent becomes incessant and begins to encompass the majority of art that oversteps the use of classical art techniques. I see this as quite a healthy situation given that the concept of convergence as a genre is moderately new and needs proper defining. Ultimately, it is the institutional development of our society that gives birth to specific genres in art, as well as overall cultural desires that pave its way. But what is it that we require from contemporary art that forces it to grow from convergent standards? Is it that a scientific modernity lacks the flavour of an aesthetic phenomenon and needs a bit of decoration? Or is it that the value of art decreases in an industrialized consumer-

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ist society? Adorno points out that the arts and entertainment of the past are today integrated and reshaped by an industry driven society. This reduction allows those who unknowingly suffer in a life of mere commodity to easily classify art and its purposes as a lesser necessity in the processes of materiality. Art as goods encourages a vested interest in art. We have a need to rationalize everything within the confines of human understanding. In a sense, this suggests we will never cease to contextualize everything. Part of the purpose of scientific inquiry is to further our knowledge for the betterment of society and man. And yet it cannot be denied that scientific discovery seems to perpetuate itself. There is a danger in a commodity-driven society integrating science and art, especially in the sense of digital reproduction as art.3 In paying too much attention to the technological means by which an artwork comes into being, we begin to falter in evaluating the purpose of the work itself. This parallels ‘‘... with the general direction of society towards an apotheosis of means, production for the sake of production ...’’4 Art as commodity is precisely this. And contemporary art does everything in its power to escape it. Art responds to the loss of its self evidence not simply by concrete transformations, of its procedures, and comportments, but by trying to pull itself free from its own concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art.5

Applying this concept to convergence, we are stuck with a very serious question: are we witnessing the beginning of a blend of science and art that comes from modernity’s need for a decorative aesthetic within its techno totality? Recently a colleague of mine suggested another frightening alternative: Do artists go out of their way to try to justify themselves in the wake of a scientific totality? Have contemporary convergent practices come about in an attempt to raise the bar, so to speak – for art to find a way to better justify itself amongst a scientific rationale that seems to not need any supportive debate for its justification? By raising this question, do we not in a way validate a certain ingrained acceptance of instrumental reasoning as a supreme logos, and admit to an aesthetic alienation of art from this limited scientific totality? Maybe not completely, but partially, for contemporary society finds much value in scientific truth and, ‘‘art ends as it becomes progressively further distanced from thought and moral goodness, as it loses its capacity to speak the truth concerning our most fundamental categorical engagements and commitments.’’6 One would think that art must incorporate scientific truth because this type

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of truth most certainly is a fundamental engagement of modern society. Therefore, suggesting that convergence is a way for art to desperately hold onto a piece of society’s truth would be logical, in a very instrumental manner. But suggesting we are so close to aesthetic alienation that art needs to take such desperate measures, negates the notion that the society that has developed the artwork is not responsible for the unpresentable, transcendent elements communicated through the work. Convergence, in contemporary art, means art plus science. Does this mean the concepts presented through a work of art, or does it mean the materials used to create a work of art, or both? If we say both, we can pretty much include anything in the category of convergence. If we say just the materials, would that make art that merely implies scientific influence convergent art, though it is made of no ‘‘advanced’’ technological materials? Let’s examine some artists and see how their work applies to convergence: Casey Reas and Ben Fry have created a program called Processing that allows anyone with limited programming skills to learn computer code that will help them create art pieces in the form of programs that are self perpetuating and/or interactive.7 Many of the interactive, digital artworks created through the processing software suggest an inherent mimetic quality within digital entities. What I find interesting is that computer generation, something that is at the opposite end of naturalism, seems to constantly try to interpret its relationship to the organic. There is no doubt that this type of development in art is convergence in action both by material and in conception. Making virtual worlds more naturalistic and realistic has become an artistic endeavor. Artist Char Davies’ virtual reality piece Osmos8 allows touch, breath and sound to become factors in the virtual reality experience, attempting to make virtuality as real as possible. Artist Paul Sermon takes the next step to make digital simulation immersive in an even more real sense by creating telepresent environments for individuals to interact with each other via live image projection.9 Sermon mixes the science of digital video with the notions of physical presence and spatial interaction. In the case of digital representation being a result of scientific inquiry, immersive digital environments such as those I have described do fall under the general notion of convergent art practices. They capitalize on the experience of illusion and the human desire to escape physical presence and tangible experiences. When we begin to question artwork that holds heavy evidence of scientific influence, but no inherent material that would be classified as

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modern technology, then classifying it as part of a convergent movement of some sort is more difficult. Cold Dark Matter by Cornelia Parker,10 for example, would fall into this category. In Cold Dark Matter, Parker first exhibited a small shed in a gallery. The shed was then removed, blown up with explosives, and the pieces reassembled to hang in mid air in the gallery, forming a generic box shape with the destroyed elements. By content alone this work does not fall under the classification of convergence. But the process of creation suggests otherwise, and the work does have a very atomic implication, holding a heavy scientific influence in its narrative presence. In the installation piece 20:50, artist Richard Wilson11 filled an entire room with engine oil making an almost seamless reflection of its surrounding the viewer. Standing in the center of the room, one became immersed in a visual illusion that was at the same time very real. In 2003 Olafur Eliasson exhibited T he Weather Project at the Tate Modern in Britain.12 Eliasson simulated the effects of the sun by installing a massive sun-like sphere in the entrance hanger of the Tate Modern (the space was an old wind tunnel). Does the use of mechanical works to simulate the experience of weather apply to convergence by material or by conception? I challenge the progressive purposes of digital experiences in art. Digitally presented works will always lack a certain truth content that is inherent in the a priori value of physical presence. As a result, artists have begun to recognize and counter this type of immersive simulated experience within the confines of real space. Installations such as Wilson and Eliasson’s are immersive in the sense that they are invitingly illusionary yet still present a setting for the audience that is anthropomorphically challenging and mimetically real. They emerge from the ashes of reality that lie in the fire of a simulated digital totality. They can be held in esteem with other forms of convergence in the sense that they are the response to a convergent digital methodology that tries to simulate reality. They are paving the highway for a future aesthetic rebirth born from its own technological self. Through reflection on the ‘‘virtuality’’ of the real situation in immersive installations like these, we touch the essence of escaping reality by realizing the tenuous nature of it through our empirical and transcendent understanding of the situation. Though we can never really understand it from the noumena perspective, the situation itself makes us more aware of the fact that we cannot. It gives us a closer glimpse towards an ontological perspective we can never reach, presenting the unpresentable, touching the equivalent of the Lacanian notion of jouissance – that feeling of ecstasy that is felt when we act out or witness

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something that momentarily fulfils, or rather approaches the fulfilment of an unattainable inner desire. II

Post-aesthetic theories would have us value art without aesthetic critique. According to post-aesthetic theories, art works must be understood in nonaesthetic terms because the very idea of aesthetics is based upon a series of exclusions which themselves assume a conception of truth in terms of its isolation from normative and aesthetic values. ... Further, just as post-positivism sees science and its object as historical constructions, so post-aesthetic theories of art attempt to interrogate art historically, asking not what art is, a-historically, but what it has been and become.13

From this standpoint, if we are to judge art as resulting from historical construction, convergent art is harmonious with the rest of art history in that it is congruent with the very focuses – drives and intuitions – of the present day scientific rationale it is born from. Therefore, one may argue that convergence is just another step in the constructs of that unending need to rationalize art through science. Adorno and Horkhimer developed their Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that the enlightened instrumental state of society today is just as much a mythological perspective of existence as it had been prior to the development of scientific rationale. To view ourselves as the lords of our perceptive reality gives us the freedom to judge within the framework of a system created on perceptual values that can be fully justified from a standpoint of instrumental thought. As a result, we categorize every type of physical representation into a system of justification that lies within truth and falsity. Aesthetic awareness lies by the wayside, waiting for its rational explanation through a scientific system. This value system is embedded in our constructive thought processes. We must always consider our unconscious efforts to give value and rationale to anything. It is a fact that art transforms according to the directions of the society creating it, obviously, but at the same time it rejects reflective evaluation while suggesting some sort of formal foundation within itself. Art strives to lose its hold on what keeps it in tune with the society it hopes to influence; therefore, when we talk of an artwork that purports to escape the confines of explanation, the work must simultaneously hold a grounding relationship to the aesthetic beauty instilled by modernity’s aesthetic appeal. This dual requirement of contemporary art is a result of the salvo of moral constitution and the distinction of a truth vs. falsity being at the two

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extremes of institutional understanding. In the face of a true/false system, art has been forced to both raise its standards (in the eyes of this system) to accommodate the system’s critics, while at the same time lower them in the system’s eyes in order to transcend complete presentability to this system, so as to allow it to contain its worth as an aesthetic phenomenon. As we begin to glimpse a notion of phenomenological discovery through artwork, instrumental rationality ingrained in our way of thought will always leak through in the explanation of it. It is unavoidable, if not in material representation, then in the examination of the intentionality of the work. Those that attempt to break from this still hold the essence of it within the framework of their results. In 1965 when Bridget Riley exhibited her work Descending in New York, it was critiqued as having been a piece of technical illustration and mathematical exercise.14 Today it could have fallen within the category of convergent work. But Riley detested any insinuation that her work was influenced by mathematics. Still her work represented these ideas to her audience. On one level art must be self-conscious so as to be recognized. On the other it must not be self-conscious else it falls prey to its own ostracisms. Art and its aesthetic effects must always be judged and justified within the borders of its institutional influences, making it possible only through self-consciousness – exactly what art refuses to accept. What it claims it is lacking is exactly what it must savour to make it what it is. Art’s concrete ideology in contemporary critique questions its possibility. Thus we have a paradox. It rejects reflection, which must assume a foundation, yet it has no solid foundation because it is constantly shifting with society. Thrown back on itself, enlightenment distances itself from that guileless objectivity that it would like to achieve; that is why, under the compulsion of its own ideal of truth, it is conjoined with the pressure to hold on to what it has condemned in the name of truth.15

If rationale is a priori to us, then so is the need to escape its explanation. The nature of society is to represent its own desires through artistic outlets in hopes of transcending them outside of its own presentable terms. Adorno argues that aesthetics has fallen prey to the rationale of an obsessive instrumental way of thought. Non-anachronistic aesthetics decides how art develops, destroying its essence as art transcendent. Is this what we are witnessing with the influx of convergent digital practices in art? Is it that art is being swallowed into a technological reality? One thing we should be aware of is that the revealing of aesthetics within a technological destiny allows for technology’s own taming. It is exactly in the loss of anachronistic methodology that technology begins

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to tame itself. The ideology of a systematic rationale is the ‘classics’ of the future. By trying to absorb art, it becomes absorbed by art. We can see this in real (tangible) immersive artworks emerging at the same time that digitally immersive works are, likely as a response, as I have suggested. Technology’s own homunculus divergence from mimetic equality becomes the ultimate reversal of fortune. Convergence is brought on by a mentality that needs to grasp onto that which it, at first glance, purports to alienate, in search for a Truth that engages its own rational enterprise partnered with a transcendence of it. This ambiguous concept of convergence merely helps us categorize a way of experiencing this marriage of science and art. One might think it ironic that art finds refuge in something that rejects it. Phenomenologically, however, they are after the same goal, art and rationale. The polarity of the situation is what keeps it alive. Science and especially digital representation is a product of instrumental practices. Therefore, when it crosses the boundary of separation between these modes of thought becoming art, then a logos of science becomes part of a logos of art and allows for the experience of jouissance to be held within the grasp of both communities. Convergence in art is just what its name implies in a much broader sense. It is not just a convergence of the physical practices of science and art, but a convergence of two methods of ontological inquiry. Rationale is ingrained within humanity. Nietzsche saw it as something ingrained in human nature while Adorno saw it as a consequence of the construct of social conditions. Regardless of its origin, it will never entirely cease in the explanation of anything. Part of the aim of art is to escape rational explanation and achieve something that has always been ‘unpresentable’. This will always be impossible. But, what is possible is for art to give form to the notion of what unpresentability is to each of us. It will most definitely be different for all of us, but it will be universally communicable within the forms of sensation and rational understanding, which we all share. And when the presentable touches the unpresentable, we achieve a momentary fulfillment of an unspeakable logos, just enough to perpetuate our search for it. Convergent art, in whatever forms it presents itself, links the mythology of a totality in truth and falsity with the mythological idea that we will one day reach a transcendent unpresentability. The merging of science and art is in itself a type of fantasy idea. Art has long used mediums outside of classical methods. In a way we could say that art has always been convergent, if we judge it by material alone. But it has not. And it has not because we determine

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convergence as such in the light of a modern technological perspective. It’s a melting pot of creativity that is contextualized and categorized. Without this conformity, it would land outside any graspable conceptual explanation. In a sense we must bring it down to earth in order to transcend an explanation for it.

III

Instrumental rationale finds its fulfilment in grounding art’s transcendent attempts. Art finds its fulfilment in stretching just outside explanation. Convergence, by definition, accommodates both. In the end it doesn’t matter what you categorize the resulting artwork as: convergence, immersive art, digital installation ... whatever. What’s important is that the work allows for a fulfilment of the cultural need to perpetuate its ontological search. The desire to understand the limits of human understanding and see outside their constraints can be seen as the driving force behind both art and science. Both forms of inquiry stand on the particular common ground of attaining moments of jouissance. Jouissance is the ontological aberration, the disturbed balance which accounts for the passage from Nothing to Something; it designates the minimal contraction which provides the density of the subject’s reality.16

It is the momentary fulfilment of a desire that can never be fully fulfilled. As Zizek puts it, that notorious Heimlich which is simultaneously the most unheimliche, always-already here and precisely as such, is alwaysalready lost.17 If we are to accept Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological teachings whereby perception acts through a joint packet of the body and mind, then phenomenological and ontological questioning will always lack a noumena perspective – to see ourselves from outside the constraints of our own conscious and sensational relationships. If we accept this, being able to conceive of it in itself helps to negate its own possibility. Therefore, a final logos in phenomenological inquiry is unattainable, and each momentary fulfilment of our questions towards that logos becomes precisely this jouissance. In Lacanian terms, this is driven by our recognition of the ‘Great Other’ and the rationale that disguises it. Adorno once argued that artworks produce their own transcendence and aren’t necessarily the platform for transcendental presentation; art and transcendence do not belong together.18 Art touches on transcendence because the work itself is blinded by the reality which it is part of, a reality of rationality.

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‘‘Only through fetishism, the blinking of the artwork vis-a`-vis the reality of which it is part, does the work transcend the spell of the reality principle as something spiritual.’’19 On this point, art alone cannot achieve reflection without grounding it in commentary and critique making the birth of a desire for explanation through artistic semblance equivalent to the human nature that is jouissance. Only through the destruction of semblance through rational critique does it survive to be transcended again. In the critique of convergence in art, the link between science and art allows for the initial bridge of instrumental vs. expressive thinking to be partially built. The concept that convergence conveys is that technology and art need each other to provide a language of understanding to question the rationale of technology and to bring art to its doorstep. Never mind the tools employed to make this happen, rather, qualify all contemporary presentation that touches on the notion of an ontological aberration. This is what provides temporary fulfilment in all institutional questioning, and perpetuates our search for the ever evading, unpresentable, logos. When Lacan was asked the question ‘What am I’, he answered: ‘‘I’’ am in a place from which a voice is heard clamouring, ‘‘The universe is a defect in the unity of non-being.’’ And not without reason, for by protecting itself this place makes being itself languish. This place is called Jouissance, and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain.20

T eachers College, Columbia University, New York NOTES 1 Zizek, Slavoj, T he Plague of Fantasies (Verso, 1997). 2 Lyotard, Jean Fransois, T he Post Modern Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 73. 3 Ibid., p. ix. 4 Adorno, Theodore W., Aesthetic T heory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 342. 5 Ibid., p. 16. 6 Bernstein, J. M., T he Fate of Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 4. 7 Fry, Ben and Casey Reas, httv.i/processing.org 8 Davies, Char, Changing Space: V irtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being: Multimedia: From Wagner to V irtual Reality (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). 9 Sermon, Paul, T he Emergence of User- and Performer-Determined Narratives in a T elematic Environment (Sheffield Hallam University: Presented at Pixel Raiders 2, 2004).

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10 Parker, Cornelia, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded V iew (Tate. Presented by the Patrons of New Art (Special Purchase Fund) through the Tate Gallery Foundation, 1995). http://www.tate.org.uk/colddarkmatter/ 11 Wilson, Richard, 20:50 (London: The Saatchi Gallery, 2000), http://www.saatchigallery.co.ukigallery/keyworks.htm 12 Eliasson, Olafur, T he Weather Project (London: The Tate Modern Gallery, 2003). 13 Ibid. (Bernstein, J. M.). 14 Riley, Bridget, Perception is T he Medium (New York Art News, 1965). 15 Ibid. (Adorno), p. 338. 16 Ibid., p. 80. 17 Ibid. (Zizek), p. 49. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. (Adorno), p. 78. 20 Ibid. (Zizek), p. 48.

SECTION II THE WORK OF ART AND ITS EXPERIENTIAL RADIUS

A dinner in the refectory of Wadham College

ELGA FREIBERGA

PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE WORK OF ART: R. INGARDEN, M. DUFRENNE, P. RICOEUR

The work of art, its analysis, its ontology has long been the subject matter of the aesthetics of modernism. This theme has attracted diverse authors – V. Benjamin, T. Adorno, M. Heidegger, etc. The significance of art in the context of aesthetics was actualized as early as in XIXth-century German philosophy. And taking into account the most pronounced shortcoming of art, namely, its objectively empirical character, as stated by G. W. Hegel, the main attention was focused on the work of art. In phenomenological aesthetics also the theme of the work of art is sharply delineated. The end of the previous century was noted for a skeptical attitude towards the fundamentalism of the work of art. The question asked was whether it was feasible to justify a work of art, its value and interpretation with the help of traditional aesthetic notions. Much was done in this respect also by thinkers of the phenomenological trend, e.g., M. Heidegger. With regard to the question about the origin of the work of art he intertwines the two existing tendencies in the analysis of the work of art – creativity and objectivism – without opposing one to the other, but accentuating their humanity. The first aspect of the question is connected with the process of the self-constitution of art as the result of which the work of art loses its character of being attached to reality, severing relations with the mimetic or imitative tradition that has prevailed on the level of theoretical ideas in West European art since Renaissance times.1 The turning point in the analysis of the work of art is connected with phenomenological aesthetics asking the question about the ontology of the work of art. Contemporary aesthetics often stresses the importance of the visual picture or the way one sees it, pointing out that historically the picture has been subordinated to the literary text or, to be more exact, the poetical text, in Aristotle’s words. Thus, the emancipation of the visual picture, casting away its ‘‘literary interpretation,’’ receives additional emphasis. In my opinion, this sort of opposition is a bit belated and is not synchronous with a world actively dominated by the image/figure culture. That is why it is worthwhile to return to the experi93 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 93–102. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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ential interpretation of the literary work analyzing the contributions to this sphere by the theorist of phenomenological aesthetics Roman Ingarden, the French aesthetician M. Dufrenne and the hermeneutist Paul Ricoeur. The question to be asked in this context would be: Is the interpretation of language and literature connected with the work of art? Or are the relationships of the work of art within the framework of phenomenological aesthetics which anticipate the two notions to be used as interrelated, or as a whole, thus foreseeing the world constitution phenomenon. That is what M. Dufrenne wrote, underscoring the fact that in any work of art the world that is being represented never contains within it the greater part of what the author has said. It is best to be seen in non-representative art forms: ‘‘Art in stone and sound art do not denote anything. When they are present, their task is only to introduce the expressed world’’.2 The first one to ask the question about literary work as a work of art is the founder of the theory of phenomenological aesthetics R. Ingarden (1893–1970).3 The prevailing problems in his aesthetics are not so much the description of the empirical experience of the work of art as the structure of the work of art and its connection with aesthetic experience. He unequivocally calls literature art, advancing the thesis that literary work has an intersubjective ‘‘life’’ and for this reason it is not to be regarded as separate subjective imagination.4 Ingarden accentuates literary work being embedded in history, indicating that it cannot possess idealness as, for instance, mathematical objects. The ‘‘life’’ of literary work is connected with its birth, which is the starting point of its history.5 It should be pointed out that Ingarden’s views have influenced also the French aesthetician M. Dufrenne. R. Ingarden’s works have been thoroughly and meticulously studied by the soul of this forum A.-T. Tymieniecka.6 Literary work, the way Ingarden views it, is an intersubjective intentional object.7 As an object it has a representative degree of liberty that finds expression in indetermination or indefiniteness that shapes the arrangement of the literary work. As an object it has its birth originating in the author’s acts of consciousness and due to writing or some other (e.g. acoustic) means it can be reanimated in the reader’s consciousness. The work itself does not duplicate the psychology either of the author or of the reader because the history of the work is beyond the source of origin or the author’s psychology just as it is beyond the psychology of an individual reader. The existence of the work of art transcends any separate moment of experience, flowing into being and continuing its life

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in multitudinous acts of consciousness. Thus, in Ingarden’s opinion, the literary work is not characterized by a previous givenness, which is an essential acknowledgement in the context of phenomenological experience. Ingarden stresses that the work has an ontically heteronomous way of existence because it is autonomous and exists of itself rather than being linked only to the author’s or reader’s consciousness. Being simultaneously linked to the author and the reader it is transcendental in relation to the consciousness of both, consciousness constituting itself as experience.8 In the analysis of literary work Ingarden compares the relationships of indeterminism with what he calls the schematic construction of the work. This stance allows better understanding of the boundaries of the literary work. Literary work as a represented object is ‘‘schematic’’. It consists of four distinct layers possessing ‘‘value qualities’’ of their own: 1) sounds of language; 2) units of meaning/sense; 3) schematic aspects (due to which the states of events can be perceived) and 4) the represented objectivations. It does not mean that the reader has to perceive the layers in gradual succession, he can fill them in gradually and differently; the layers are not strictly determined. Ingarden considered that the mutual combinations of layers form a totality that provides for a polyphonic harmony of value qualities.9 As a represented object literary work can be characterized by a final number of characteristic features which, in turn, does not mean that the boundaries are strictly fixed: they are supplemented by a potentially unlimited number of other indeterminate features. In explaining these relations it is essential to mention Ingarden’s allusion to the indeterminations included in the German writer T. Mann’s long story ‘‘Tristan’’. In this story about the aesthetic presentation of death and the crash of this aestheticism within the framework of a Wagner-style love motive Ingarden writes that ‘‘... death details showing whether it is fast or slow, painful or otherwise are those points of indetermination in Mann’s story, which are filled in by the reader ... this filling in has nothing to do with the artistic form of the story ... However, leaving the details unfilled provides for greater expressiveness. ... Once the details are easily foreseen, the artistic impression can be destroyed’’.10 The presence of indetermination ‘‘unshackles’’ the work, makes it ‘‘more independent’’ of the reader’s personal experience. Work of a greater degree of indetermination is multidimensional to a greater degree; it does not lead the reader in the only possible direction, but allows freedom of movement within the framework of the literary work. Ingarden detaches the way the reader concretizes the work from the work itself. The justification of the notion of detach-

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ment is based on the mutually interconnected but of necessity differing from each other ‘‘aesthetic object’’ produced by the reader and ‘‘artistic object’’ created by the author. This distinction remains valid not only because of the readers’ differing experiences or the degree of indetermination inherent in the work, but also because acquaintance with the work proceeds in time (is of a temporal character). That allows Ingarden to conclude that the work can never be perceived as a whole, but always only partially.11 The work of art, according to Ingarden, is ontological and he asks the question whether it is feasible for us to get to know it. Ingarden’s analysis of the work of art that especially in his early period is characterized by great precision and a wish to achieve this precision is closely connected with the characteristic feature of phenomenological philosophy, namely, linking presentation of objects with experience. Ingarden’s ontological analysis of the work of art is achieved by analyzing the most essential meanings of experience to be found in the literary work. In his later period, in ‘‘The Ontology of the Work of Art’’ (1961) Ingarden turns also to musical, pictorial and architectural work. The character of ontology within the framework of the work of art is regarded by Ingarden as a complicated problem irreducible to either a physical object, or to an ideal sphere of meanings, but arising as purely intentional formations, which substantially extend human life’s values.12 Of course, one can say that Ingarden’s theory does not transcend the boundaries of use of classical aesthetic notions, thus retaining his analysis within the framework of value aesthetics. Values form a definite ideal arrangement that, in Ingarden’s opinion, is immanent in the work of art and serves as the basis for later interpretation. That, according to Ingarden’s critics, delimits the life of the work of art precluding the expression of the unexpected, the provoking, and the up-to-date; and it narrows the history of the work. One of the most active critics of Ingarden, W. Iser (1926) stressed that Ingarden was too particular in restricting the feasible variants of concretization. Iser underscored especially the significance of the ‘‘written’’ and ‘‘unwritten’’ aspects in the text placing in the forefront the readers’ participation in construing meanings which he designated as virtual dimension formed on the basis of the interaction of gaps and indeterminations. Virtual dimension is halfway, as it were, between the reader and the text. The act of reading, according to Iser, is ‘‘filling in gaps’’ and ‘‘compact building’’ that does not arise from following the values embodied in the text. The challenge of the text, as Iser calls the literary work, is to surprise the reader and change his reading habits.

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As the result of this meanings are not formed as determined by the text, but rather as events and activities interacting with the readers’ experiences and sliding out of the controlling framework of the story. The text is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous. It comes into being as a ‘‘self-regulating system’’ where reading intermingles with another, another’s experience that may prove to be changeable depending on different assumptions of readers as to what a work of art is. Iser calls it the experiential paradox because the experience gained while reading ‘‘cannot be perceived as a tangible being that will come to mind independently in the process of reading. It is always guided by the text, but it is not in the text’’.13 That is why reading is not a process of finding, but a process of discovery where you come across surprises, converted meanings and frustration. All of this empowers the text to provoke the reader to reconsider his previously adopted position. Iser concludes that the work of art depragmatizes the conventions and norms of everyday life that lose their instrumental (routine) context man has long ceased to notice.14 Depragmatizing these conventions the work can point to their borders and even cross them critically, reconsidering them. The notions of classical aesthetics erect the borders and retain them paying due respect to the principle of harmony the use of which, according to Iser, is detrimental to Ingarden’s understanding of literary work. By way of justification one must note that accentuating the schematic character of literary work, that he himself calls inner harmony, Ingarden tries to solve the problem of interpretation borderlines that are actualized in the later context of phenomenological aesthetics and discussed by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. It is noteworthy that Ingarden makes use of Husserl’s teaching about intersubjectivity that presupposes the author’s and reader’s mutuality in reading the literary work, assuming that they meet as two subjects that cannot be restricted only to the author’s or the reader’s experience. Unlike Ingarden, Iser depends more on M. Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology rather than on Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the latter indubitably seeing the feasibility of rational interpretation. Analysis of literary work is being developed in hermeneutics that takes root as a critique of phenomenological transcendentalism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy (1889–1976) by posing the problem of language ontology and thus initiating hermeneutic philosophy. Understanding as distinct from cognition is always like overtaking oneself (sich vorweg), as looking forward to explanation that stimulates the event of explanation and presupposes some pre-structure (Vorstruktur) that inaugurates under-

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standing and leads it in a circle. (Sein und Zeit, in ‘‘Understanding and Interpretation’’). Heidegger shows understanding as a reflexive act of experience that is a sketch of understanding totality, as stated by one of the most outstanding hermeneutists Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2001). The Heidegger–Gadamer tradition in philosophy, just as in the interpretation of literary work, views experience as an act of reflection that does not include interpretation. However, experience itself is the keeper of sense totality that is significant also in connection with aesthetic experience singling out experience not as a means of forming a judgement, as is usually accepted in the classical theory, but as a totality whose keeper is man in his act of understanding. Interpretation and language are the central themes in the philosophy of the French phenomenologist and hermeneutist Paul Ricoeur (1913). Ricoeur considers that the task of phenomenology is to turn not so much to the individual consciousness but rather to the cultural phenomena retaining man’s presence and that bring to mind the thesis about phenomenology as philosophy of experience. Cultural objects, according to Ricoeur, are endowed with social and historic existence because ‘‘... cogito can reveal itself only indirectly, while deciphering self-created documents in the process of which reflection can turn into interpretation’’.15 Thus, interpretation, in Ricoeur’s opinion, is ‘‘... mastering our efforts to exist and our wish to ‘be’ by the very means that are the testimony of these efforts and wishes’’.16 In his interpretation theory Ricoeur combines two dimensions: self-understanding of man’s existence that manifests itself as a wish to understand and the world of culture that appears to man as his presence in ‘‘footprints’’, traces, and while separated from man himself shows his objectivations never identifying itself with him. Experience is the combining link that serves as a mediator between the conceptual clarity and the richness of imagination. Ricoeur notes that hermeneutics is a compound discourse requiring both clarity and image.17 Interpretation does not address a definite literary, visual or musical work, but rather one’s self-experience of his existence in the world that manifests itself as man’s time. The basis, the soul of interpretation, says Ricoeur, is metaphor: ‘‘Metaphor is alive not only because it reanimates the constituted language. Metaphor is alive due to the fact that it sparks off imagination causing one ‘to think again’ on the conceptual level. This fight for ‘thinking again’ is guided by a vitalizing principle that is the soul of interpretation’’.18 Metaphor is the feasibility of producing a new meaning that stems from semantic insufficiency characterizing any work of art. It can

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be called semantic insufficiency not because the work of art appeared as a principal absurdity but because of the involvement of man’s time in it (we shall still have to return to the meaning of the time dimension). Interpretation is not only speculative in character; it is to be understood as a multistage technique of analysis that envisages definite procedures that could be used in mastering the text or making it one’s own. But interpretation is never a closed process; it is endless and open having no definite aim in view unless one considers it to be the understanding of man’s time. As mentioned before, Ricoeur does not limit himself to one concrete work, unless we consider Bible texts to which he has turned time and again.19 That is why the aim of interpretation is to be a mediator between the world of work and the world of the reader, both having temporal existence and a manner of expression in the form of narrative or story. The story-telling character of history and literature intertwines in the narrative that is made closer to man’s understanding of time existence, existence that makes itself known as the world of culture: ‘‘The difference between history and literature opens the way to amplification of the language game. ... History is a form of true story.’’20 Narrative does not restrict the story to ‘‘only’’ literature or ‘‘only’’ history; it cannot be enclosed within the framework of one literary work. It is rather to be connected with man’s wish to be, and his wish to understand this being, but narrative has the shape of a work of art, it is an artifact; history or historiography is an artifact, too. Narrative is like a bridge between imaginativeness of literature and the facticity of history, between the image and the reference. That makes Ricoeur conclude that man’s time as reproduced time is sooner cosmic than one’s inner, living time.21 To elucidate it Ricoeur introduces the idea of recit, which should not be regarded as a notion, but rather as a figure. Recit corresponds to the English recite (from Latin recitare, in English to recite = to read aloud sth. memorized or prepared, E.F.). But Ricoeur combines in the word the meanings of story telling and interpretation that are not synchronous or simultaneous acts, but turn into ‘‘the time of retelling’’ that, according to Ricoeur, is a ‘‘re-figuration’’ of events of reality, or forming another figure.22 Recit is a combination of literary and historic analysis that initiates the understanding of the text. The text, whether scientific or literary, has allusions to reality, because it expresses something, it contains some story. Units of the text possess a certain autonomy in relation to the author that allow of interpretation which the reader implements as interpretation of his freedom, entering the world

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of the text with his own set of references ready to uncover what the text allows or points to. That makes interpretative acts infinite because certain indefiniteness is inherent in any text, a state of expectancy, as it were, that calls for new texts and keeps up the continuity of tradition, but the question as to the direction into which the tradition moves remains open. The relationship between narrative and experience that always retains a certain distance between man and the world of his own making, is not easily understandable; nevertheless, it manifests itself as the only one artefactual, both referring to reality and independent of it, like an act of creation in which what really exists undergoes a process of transformation: ‘‘What is brought in by the manifestations of narratives is seen in the re-figuration of reality as the double meaning that discloses the scattered dimensions of man’s experience and transforms our way of seeing the world’’.23 Narrative and interpretation of man’s time allow Ricoeur to view the problem of aesthetic experience in a different way. Ricoeur accentuates also the meaning of aesthetic experience without stressing its normative character, but rather the fact that this notion is detached from the political and economic spheres. This detachment frees the work of art from the conditions of its origin discarding usage, validity or commercial value; on the one hand, making it unhistorical, that is inaccessible to sociology and yet, on the other hand, it is the aesthetic experience that makes the work of art transhistorical, namely, makes it accessible to an up-to-date view that lifts it out of the depths of time. It is true that the work of art does not belong only to the history of art that can state precisely the time of its origin, style or genre; but should history be regarded only as a restriction? The notion of trans-historicity suggested by Ricoeur forms the singularity, the uniqueness of the work of art that constitutes its communicative readiness or communicability. It is communicability that hermeneutic philosophy maintains underscores the perceptibility of the work of art, because it does belong to one historical time that is like a restricted line segment in the flow of time but can be related to man’s time thanks to its trans-historicity. The communicability of the work of art does not make its perceptibility completely objective and the work of art itself completely universal. The existence of the work of art is cloven; it exists as an inter-sphere between the author and the public because the work of art according to the mode of its time is not the mode of only one time as visual art or plastic art, but also the mode of two times as music, theatre, literature, history where one is the time of creation and the other – the time of performance. The most complicated structure of

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temporality the work of art possesses, according to Ricoeur, the presence of two times that is especially characteristic of music, is a special mode of re-figuration that joins the trans-temporal with the contemporary or the everlasting with the historical. And that is exactly the task of aesthetic experience – to show the communicability of the work of art that is only possible beyond the limits of historical concreteness: otherwise we shall only repeat in our perception already established meanings following the objective scheme inherent in the work of art or else return to the already mentioned harmonic elements characteristic of classical aesthetics. Production of new meanings that in Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation is connected with the notion of metaphor makes one pass through a number of semantic fields that is also experiencing time acts or the formation of the temporality of the narrative. Joining different events, causes, and coincidences means creating a new meaning that is the most important intrigue.24 Any intrigue is singular, unique – just like a work of art. The problem of the ontology of the work of art is not to be linked only with the theoretical or practical aspect of aesthetics. That is the question that man, following M. Heidegger, asks himself: Is there in his world anything that is stable that goes on? Or else: Is man’s life only fragmentary having no understandable or common values, no heritage or fate? The question about the ontology of the work of art is metaphysical in the most profound, namely, philosophical sense that gives proof to the fact that to think, to feel and to understand is just as important for a human being as it is to breathe.

NOTES 1 For more about it, see: E. Panofsky, Idea. A Concept in Art T heory (New York, 1975). 2 M. Dufrenne, Phe´nome`nologie de l’expe´rience esthe´tique (Paris, 1953), vol. 1., p. 240. 3 R. Ingarden, The Polish phenomenologist and theoretician of aesthetics. The most outstanding works in aesthetics: T he L iterary Work of Art (1931), first published in German: Das literarischen Kunstwerke; and T he Cognition of the L iterary Work of Art (1937) – Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerke. 4 For the concept of imagination used in phenomenological theory, see: J.-P. Sartre, L ’imaginaire. Psychologie phe´nome`nologique de l’imagination (Paris, 1940). 5 R. Ingarden, T he L iterary Work of Art. Northwestern UP, 1973, p. 331. 6 See: A.-T. Tymieniecka, Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Massachusetts, 1976. 7 R. Ingarden, T he Cognition of the L iterary Work of Art, p. 253. 8 R. Ingarden, T he L iterary Work of Art, p. 334. 9 Ibid., p. 369.

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10 R. Ingarden, T he Cognition of the L iterary Work of Art, p. 253. 11 R. Ingarden, T he L iterary Work of Art, p. 334. 12 R. Ingarden, Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst. Tu¨bingen, 1962, S. 253. 13 W. Iser, T he Act of Reading: A T heory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore UP, 1978), p. 168. 14 Ibid., p. 181. 15 T he Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. by Ch. Regan and D. Stewart (New York, 1978), p. 102. 16 Ibid., p. 99. 17 P. Ricoeur, L a me´taphore vivre (Paris, 1975), p. 278. 18 Ibid., p. 279. 19 One of the last works on the theme is L ’Herme´neutique Biblique (Paris, 2000). 20 P. Ricoeur, T emps et re´cit (Paris, 1983), vol. 1, p. 215. 21 Ibid., pp. 228–229. 22 P. Ricoeur, T emps et re´cit (Paris, 1984), vol. II, p. 279. 23 P. Ricoeur, Du texte a l’action (Paris, 1995), p. 85. 24 P. Ricoeur, Re´flexion faite (Paris, 1995), pp. 73–74

DAVID BRUBAKER

PAINTING FROM THE HEART: BEAUTY, MOORE AND MERLEAU-PONTY’S WHOLES OF VISIBILITY

Today, beauty is a fashionable topic for many aestheticians around the world. Elaine Scarry praises beauty for restoring ‘‘one’s own access to an already existing level of aliveness.’’ Arthur Danto deems the disappearance of beauty from the discourse of Logical Positivism as ‘‘a great loss;’’ beauty is necessary for life and an option for art. He adds that the exalted attitude toward beauty held by such writers as G. E. Moore contributes to our esteem for art. Richard Shusterman, who links ethics to living aesthetically, holds that the ‘‘Moorean-Bloomsbury’’ account of beauty, involving organic unities, may be the only version of aesthetic life still viable in our postmodern culture. Jianping Gao, who studies the writings of Chinese literati painters and critics, interprets the beauty of a line in terms of a subjective unity which is achieved in the bodily process of painting, through the interaction of yi (idea), qi (breath, vital force), shi (momentum) and bi (brushwork). In short, there is a research community which affirms the value of the beautiful. This trend is a sign of something new, since the emerging accounts of beauty are non-metaphysical, centered on the body, and occasions for trans-cultural dialogue. Scarry writes, for example, that when we undergo the presence of the beautiful, ‘‘what happens, happens through our bodies.’’ Moore claims that the cognition of a beautiful natural object which exists is more valuable then the same cognition of one that does not. Danto, Shusterman and Gao connect beauty with sensibility, living the body, and an idea from the heart which the hand traces in ink.1 This paper presents initial thoughts on how the process of painting can give individual persons an awareness of the beauty of corporeal wholes of intrinsic value. I assert that the activity of painting can give an awareness of wholes of personal embodiment which offer unity to the self and communion with nature. To show this, I begin with a review of G. E. Moore’s account of beauty in Principia Ethica. Danto and Shusterman are right that parts of Moore’s account may lead to an interpretation of beauty which is viable for us today. Moore links beauty to complex wholes of cognitive elements which belong to states of consciousness of the highest value. In the second section, I join Moore’s discussion of beauty, natural objects and intrinsically valuable wholes together with 103 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 103–111. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh of the body. Moore links beauty to complex wholes of intrinsic worth, while Merleau-Ponty situates visual objects within a whole of visibility lent by the body; so, I suggest that a consciousness of beauty consists of noticing that objects or qualities are embedded within the whole of visibility (or the whole of the visible) which is the painter’s private exemplar of the actuality of the self in nature. (The element of flesh also consists of other wholes that resist definition in objective terms: tactility, aromaticity, audibility.) Finally, in the last section, I affirm that an aesthetics which links the beautiful with the body as one lives it for oneself may cohere with some traditional Chinese descriptions of the process of painting. I claim that the idea of the whole of visibility lent by one’s body could become a resource for interpreting the writings of painters such as Shi Tao. 2. BEAUTY AND WHOLES OF INTRINSIC VALUE

In this section, I outline several features of Moore’s account of beauty: the indefinability of ‘good,’ the relation between the beautiful and what is good, and the role of existing natural objects in the consciousness of intrinsically valuable wholes. Moore describes beauty in relation to an ideal, namely, to some good which is valuable in itself. So, his account of what constitutes an ideal can be articulated first. By ‘ideal’, he means an intrinsically valuable good which becomes a guiding purpose or end for right conduct; he does not define ‘good’ as an ideal which is metaphysically real. He claims that ‘good’ is simple and cannot be defined; and it cannot be defined because it has no parts. Moore qualifies this indefinability: the word ‘good’ cannot be defined by the systematic science of Ethics which provides knowledge as its direct object and ‘‘correct reasons for thinking that this or that is good.’’ By implication, his own account is a systematic Ethics which provides knowledge. ‘Good’ applies to intrinsically valuable wholes which include the cognition of particular natural objects or qualities as parts. But ‘good’ cannot be defined by any particular part of nature (i.e. not by one type of natural object), nor can it be defined by the sum of all such parts, or by the set of all particular natural objects.2 The indefinable aspect of ‘good’ leads Moore to a discussion of a common error in reasoning which he calls the naturalistic fallacy. This is an error which occurs when philosophers begin with the evidence that ‘good’ is attached to some natural object and then move to the conclusion that the natural object defines ‘good.’ An object may of course be good;

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but it does not follow that a single type of natural object can define ‘good’. Moore rejects Naturalistic descriptions of beauty and aesthetic appreciation, because he believes that they inevitably try to define ‘good’ by substituting one of the objects known to the natural sciences. This fallacy does seem unavoidable for any objective aesthetics which seeks to explain beauty by reference to one particular type of natural object, external appearance, or compositional form. However, this fallacy is not an unavoidable trap for the newly emerging voices in aesthetics which seek to explain the beautiful in relation to the body. The naturalistic fallacy can be avoided, as long as we relate ‘beauty’ and ‘good’ to simple wholes of the self ’s own body, without naming any particular natural object or any physical or material properties known to the natural sciences.3 Moore connects the appreciation of art and nature with cognitive elements which combine to make wholes of the greatest good. He claims that ‘‘personal affection and the appreciation of what is valuable in Art or Nature, are good in themselves.’’ The beautiful complex wholes of art or nature are one of the greatest goods of which we are conscious. He goes on to claim that ‘‘the proper appreciation of a beautiful object is a good thing in itself.’’4 It seems that aesthetic appreciation is good in itself, when it includes an appropriate feeling and the seeing of what is beautiful. But a consciousness of a feeling is not sufficient for a consciousness of beauty. For something to be beautiful, we must have an awareness of it as an essential element in some valuable whole which is good in itself. Moore adds that a whole is more valuable if we are conscious of it as including an actually existing thing; and he concludes from this that an intrinsically valuable whole shorn of all consciousness of material qualities would not be a whole which we regard as among the great goods. The consciousness of material qualities is a necessary constituent of any whole – of art or nature – which is intrinsically good. I wish to raise a few questions here concerning Moore’s account. Moore gives us a framework for linking ‘good’ with wholes of intrinsic value. I am persuaded by his claim that the value of such wholes improve when the cognition of an existing natural object is added. But why should the cognition of a natural object increase the intrinsic value of a whole, as it does? The increase in value of a whole cannot be explained by any inclusion of some particular natural object, for Moore states that such objects have no intrinsic value. Yet, it is still the cognition of material objects which permits us to apply ‘good’ ‘better’ or ‘best’ to some whole which is no longer imaginary. Clearly, the intrinsic value of a whole is

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not increased by a consciousness of some particular natural object or condition; for that would lead to the naturalistic fallacy. Similar questions arise with respect to beauty. According to Moore, the awareness of beauty does depend on a consciousness of material qualities as essential elements of a whole to which ‘good’ applies. Moreover, beautiful objects which exist are more valuable than those which are merely in the imagination. If so, then perhaps there is some other aspect of corporeality, independent of the consciousness of natural objects or properties, which adds to the intrinsic value to a whole associated with art or nature? To answer such questions, we need some language that would permit us to talk of corporeality, without naming particular natural objects. We need terms which will give us something to say, when we ask how corporeality contributes to the beauty of intrinsically valuable wholes. I wish to suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh offers language which may be used to explain how beauty arises from a consciousness of corporeal elements essential to an intrinsically valuable whole. His account is helpful, because he writes about the corporeal from the perspective of the painter’s self-embodiment. 3. WHOLES OF FLESH AND THE VALUE OF PAINTING

There is something more that philosophers can say about wholes denoted by the words ‘good’ and ‘beautiful.’ I wish to do one thing in this section. I wish to persuade the reader that Moore’s notion of intrinsically valuable wholes may be reinterpreted in terms of the wholes of flesh which MerleauPonty connects with the painter’s self-embodiment. This amalgam will enable us to add Moore’s talk of beautiful natural objects to MerleauPonty’s talk of wholes of flesh lent by the painter’s own body in the process of painting. Merleau-Ponty does use language which implies the observation of intrinsically valuable wholes of flesh to explain the significance of the process of painting. His words give us a way to explain how a person assigns the word ‘good’ to simple, objectively undefinable, wholes of the flesh of the body. These wholes of flesh are of intrinsic value to the person who possesses and notices them, since they are that by which the person acquires evidence of self-incarnation.5 Merleau-Ponty describes how a whole of this sort is a place where one’s own body provides a pivotal context for the coming-to-be and passing-away of a Gestalt or a visual perception of a particular natural object. Such wholes – of visibility and tactility, for example – provide stable support for transient perceptions

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and cognitive thoughts of distinct objects. Indeed, they enable MerleauPonty to speak of the individual person as possessing a composite interior of wholes of flesh and thinking. Finally, each whole of innate visibility is exemplified privately; no person has direct acquaintance to any token of flesh – such as the context of visibility – which another possesses. Thus, ‘visibility’ cannot be defined by the natural objects of the sciences. In short, Merleau-Ponty’s account describes wholes which are sensible, intrinsically valuable, and corporeally evident for each person who possesses them. Moore and Merleau-Ponty both introduce terms for intrinsically valuable wholes, so we may begin to experiment with accounts which relate beautiful natural objects to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of wholes of flesh. We may begin by proposing this account: a painter becomes aware of a cognized quality or object as beautiful, after noticing that the quality or object is exemplified within the intrinsically valuable wholes of the painter’s own body to which ‘good’ applies. Any visible object may be noticed as beautiful, since its visible aspect is essential to a whole by which one comes to think of oneself as present in nature. It may follow that a brush stroke is beautiful, when it serves to emphasize the non-cognitive whole of visibility which is the living painter’s best evidence both for the actually of the incarnate self and for the external existence of some larger whole of nature beyond the dimension of innate wholes of flesh. The selective mixing of Moore and Merleau-Ponty enables us to speak about the origin of the feeling of beauty which arises for the painter who watches the whole of visibility as a singular openness to the natural world. It also enables us to affirm that the aestheticization of ethics is a viable project, and that this project may be advanced by describing sites of a more radical sort of embodiment, by means of a naturalistic philosophy which is no longer limited to naming objects of the natural sciences. 4. TRANSCULTURAL AESTHETICS: PAINTING FROM THE HEART OF THE VISIBLE

In this final section, I suggest that we are close to developing a language for a new aesthetics which will be of trans-cultural and global interest. I have already tried to persuade the reader that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh permits an account of the beauty of a line, from the preobjective perspective of the visibility innate to the creative artist’s own body. What I wish to do now is to establish that the account of beautiful painting provided by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh does cohere

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with the interpretation of the process of painting which Gao finds in studying the texts of literati painters. If there is a convergence, then an account of beauty may be developed by joining the philosophy of flesh with Gao’s account of the writings of Chinese literati painters such as Sli Tao. Is there any evidence for believing that Merleau-Ponty’s account may strengthen and confirm the subjective unity associated with the interaction of yi, qi, shi and bi ? There is some. I have time to hint at what must be left for a future and more detailed comparative study. Merleau-Ponty states that vision and perception always seem to be formed ‘‘in the heart of the visible.’’6 The whole of visibly constitutive flesh is the heart of any actual visual perception, from the painter’s personal perspective as an eye-witness. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s language implies that the heart of this visibility is also an intrinsically valuable whole by which the painter acquires a sense of self-embodiment. Thus, the corporeal whole of visibility lent by the body may be described as at the heart of the painter’s own sense of aliveness, as Scarry might say. Moreover, the intrinsically valuable sample of this whole of visibility gives rise to an idea: there is a thought for it. But the thought is not of a determinate object that all of us can cognize and confirm together. The idea of one’s own whole of visibility is not a standard sensible intuition of a particular object or quality. Yet, the idea of the whole of visibility lent by one’s own body has authority, because it is instantiated by the heart of the seer’s sensible life. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty describes the visibility at the heart of the sensible life of the living painter as a ‘‘lake of non being.’’7 The self-evident corporeal whole of visibility is like a lake of non being, because it is a sensible whole which a living painter thinks about and notices, without cognizing any determinate objects which emerge as distinct particulars on the natural scene. (The surface of a lake is a whole within which a particular wave or pattern arises through cognition.) Thus, putting this together, we may say that the intrinsically valuable whole of visibility is a heart of non-being which gives the painter the idea that the self contains a sample of non-being. One acquires a non-cognitive awareness that visibility is a corporeally expressed whole of one’s own body and the basis of a living connection with nature. Does this description correspond well to Gao’s interpretation of the writings of literati painters such as Shi Tao? Let us consider, for now, only what Gao writes about yi (idea). To prepare for yi, the painter must forget the physical self and transform the ordinary self-consciousness of objects in to a pure self which achieves communion with nature. Gao states that yi must be ‘‘drawn out from the heart.’’ He also states that

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the ‘‘painter’s yi, or idea, is Non-being, while the stroke is being; in making one stroke, the painter accomplishes the great leap from Nonbeing to Being.’’8 As Gao notes, Shi Tao is one source for the claim that painting is a movement from an idea which follows the heart; and this idea of following the heart is central to his one-stroke (yi-hua) explanation of the process of painting. Shi Tao’s one-stroke interpretation is an attempt to explain the significance of the movement of making a stroke. His account is linked to some traditional philosophical ideas of Laozi and Zhuangzi. For example, after citing Wang Bi’s (226–249) annotation of a passage in the Daodejing which states that The Dao is Non-being and Nameless, Gao points out that many scholars consider this Taoist idea to be the origin for interpretations of one-stroke which link the painter’s yi to Non-being. Does Shi Tao’s account match the terms contained in Merleau-Ponty’s account of painting? In both cases, the painter starts with an idea of nonbeing which arises from the heart of the pure self cultivated by suspending the cognition of natural objects. Merleau-Ponty’s account helps, since it shows that there is a philosophy capable of linking the idea of non-being to a whole of visibility lent by the body. Hence, Shi Tao’s Taoist inspired interpretation of painting may perhaps begin to find expression in a contemporary philosophy. If we accept a philosophy of flesh which denotes the intrinsically valuable whole of visibility which is innate to the painter, then it may be possible to explain the importance of the visible sheet of paper in the process of painting. The creation of brush strokes on a visible page requires attention both to the stroke as a positive mark and also to the surrounding hollow or place of visibility within which the stroke is made. Thus, by giving equal consideration to the context of visibility which surrounds the being of the stroke in ink, the painter-calligrapher retains an awareness of a corporeal whole which is essential to self-stability and an openness to the actuality of nature. If the foregoing is persuasive, then Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of a non-objective whole of visibility lends support to Gao’s interpretation of painting as a bodily process which promotes subjective unity. In both cases, the thoughtful painter would become aware of a central aspect of the self (e.g. the simple corporeal whole of visibility), which provides an openness to nature. If Moore’s account of beauty is connected with Merleau-Ponty’s description of the whole of visibility innate to the painter, then it may be possible to create an account of beauty, based on a philosophy of wholes of the flesh of the body, which may converge with Gao’s account of the process of painting. The beautiful line is one pro-

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duced by the painter, as a result of an inner unity furnished by noticing the self-evident and innate whole of visibility.9

5. POSTMODERN LIFE

I wish to close with the following thoughts. Elaine Scarry seems to put our period into historical perspective, when she describes one of the errors which can be made with regard to beauty: something present and confidently repudiated as the site of beauty is suddenly regarded as beautiful.10 Late-modernists interested in daily life repudiated beauty, once Kant detached it from morality and the world of sense.11 But today it seems that beauty is regarded as the sign of an important good, and as an occasion for a radical decentering which redirects our thinking to an embodied communion with nature and to others who possess a similar aliveness. We are more suspicious now of accounts which isolate beauty from important goods and the charm of sensuously presented nature. University of New Haven

NOTES 1 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 90, 111; Arthur Danto, T he Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), pp. 8, 29, 33, 102,160; Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: L iving Beauty, Rethinking Art (Rowan & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 251, 261; Jianping Gao, T he Expressive Act in Chinese Painting (Uppsala, 1996), pp. 188–191; G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1988), p. 207. 2 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1988), pp. 6, 9–10, 20. 3 Ibid., p. 38. 4 Ibid., pp. 188–189. 5 For a discussion of visibility, see David Brubaker, ‘‘Merleau-Ponty’s Three Intertwinings,’’ T he Journal of Value Inquiry, 34: 89–101, 2000. 6 Merleau-Ponty, T he V isible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 130. 7 Ibid., p. 206. 8 Gao, Jianping, T he Expressive Act in Chinese Painting (Uppsala, 1996), pp. 174, 192. 9 Another question is whether it is sufficient to describe the interior communion with nature as a subjective or psychological state. Talk of the experiences or feelings of the painter does not succeed in naming a corporeal ground that would help to explain how an extraordinary awareness of nature is acquired by the self, after the suspension of all cognition of physical objects and particular forms. Accounts which relate beauty to some state of consciousness which furnishes psychological unity stop short of describing an innate corporeal

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dimension that persists within the self as a pivot for the emergence and disappearance of perceptual objects, forms and patterns. 10 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, pp. 15–16. 11 Marcia Eaton notes that Tolstoy downplayed beauty’s role partly because of the influence of Kant’s theory; see Marcia Easton, ‘‘Kantian and Contextual Beauty,’’ in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 27.

MOLODKINA LJUDMILA

ON PHENOMENOLOGY OF MEMORY AND MEMORIAL ( IN TERMS OF ARCHITECTURAL AND LANDSCAPING CREATIONS )

In modern philosophical culture, as I believe it, the issue of the phenomenological analysis of memory, and therefore the role of intentional subject in the process of memorial establishment may gain more and more actuality. Memory is perceived as a multitude of activities, social and cultural actions undertaken by an individual, a group of individuals, or a society aimed at symbolic reconstruction of the past in the present. All these include expensive restoration works, museification of a number of memorial objects and things, as well as development of new ‘‘memorabilia tours’’ and buoyant ‘‘historical tourism’’, which cannot but testify to the commercialization of historical memory, turning the past to goods. Memory is organically connected with the development of individual and collective identities, with moral, religious, philosophical and aesthetic versions of the past. Memories offer access to the realities of the past, thus creating the basis for social order. There are no societies which could survive without the collective or individual ‘‘memory fund’’. Religion and family, professional associations and social institutions are bound together with collective and personal reminiscences. Memory is a source of social cohesion, social bonding; memory has an ‘‘aura of transcendence’’. Reminiscences, which became a fortune of collective consciousness, may depict the events of the past quite objectively. Memory, as a phenomenon, develops and consolidates itself in various memorials – monuments, commemorative plaques, museums, sculptures, memorialized architectural ensembles with adjacent landscapes and environment etc. Any cultural memorial is an objective result of human activity, which, to a greater extent, reflects the culture and history of its e´poque; which became the subject matter of valuation paradigms, and therefore is a medium in the dialogue of cultures. In this context the memorial is perceived as an object that records a kind of consent with a certain integral interpretation of the past, and, therefore, the memorial acts as a material carrier of existence continuity. In the history of philosophy the issues related to memory and memorials were the subject matter of numerous scientific researches of various 113 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 113–129. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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philosophic schools. For instance, German hermeneuticist Professor Johann Gustav Droysen related the Cultural Memorial to a mixed form of the ‘‘Source’’ and the ‘‘Remnant, Residuum’’; while Hans-Georg Gadamer stated that ‘‘... a piece of art may speak to ‘the generation’, and thus it is important to understand the essence of such communication.’’1 Russian hermeneuticist Mikhail Bakhtin created the typology of memory: ‘‘... Memory of the Future, Memory of the Genre, Memory of the History, Memory Eternal, Aesthetic Memory, Ontological Memory, Space Memory, Memory of the Past etc.’’2 From the point of view of French historian Pierre Nora, the interaction between memory and history in modern culture is expressed in three actual forms: ‘‘MemoryArchive, Memory-Duty and Memory-Absenteeism.’’3 French Philosopher Maurice Halbwachs selected memory as the subject of his sociological survey ‘‘Collective Memory’’. The author believes that ‘‘... Memory traverses an event to a source of moral reflection for upcoming generations, endowing such an event with the status of positiveness and sacrality.’’4 In his semiotic concept, Russian notionalist Yuriy Lotman declares that cultural memory is ensured by ‘‘... the presence of certain constant texts, the unity of invariant codes.’’5 When updating and actualizing the problem of memory and memorial as the subject matter of phenomenological analysis, I anticipated many difficulties on the way to its solution. The matter is that the suggested angle of studying the issues related to memory is mediated by fundamentals of the infinite field of methodological, epistemological, ethical, aesthetical and culturological researches of the consciousness phenomenon as such. The breadth and ‘‘panoramicity’’ of such issues does not exclude accentuation on details, on separate subjects. In our case the focus of philosophical–aesthetical interpretation is the separation of phenomenological bases of memory as an event in the consciousness, as its objective act and identification of the role of intentional subject for the formation of the Architectural-Landscape Memorial concept. I was inspired by the phenomenological works of E. Husserl: his assumptions on correlativeness and intentionality of consciousness, on the feeling of obviousness and ‘‘experiencing the truth’’, on phenomenological reduction and on the ‘‘living world’’. The dynamics of our reasoning lead to the vision of the second objective: identify and understand how an architectural creation gradually fills with intentional meaning and, therefore, becomes a memorial in the observer’s perception. Our desire to explore this aspect was provoked by

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studying a challenging aesthetic-phenomenological method of R. Ingarden, who was the first to introduce the architectural creation as a phenomenon. By introducing the notion of ‘‘Architectural-Landscaping Memorial’’, I followed several fundamentals. Firstly, this is justified by the intention to broaden the memorial-objective zone of an architectural creation as such, ‘‘the territory of the memorial’’ through adding supplementing ‘‘background’’ elements of landscape to the architectural-spacious context, the elements that possess spontaneous aesthetic and memorial value. In synthesis with architectural superstructures these natural elements are capable of laying the foundations for various architectural-landscaping genres: Russian artistic memorial manor, Italian historical villa, Japanese symbolic garden, English castle with its sentimentally-aestheticized natural environment, French palace and park ensemble, etc. Secondly, the scientific character of aesthetic-artistic self-sufficiency of nature is corroborated by the facts of the history of philosophical-aesthetic ideas. Let us recall the uniform Kantian approach towards living nature and to artistic creations from the point of view of practicability. In architectural-landscaping art this momentum, to our mind, may be revealed through the content of the ‘‘concomitant beauty’’ category, which E. Kant introduced alongside the ‘‘pure’’ beauty category. In this case the ‘‘... practical interest, that the aesthetically converted nature was never deprived of, is the most significant factor.’’6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, discussing the perception of natural beauty, used to point out the aesthetical history of landscape and focused on the role of ‘‘... aesthetic taste that has always been generated and justified by the artistic oeuvre of the e´poque.’’7 Thirdly, by positing the synthesis of architecture and nature as the subject matter of our phenomenological analysis, I also observed the contemporary aesthetic concepts of environment, the environmentalistic aesthetics in the first instance. In the background of urbanization, the aesthetic value of landscape and architecture is vividly revealed. A landscape is perceived as a holistic phenomenon, which has certain social and aesthetic value, which is subject to safeguarding, and, therefore, to certain extent, is of memorable value. Important is the fact that the aesthetic value of a landscape is increasingly accounted for when developing landscaping projects for residential and industrial sites and the sites of mineral workings. In this context the environmentalistic aesthetics focus on the aesthetic perception of landscape, attributing unique psychological features to landscapes, which help to distinguish them from the traditional

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perception of artworks. The entire pallet of sensations becomes meaningful: sight, touch, hearing and smell. Even muscular feelings and dwelling physiological vibrations participate in aesthetical evaluation of the landscape; the sense of motion plays a tremendous aesthetic role. Distance, weight, volume, time, color, light pattern, sound, odor, etc. comprise the basis for aesthetic perception of the environment. There is no doubt that phenomenological analysis may have an invaluable significance for studying and understanding the environmentalistic perception of the landscape. Let us try to trace the genesis of memory and architectural-landscaping memorial from the phenomenological point of view.8 In E. Husserl’s philosophy the issue of memory is atrociously and transparently presented through the prism of various modes of consciousness, such as perception and reminiscence, the notion of intentional object, the issues of correlation between the past, the present and the eternal in the development of philosophy and natural history, as well as through philosophical-historical views of the great thinker. The motion towards the objects, ‘‘the return’’ to the objects means the entire reconstruction of the intimate semantic field, the field of notions and differences between ‘‘consciousness’’ and ‘‘objects’’. From Husserl’s point of view any object has to be assessed as a correlate of consciousness, i.e. the correlate of perceptions, reminiscences (ergo memory correlate), dreams, statements, doubts, presumptions, etc. All these are objective acts of consciousness, various moods of objects presented to consciousness. However, the object at the same time is never transferred to consciousness itself, but its meaning content is being fixed appropriately to the features of certain modes of consciousness. In our case the very reminiscence is important. Thus I may suggest that memory is combined by plurality of reminiscences. If reckoning this way, architectural-landscaping creations in their diversity of genres become memorials in our perception and reminiscences. Important is the very process of perception-reminiscences, as a process of forming certain spectrum of meanings, which are observed in an object (architectural-landscaping creation), in its properties and functions. The process of an architectural-landscaping creation becoming a memorial is actually taking place in our consciousness; consciousness attributes memories as certain meanings and memories exist in consciousness as its objective content. What are the phases of this complicated and multi-valued process, which runs in our consciousness and which results in a birth of a memorial phenomenon? According to Husserl, the baseline principle, which forms

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the methodological foundation of phenomenology, is the principle of obviousness. An obvious thing is one given to us directly. Direct knowledge as originally initial information makes the basis of all other knowledge. According to Husserl, the obviousness is the ‘‘experiencing’’ of truth. ‘‘The truth ... can be experienced in a sense that the ideal could be experienced in a real act in general ... The thing that is referred to as an obvious thing, is not only discussed (i.e. constructed in assertions, statements, allegations), but is also present in the very experiencing of such statement ... the experiencing of coincidence between the imaginable and the actual features, the experienced, which is cerebrated – between the experienced sense of such statement and the experienced correlation of phenomena – is the obviousness, while the idea of such coincidence – is the truth.’’9 At the same time Husserl denies mixing the content of the statement as a meaning, as ideal unity with a running psychic act of judgment, which in turn is a singular empiric fact. The content of judgment is never connected with any anthropological features of a human. In our consciousness a directly presented architectural-landscaping creation at first is never perceived as a memorial. It is represented as a real empiric act in its initial, original meaning. The truth is most obviously experienced in this particular vision of architectural creations, supplementary sculptural elements, decorative and ornamental art objects, personal items, auxiliary buildings as well as aestheticized natural objects. Husserl calls this angle of view on the connection between the consciousness and the object the ‘‘... vision in general, the last lawful source of all rational assertions.’’10 It should be noted that not only actually existing objects (architectural, natural, household, etc.) may be directly given or obvious objects. An illusion, a mirage, events of the past, personal experience, things that I saw, things that I heard, things that I read or felt etc., may fall into this category. All these cases of obviousness are represented as empiric visions, therefore as an object that may be thought of. The truth appears in cases of experiencing the coincidence of the present, evident facts and the facts, which exist in our mind, i.e. their meanings and implications. An architectural-landscaping creation at first is experienced as a correlation of its integral constituents, and thereafter people experience the meanings and implications of such objects. The knowledge of the object and the object itself should always coincide, and therein is the truth. The question is: how and when an architectural-landscaping creation achieves the level of an artistic work in our consciousness, and thereafter

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– under certain circumstances (these may be connected with historical events, with the lives of prominent persons, as well as with a number of subjective or personal factors) – obtains a memorial meaning? Answering this question with the use of Husserl’s phenomenological method, I should recall the fact that the great philosopher believed in reduction as a vehicle for achieving authentic obviousness, i.e. the truth. Reduction is intended to change the setting of consciousness. Being initially original and natural, being aimed at the objects and occurrences of the external world, it transforms to eidetic reduction, which helps in getting free from emotional and sensual occurrences and helps passing on ‘‘pure phenomena’’. In its turn, phenomenological reduction helps in ‘‘bracketing away’’ all trans-phenomenal elements. Therefore, this allows us first to set the consciousness to exploring our personal activity aimed at institutionalization of objects, and then it gives the consciousness a possibility to refer to itself. The problem is in obtaining an initial form of consciousness experience, which is the fulcrum of any empiric experience, by way of bracketing away everything foreign to authentic phenomena. According to Husserl, the perception is the initial experience and the main modus of consciousness. The perception directly recovers the genesis of the object, i.e. seizes its self-entitativeness, self-miraculousness, and therefore I receive a feeling of obviousness. In this moment the consciousness should never superinduce anything to it or construct anything; consciousness should only allow the object to appear, behold, show up or reveal itself. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, perception is the precondition of any other mode of consciousness including reminiscences. What is the difference between the architectural-landscaping creation as an empiric occurrence and the architectural-landscaping creation as a pure phenomenon? Qua empiric being an architectural-landscaping creation would never appear to us itself; it is always represented through a system of ties and relations with other phenomena. Its existence is always mediated and subject to aesthetic tastes and ideals of the e´poque, justified by pragmatic and mercantile preferences and by the status of the sociological and cultural environment in general. In other words, an object is always revealed ‘‘in shades’’, continuously transforming and appearing in an entirely new shape. The ‘‘pure phenomenon’’ of architectural-landscaping creation might be given to us as an ‘‘idea’’, for instance, the idea of artistic creation or the idea of memorial, i.e. as a ‘‘pure essence’’, isolated from the flux of time. However, at the same time the ‘‘pure essence’’ of a memorial always

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remains as immanently given to us; the rest of materials, namely: any material empiric and transcendental to consciousness (buildings, natural components, sculptural elements, fine arts, objects of decorative and ornamental arts, etc.) should be factored out of brackets. Only the pure structure of a memorial should be left in consciousness. Husserl attributes the discovery of pure structures in consciousness to intentionality, i.e. consciousness focusing on the object. According to the philosopher, intentionality comprises the very essence of transcendental subjectiveness and should be perceived as a feature of experiencing the idiom ‘‘to be a consciousness of something’’. ‘‘Noesis and noema’’ are the complementary aspects of intentionality. Noesis is the process of cogitation, while the noemata (or cogitata) are that which are cogitated. Every intentional experience has a noetic (real) phase and a noematic (non-real) phase. Every noetic phase of consciousness corresponds to a noematic phase of consciousness. Noesis is a process of reasoning, which assigns meaning to intentional objects. Noesis and noema may both be a means to explain objective meaning. The noetic meaning of transcendent objects is discoverable by reason, while the noematic meaning of immanent objects is discoverable by pure intuition. Noetic meaning is transcendent, while noematic meaning is immanent. Thus, noesis and noema correspond respectively to experience and essence. In case I succeed to see in such architectural-landscaping ensembles such as a historical Italian villa, or a Russian artistic-memorial manor, not only buildings surrounded by trees and bushes, but also pieces of art, and then the memorials that communicate to us memorable information, for instance, pieces of information on Andreo Palladio in Vicenza or a story about Count Yusupov in Archangelskoye Manor in the suburbs of Moscow, or evidence of Pushkin’s stay in it, I thereby feel such objects, determine their meanings and essence as pieces of art or memorials. My consciousness is focused on them as on the memorials. I intentionally experience these objects as memorials. Some other person may not have such associations. Not everyone is gifted with an ability to recognize memorial stratification over the object, to make them intentional and impress the same in consciousness as memorials. The meaning is always ideal and subjective; it represents my personal attitude towards the object, but never the object itself. I see a memorial in this object, I do treat and perceive it as a memorial, I attribute to it the meaning of memorial even in cases where the empiric objects – I mean the architectural-landscaping creations – are shabby or dilapidated or even already extinct as material carriers of the sense. My ‘‘pure consciousness’’ aimed at such an object

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performs an intentional act, while the object itself, being deliberately and previously bracketed away, also obtains the intentionality features. The intentional act and intentional object, being the subject matter of such an act, continue residing in the framework of pure consciousness, thus composing the quintessence of its existence. The intentionality literally constitutes the consciousness, and to be more precise institutionalizes its objective act such as reminiscence, thus impregnating the same with meaningful essence, i.e. making it memory. It is also possible to dwell upon the problem from the other standpoint. When an object is a memorial unknown to general public, or an archived entity, which is not accessible to a broad perception, such an object in a certain period of time may shake it free from archive dust and may become a museum exhibit, and therefore may obtain features of a work of art. It should be noted that in order to reveal its meaning content, each object or phenomenon, obscured by a patina of the past, requires a special approach and needs to be presented to the viewer’s perception in a special way aided by the museum facilities. This is absolutely true for architectural-landscaping creations in particular, the material texture of which includes a great number of components, each of which requires a specific form of museification, which in turn ensures adequate ‘‘perusal’’ of the text of such element. Thus, Italian villas Rotunda or Barbaro, built by A. Palladio, or Yasnaya Poliana Manor, which belonged to famous Russian Romanist Leo Tolstoy, initially were designed as rather utilitarian objects, which in many ways reflected the aesthetic tastes of the architect or the customer. After the death of their owners most of such architecturallandscaping creations tend to be archived. This process is predominantly justified by their memorial and, in most cases, by their artistic-aesthetic content. But only after these objects become accessible to the general public, only after tourist venues and routes are directly laid down to them as the routes to the ‘‘memorial places’’, and, therefore new possibilities arise for panoramic perception, instead of localized and secluded aesthetic catalepsy – these objects gain the status of museum exhibits, which also contributes to revealing the genuine meaning of the piece of art. In the context of the phenomenological thesaurus this would sound like that: an Italian villa or Russian manor as intentional objects may be presented in their noema, i.e. in their objective sense, first as memories, and then as genuine pieces of art accessible for general public’s perception, accessible for ‘‘panoramic viewer’’. The noesis of ‘‘reminiscences’’ leads to the noesis of ‘‘immediate perception’’.

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I believe that the Husserlian notion of potentional horizon might be quite an interesting application to studying memory and memorial phenomena. The matter is that an intentional object exposed to the intentional act is never presented to consciousness as actual entirely. Its actualization is always of a partial or fragmentary character and is almost always reflected on the backlight of potentional horizon, which in turn actualizes when being in the focus of attention. In this case I generate a new, not yet actualized horizon, which has all the prerequisites for the same. According to Husserl, the actualization of the entire chain of opportunities (horizons) is a horme and purposeful activity of transcendental Ego. Husserl believed that ‘‘horizon’’ is a kind of passive preliminary Being. The meaning of a memorial is imbedded in the object itself as in a phenomenon, which in a certain period of time appears to the consciousness, i.e. becomes visual. Thereafter I witness a process of specific reproduction, actualization of its notional horizons as a memorial by way of consciousness reactivation. There might be several reasons for stimulation of such processes, such as social-cultural interests or concerns, dialogue of cultures, the aspiration for cognizing the true state of things from different standpoints pertaining to an event or a celebrity etc. The means for consciousness reactivation, which allow actualizing of the meaning horizons repetitively, is the reflection and phenomenological reduction in a form of its initial benchmark or milestone, as I pointed out previously. From my point of view, we may trace the phenomenological aspects of attitude to the past and the interpretation of memory, the way Husserl tackles the problem of inter-subjectiveness as a-priori-ideal similarity, which is a transcendental basis for any empiric community. There is an inter-subjective institutionalization of the ‘‘Other’’, thematization of the ‘‘Other’’ and the community, i.e. there is an extravagating of ‘‘I’’. The connection between ‘‘I’’ with ‘‘Other’’ and with ‘‘Other I’’ becomes obvious. Husserl believed that this process is effected by way of ‘‘experiencing’’, i.e. the intentionality of the own ‘‘I’’ may lead us to the universe of the other’s ‘‘I’’ (the empiric world remains excluded). The Transcendental Ego categorically includes its transcendental Alter-Ego. ‘‘Other’’ may intentionally be experienced only in the framework of Alter-ego. The dialogue of cultures, inter-cultural communication by way of cultural memorial, is more likely based on such intentional dialectics. Husserl was pretty much convinced that a man may experience his own consciousness existence in its being, while it is not possible to experience the other’s one. However, with the help of the method of apperception by analogy, i.e. with the help of perception, the cognition

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based on former images, the consciousness of the ‘‘Other’’ in my own ‘‘I’’ is consistently and proportionally revealed, i.e. institutionalized. As a result, the transcendental subjectiveness enhances up to the level of intersubjectiveness and transcendental sociality. Husserl believed that the capacity of transcendental ‘‘I’’ to modify itself and act as ‘‘my own Other’’ is justified by the temporality of pure consciousness. In this background the problem of reminiscences, the attitude to the past is quite clearly projected and looks actual. ‘‘... Judging from transcendental interpretation of reminiscences, we understand that the past ‘‘I’’ of the present, belongs to the experienced of to the past, while the genuine initial ‘‘I’’ is the ‘‘I’’ of actual presence ... Therefore the actual ‘‘I’’ performs an act, in which it institutionalizes the modified modus of itself as Being (in the modus of the past) ...’’11 According to Husserl, the transcendental inter-subjectiveness may transform to transcendental generality only through Ego, its transcendental functions and actions. ‘‘Pole – I’’ is institutionalized to the ‘‘world for all’’ and for each individual. Husserl’s phenomenological concept is backed up by the works of Russian hermeneuticist Mikhail Bakhtin. He believed that Memory is not solely a feature of individual consciousness, but, in the first instance, a uniform category of big time of culture. ‘‘There is almost complete analogy between the meaning of time and space borders in the consciousness of the Other and self-consciousness.’’12 Bakhtin believed that ‘‘phenomenological penetration to the integrity of self-experiencing, as well as contemplation or description of self-experiencing and experiencing of the Other’’, may only be effected through reminiscence. Memory relates to Being from the standpoint of its undoubted weighty value; memory helps us feel and understand this world as the world of the ‘‘Others’’, who have already lived through or are living their lives. Memory masters the ‘‘Golden Key’’ to the aesthetic coronation of personality. Memory solicits and heartidly accepts the ‘‘Other’’ apart from any other forthcoming meaning. Phenomenological configuration of the memory problem is clearly presented in Husserl’s assertions, which pertain to the search for ideals of universal philosophy and the reasons of historical reciprocal causation of all sciences. It is only historical contemplation that ‘‘... helps us remember that we are a-priori philosophers as such, the heirs of the past in our concepts, problems and methods ... It is obvious that ... comprehensive and critical conceptualization of the past is absolutely vital for any solution to obtain radical self-consciousness ...’’13

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Husserl reasonably believed that ‘‘... succession and continuity in philosophy allows remembering and preserving of all its historical forms and helps the philosophers communicating with each other, fighting their ways through gallimaufry of ‘historical facts’ of philosophy, thus obtaining the meaning of the philosophy of the past’’14 Husserl perceived memory as a kind of logical carcass, which securely holds a symbiosis of former philosophical systems, for the purpose of rational cognition of the present and for the purpose of universal philosophical development. Having introduced the ‘‘living world’’ category to the philosophical dictionary, the world which is obviously given to everyone as his/her personal surrounding routine and purpose-oriented activity, Husserl prima facie collated the historical issues of relationship between the past and the present, the oblivion and the memory, the eternal and constant as predetermined, restoration of the lost linkage between the science and the subject. From his point of view the living world is something integral, a background, a horizon for understanding human activities, objectives, interests and concerns. The correlation of the past and the present, memory and oblivion are presented much more vividly, when the philosopher points out the fact that this pre-determined, pre-imaginative living world acquires the ‘‘stratification of times’’, the traditions, historically emerging theoretical concepts, i.e. the living world forms up historically. ‘‘This genuinely contemplated, experimental and experimentally cognizable world, being the arena of our lives, remains permanent in its own essential structure.’’15 Husserl appealed to us to remember and study the experience of the past in cognizing the world as a universe and all-unity, to use this knowledge in further exploration. He paralleled scientific achievements of the past with ‘‘sediment occurrences’’, which in this contemporary world of ideal objects reveal themselves through reminiscences as ‘‘spiritual exploration’’. Considering the issues of memory and memorial in the course of phenomenological philosophy, I could not ignore such an essential and important philosophical-aesthetical survey in the field of architecture performed by Roman Ingarden, the follower of Husserl. Moreover, I should point out that Husserl regarded phenomenology as a solid base for the entire aesthetic sphere. Accounting for the specifics of the selected theme, I will try to determine and, if feasible, to analyze the role of the intentional object in the development of meaning of architectural creation, the way Ingarden perceived it, and to externalize my own position regard-

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ing architectural-landscaping memorial in the light of such reasoning. A fortiori, the philosopher used to make reservations, that he studied the ‘‘... specifics of architecture on the background of its memorials.’’16 In his famous work ‘‘Researches on Aesthetics’’, Ingarden dedicated one of the book’s chapters to the phenomenological analysis of architecture, thus initiating one of the most profound and intriguing philosophical concepts in architectonics. The philosopher traced the dialectics of architectural creation development, breaking it down to several phases (‘‘strata’’), which help identifying sense and meaning in an initially usual building. The researcher mentally observes the phenomenological ‘‘portrait’’ of the building, which in the eyes of the spectator gradually transforms to a genuine piece of art. At the same time it is stressed that the development of the aesthetic-artistic value of the building progresses in consciousness gradationally, in a consistently increasing notional ‘‘tempo’’. The philosopher notes different approaches and points of view, the so-called ‘‘... labels, which consciousness attributes to the building. This might be a vision of an engineer, an opinion of historian researcher or a mere spectator’s delight. Each point of view is intended for imbuing the building with various features, which in the object obtain the meaningfulness of its properties and peculiarities.’’17 An object due to a multitude of such acquired new properties gradually metamorphoses, gaining a new image, a new quintessence. While amplifying such philosophical-aesthetic arguments, Ingarden managed to create a unique phenomenological typology of phases in the genesis of an architectural image, articulating particular continuity and reciprocal dependence of the same. Schematically this process may be presented in the following way: 1. A building as a holistic, really existing physical object; 2. A building as an entity base for an architectural creation; 3. A creation of architecture concretized as an aesthetic object. Further exploring the ideas of R. Ingarden, I called upon liberty to denominate a building an ‘‘entity foundation for a cultural memorial’’. Under certain intentional acts, supported by specific concretization, a building may accumulate its memorial or monumental essence. Ingarden, being a true phenomenologist, at first mentally accentuates the actual objectivity of the building (‘‘mass of bricks’’). This is something whole, imbued with certain physical properties, regulated by its internal laws, allotted with independent essence towards any acts of consciousness. This is the real whole, which is sealed in the phenomenon of a building,

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existing autonomously and independently from consciousness. However, Ingarden stresses, the real whole is an equivalent of certain ‘‘subjective standpoint and conscious behavior of a person, which result ... in avoiding any intentional act ...’’18 In other words, the building phenomenon as a whole is not intentional, and such a building is not yet a ‘‘temple’’, a ‘‘theater’’, a ‘‘relic’’, therefore is not a ‘‘memorial’’ yet. Copying the traditional phenomenological style of Husserl, I should say that the real whole of a building is its ‘‘living world’’, a background, a horizon, which subsequently may serve a ground for other specific acts of consciousness – the intentional acts. According to Ingarden, such a building should go through a kind of ‘‘initiation to a temple’’ (or in our case, ‘‘the inauguration to a memorial, a monument’’ of a group of buildings in the natural environment). By the way, these assertions of the philosopher clearly depict the problem of memory, which obviously has never been foreign to Ingarden. A boscage may become sacred and a piece of fabric may transfer to a banner that we ‘‘salute, honor and enshrine through centuries as memorabilia ...’’19 A building of a manor and a park surrounding it, along with a tree (for instance an oak tree in Ostafievo Manor in Russia, former estate of the Vyazemskiys Dukes) becomes memorial, if duly inaugurated to memorial, which in turn is the intentional act of consciousness. Ingarden notes a considerable fluidity and variability of such intentional acts of our consciousness. In many ways this is determined by the social and cultural environment, by the type of public and individual consciousness, religious beliefs and the mentality in general. Nevertheless, an intentional act of consciousness, aimed at a really existing object (a building, a piece of landscape, household object etc.) actually does not change anything in a real physical world of such objects. What is important is that such a real object acquires a new intentional, unreal feature – it becomes an entity base for a certain new object: a temple or a monument. There might be another point of view, where a building, intentionally turned into a creation of architecture, in certain circumstances becomes a genuine work of art. Spectators in their consciousness should elaborate a special position, a well-defined opinion regarding such building. In this situation we may witness not an ‘‘initiation to a memorial’’ but rather an ‘‘initiation to an artistic-aesthetic creation’’. I have already dwelt upon the potential of inverse processes, whereby a memorial in its social and cultural environment, breaking through the imprisonment of archive abyss, may acquire the status of artwork.

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Ingarden emphasizes the role of the material’s properties in the development of intentional architectural object. The entity basis of magnificent Gothic or Roman cathedrals is a system of walls, clad with various construction materials. In case of restoration works such obsolete or destroyed materials may be substituted with new ones. However the aesthetic image of such a Gothic cathedral as a unique and exclusive work of art remains inviolable. I never intended to consider issues connected with the safeguarding of the semantic content of an architectural creation after its restoration or renovation in the framework of this presentation. That would require separate and thorough scientific analysis. Extrapolating the difference between real existing buildings and architectural creations, Ingarden picked up significant peculiarities. A piece of architectural art as distinct from a building, which represents a real physical object, is allotted with a different combination of sensual characteristics. These highest order characteristics are of significant aesthetic value; their magnificence and individual vividness may reveal exclusively an aesthetic concretization of an architectural creation. A work of art that possesses such qualities, a fortiori, is intentional ...20 Ingarden believes that an architectural piece of art enjoys bilateral biotic relativity. On one hand it depends on ‘‘individuality of creative spiritual act’’, i.e. on the author’s ‘‘signature’’, on the idea of the author. On the other hand, an architectural piece of art depends on the properties of the physical object, which in turn is an entity basis for such architectural creation. The philosopher is confident that these tangible-physical properties should ultimately correspond to, or should be ‘‘tuned up’’ to the purpose of such a creative act, and should help express the ‘‘will of the artist’’. An architectural creation may be considered as a successfully completed piece of art only when artistic and creative ideas of an author are externalized in a specific material object. The aesthetic phenomenology of Ingarden focused on studying architecture poses a challenging issue – a complicated process of aesthetic experiencing of an architectural creation: from conventional observation through artistic-aesthetic perception. Let us specify the major phases of this multi-valued process. When comparing a creation of architecture with music or fine arts Ingarden distinguishes a double-layer structure of such creation of architecture: he visually perceives the shapes and 3D forms of a building (a temple, a palace, a manor, a villa). The double-layer structure is expressed through such shapes. Ingarden believes that the form of heavy mass of

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specific real object is the most critical element of any architectural creation. This ‘‘idiosyncratic logic of mass’’ shapes a certain structural matrix, which, as a matter of fact, exactly defines the external three-dimensional configuration, making such a real object intentional in our consciousness. In other words, a phenomenon of the architectural object arises in our perception. To be exact, a building as a real object is perfected phenomenally to a level of artistic work thanks to its constitutive factor – the form of heavy mass. Ingarden accentuates on the quite sophisticated issue of the structural architectonic integrity of the architectural creation. He stresses that such a piece of work is never an accidental conglomerate or occasional array of shapes. On the contrary, from the point of view of its dimensional form and architectonic features it should distinguish itself by a certain intrinsic and qualitative integrity. According to the philosopher, the most important architectonic element of any architectural creation is the system of geometrical forms, based on the law of statics of heavy masses, corresponding to the practical purpose of such building. All other elements of such creation from the architectonic point of view are derivative, though in the aesthetic perception of the same they may play the leading role: I mean the elements of natural environment, artistic or decorative details, and memorial objects, i.e. everything that constitutes material content of the architectural creation’s image. Delicately, with the craftsmanship of a jeweler, Ingarden leads us to a conclusion that, ‘‘... notwithstanding a peculiar intrinsic essentiality and complicated logic of architectural artistic creation, it is a work created by a human being, based on ratiocination of the author. This creation personifies manifestation of emotional and desire elements of human soul.’’21 The theme of human, consequently, mediated theme of memory is depicted in relievo in Ingarden’s phenomenological statements on the ties of architectural creation with the real world and pieces of literature, as well as on the issues of its concretization. The thinker insists that ‘‘... architecture expresses a person ... through expressing its main mental structure and his way of carnal life, his structural-intellectual and aesthetic-perceptive spiritual capabilities.’’22 According to Ingarden, each architectural piece of art is connected with the real world through a human being. A human being is already represented in such a utilitarian and really existing building exposed to intentional acts of our consciousness. Finally a building thereby transforms in our perception either to a temple, or a palace, while in our reminiscences – to a memorial. This is the semantic meaning of architecture and this is what approximates it to the real world.

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According to Ingarden, the phenomenological genesis of architectural creation culminates in the phase of its concretization. There is an important detail here – the exclusiveness and individuality of an architectural piece of art on the background of multiplicity of architectural aesthetic objects based on or inspired by such genuine work of art. Ingarden thereby introduces the notion of ‘‘concretization’’, which, from his point of view, presupposes diversity of aesthetic processes in perceiving an architectural piece of art. Each spectator perceives the work individually, i.e. the consciousness, intentionally focused on such architectural object, is diversified in its modes. Ingarden believes that perceptions may have an aesthetic form and therefore may acquire the features of aesthetic experiencing, while architectural creation thereby acquires additional intentional aesthetic qualities. The concretization of architectural creation as an artistic phenomenon is a more sophisticated process. The intentional rhythm becomes more dynamic through the movement of the spectator both inside and outside the building. In an intentional object the spectator artistically and aesthetically experiences a ‘‘prolonged play of shapes’’, an ‘‘idiosyncratic life’’ of the building, the spectator starts understanding a ‘‘mysterious tongue of quiescent but still ‘communicating’ stony interior of the building.’’23 The ‘‘external’’ life of an architectural creation is its surrounding landscape, sunrise or sunset, midday heat, deep blue sky, autumn mist, midnight gloom – all these make the same building diverse in perceiving its concretization. Following such phenomenological discourse of R. Ingarden, I would like to add in conclusion that the interior space of the building and its exterior combines a great number of memorable objects, starting from the building itself, through natural environment and personal, household or other objects. Memorial ‘‘stratifications’’ of various kinds in architectural-landscaping creation, which are experienced as diversified concretizations, increase the level of its intentionality to the ‘‘memorial’’ level. Moscow

NOTES 1 H. G. Gadamer, ‘‘Aesthetics and Hermeneutics’’. In Actuality of Beautiful. Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishing House, 1991. 2 M. M. Bakhtin, Collected Works in 7 volumes. Moscow: Russian Dictionaries Publishing House, Vol. 5 – 1996, Vol. 2 – 2000, Vol. 1 – 2003, Vol. 6 – 2002.

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3 P. Gallimard, ‘‘Les lieux de me´moire. Sous la direction de Pierre Nora’’ V.I. – L a Re´publique, 1984. V.II. – L a Nation, 1986. 4 E. G. Trubina, Article ‘‘Collective Memory’’, Contemporary Philosophy Dictionary, Editor Prof. V. E. Kemerova. Moscow, 2004, p. 506. 5 U. M. Lotman, Semiosphere. Culture and Explosion. Inside the T hinking Worlds. Articles. Researches. Notes. St. Petersburg, Iskusstvo SPB Publishing House, 2000, p. 673. 6 E. Kant, Collected Works in 6 volumes. Moscow, 1966. Vol. 5. 7 Gadamer, op. cit., p. 259. 8 A. Bermant, ‘‘Environmental Aesthetics’’. In Non-classics L exicology. Artistic – Aesthetic Culture of XX Century, V. V. Byschkova (ed.). Moscow: Rosspen, 2003. 9 E. Husserl, ‘‘Logic Researches’’, Vol. 1, SPB, 1909, pp. 164–165. 10 E. Husserl. Ideen zu einer reinen Pha¨nomenologie und pha¨nomenologischen Philosophie. Husserliana. 3. S. 44. 11 E. Husserl, Zur Pha¨nomenologie der Intersubjektivita¨t. T.2., hrsg. von.1 kern. Den Haag., 1973, S. 189. 12 Bakhtin, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 183. 13 Ibid. 14 E. Husserl, ‘‘Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’’, Philosophy, No. 7, 1992, p. 145. 15 Ibid. 16 Roman Ingarden, Researches on Aesthetics. Architectural Creations. Moscow. ‘‘Foreign Literature’’ Publishing House, 1962, p. 206. 17 Ingarden, op. cit., pp. 204–205. 18 Ingarden, op. cit., p. 207. 19 Ingarden, op. cit., p. 209. 20 Ingarden, op. cit., pp. 213–214. 21 Ingarden, op. cit., p. 247. 22 Ibid. 23 Ingarden, op. cit., p. 259.

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PATINA – ATMOSPHERE – AROMA T owards an Aesthetics of Fine DiVerences

My paper deals mainly with some possible implications of a phenomenological investigation of touch, smell and taste for determining aesthetic criteria for works of art, environments, and their experience. In the first part, patina, atmosphere and aroma – phenomena related originally to the tactile, olfactory and gustatory experience – are shown to be relevant also as general aesthetic values. In the second part, the peculiarities of a theoretical discourse on touch, smell and taste are discussed. Since the subject of their production and consumption is partly pre-reflexive, preintentional and collective, such phenomena represent a challenge to classical phenomenological theory. More generally, the specificity of the experience of touch, smell and taste significantly impacts the theoretical discourse on these senses: their tendency to synaesthesia makes inevitable the use of metaphors in describing and theorising about them while the essential temporality and dynamism of their experience is most accurately reproduced in a narrative manner. The third section of the present analysis concerns the question of the aesthetic border, i.e. the demarcation line between art and non-art, which is shown to be relative to the general cultural field in which our experience is embedded. Finally, sensibility is emphasised as a basic condition of the aesthetic experience and even as the primary foundation of an aesthetics of the ‘‘secondary’’ senses.

AESTHETIC VALUES GROUNDED ON TOUCH, SMELL AND TASTE

Patina, atmosphere and aroma are sensory phenomena that originally stem from or are related to tactile, olfactory and gustatory impressions. Nevertheless, these same words acquired in time a second, overlying meaning, whose metaphorical character is now scarcely felt. In this wider meaning, patina, atmosphere and aroma function no longer as strictly descriptive terms (and hence are irreducible to a specific sensory modality – touch, smell or taste), but have also certain aesthetic connotations: specifically, they are used as positive values. In general, patina expresses the aestheticizing (a¨sthetisierend) effect of time, atmosphere stands for the affective quality or halo surrounding an object or an environment, while 131 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 131–148. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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aroma attempts to grasp a work of art’s or a literary idiolect’s special note and their deviation from the standard. Patina Patina as a visual phenomenon typically designates an incrustation, usually green, on old bronze or other kinds of surfaces, as well as the gloss produced by age on woodwork. Patina can be regarded as a material accretion to the object or as a sort of corroding ‘‘parasite,’’ but it is not one that adheres from outside to the surface of the object, but rather emerges from inside of it, indicating therefore an immanent dynamics of the matter. More concretely, patina appears when a surface is repeatedly touched over a long interval of time. All three of these factors – material, time, and touch – escape the subject’s intention and are anonymous in the extreme, including touch.1 In sum, patina refers to every sensible modification of artefacts produced by human touching and/or climatic change, and can be found in all art forms that use degradable materials. Upon closer inspection, patina can also be defined as the visible surface of a temporal depth,2 giving a good example for the manner in which time itself can be converted into an aesthetic agent. And particularly in our times, when economy has monopolised the value of novelty, the material (patina) or symbolic age (tradition, etc.) of something gives the impression of nobility. Old houses and abandoned industrial factories, outmoded objects of use, and not least sites of historical events are either transformed into museums or ‘‘recycled’’ as offices, residential spaces, etc. Compared to recent edifices and urban environments, the antiquated already possess flair and spread their own atmosphere. All sorts of antiquities, old furniture, slowly growing plants and new apartments built on the top of old buildings are ‘‘in.’’ When one acquires them, one appropriates a foreign past, or in other words, buys time. The modernist ideal of functionality yields precedence to values like tradition and the exotic. Time is not only a matter of life-style and new design, but is brought into focus also by artists: Duchamp’s E´levage de poussie`re (Photo by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920), as well as his scenery of the retrospective First Papers of Surrealism (New York, 1942), with its hanging spider webs between paintings, require long intervals of time for their very physical constitution, and so simulate the passage of time. The alert rhythms of modernity are substituted in all the above mentioned cases by slowness and long-term processes. In the last decades, technology has succeeded in intervening in the flowing of ‘‘natural’’ time, shortening for

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example the agricultural production cycles, and has universalised the imperative of efficiency. But, as we know, art was interpreted in classical aesthetics as a mediator between nature and technique;3 modern art, by stressing the aesthetic value of time, reopens this undecided game. The artist’s activity in such art forms deserves special mention. In both our examples, Duchamp does not actually shape or produce objects, but allows time as the real artist to become manifest, i.e. to objectify or embody itself indirectly, through natural processes. In other words, the artist is to be understood as a ‘‘phenomenologist,’’ since he lets phenomena present themselves (e.g. in these cases he allows time to ‘‘gather’’ and concentrate in dust formations and spider webs). Art returns to the original meaning of culture as cultivating the soil: the artist ‘‘cultivates’’ or ‘‘breeds’’ dust, and takes care of the ‘‘natural’’ aesthetics of materials (in Heideggerian language: the Earth), with their immanent temporality and perceptible changes. Letting-be lifts doing to a higher level. But let us return to the visible patina. This represents, as I have already mentioned, a sediment that grows ‘‘digitally’’ – i.e. through frequent local touches.4 Patina makes visible not only the touching subject’s embodiment, but also a certain sensitivity (and thus vulnerability) of the touched material substratum: the matter reacts to the subject’s gestures, recording them in the form of traces, spots and marks, scratches and fissures. A furniture material that was appreciated a few decades ago for its ‘‘timeless functionality,’’ ‘‘robustness,’’ and for ‘‘rejecting dirt,’’ is today criticised as ‘‘cheap’’ and ‘‘cold.’’5 In contrast, those materials are praised which – like wood – interact with human beings in a process of living-together. If we agree to take patina in a broad sense, then the term can be applied not only to metals or wood polished with use, but for example also to wines, whose aroma intensifies similarly in the long run; in German one says that a long storage makes wine become ‘‘noble’’ (veredelt), just as patina (Edelrost) is a ‘‘noble’’ rust. Even old-fashioned words and archaisms, adequately introduced in a larger context, achieve the effect of a linguistic patina, creating a specific style; their expressive and poetical qualities are not to be reduced to mere anachronisms. Put concisely, the phenomenon of patina exemplifies the aesthetic (i.e. positive) value of time.6 Patina records the passage of an object through time, whether continuous and homogenous or violent and discontinuous; it stores history – the object’s story within the life-world – and saves the past from oblivion. And even if such traces left by men become visible only on certain materials, they exist in principle on every surface, and every human handling touches some sensitive screen. Moreover, material patina not

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only saves and records gestures, feelings, and memories, but is also itself a (his)story in the meaning of Ge-schichte – as a phenomenon, patina is actually nothing other than a superposition of strata (Schichten) containing fingerprints and traces, like a ‘‘geological’’ set of successive layers. However, unlike any other screen, the objects’ ‘‘skin’’ opens to a (temporal) depth. On other occasions I have argued that the aesthetic character should be regarded less as a static property of a material object, one that is given once for ever by the creative artist and has only to be rediscovered or actualised by the perceiver, and more as a process of becoming aesthetic. In the case of patina and – as we shall see further – of atmosphere, this ¨ sthetisierung) takes place in the manner of a poeticalaesthetisation (A concentration (Verdichtung) of fingerprints and breathings or, following Merleau-Ponty, as a ‘‘crystallisation.’’7 Being a trace, patina represents (i.e. makes present) an absence, not however an abstract Nothing, but the concrete absence (of all the persons who have ever touched the object).8 We are often inclined to see negative traces on an objects’ or persons’ skin – wrinkles and scars, for example, – as the negative signs of age and wounds inflicted by a tragic history. In this way the past is viewed as heavy and oppressive, requiring collective memory and sombre reflection to come to terms with it: responsibility means gravity. In the phenomenon of patina, however, appropriating the past seems to reflect just the opposite attitude: its spectators slide easily along time, as if they were skating (Fr.: patiner). However – warns Pierre Bourdieu – the philosophy of art never missed any occasion to express its mistrust of lightness and to condemn it as frivolous, barbarian, primitive, childish, cheap, superficial or unpolished.9 Aesthetics demanded from art finally just what it demanded from morality: profound feelings and thoughts that require an adequate interpretation. But should this then mean that an aesthetics emphasising such phenomena as patina returns to hermeneutics? After all, Hans-Georg Gadamer also took into consideration the temporal distance between the contemporary interpretation and the historical world opened by the work of art and considered this gap to be a productive condition of comprehension.10 The answer to this question is at least in one respect negative: the Gadamerian approach is definitely semantic, whereas patina remains primarily a sensible phenomenon. And even if patina objectifies a W irkungsgeschichte, this is still no history of ideas, but the compacted history of human gestures and their gesta (Lat.: historical acts). Moreover, to rehabilitate lightness and its implicit morality11 in the aesthetic realm by no means implies a subject lying beyond history and, as such, basically

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neither involved nor interested in its mischief. On the contrary, the reinterpretation of the aesthetic ‘‘superficiality’’ as condensing time and stories actually reinforces the historical perspective. Taking part in the history and being in the midst of the life-world are essential for the embodied subject, that has to touch and breathe and whose bodily existence cannot thus not leave traces. Its being-here (Dasein) and living (Wohnen) is just one stratum (Schichte) more in the history (Ge-schichte) of patina, one breath in the atmosphere of a site. Finally, the so-called ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘organic’’ architecture (Alvar Aalto), as well as movies (Andrei Tarkovsky), Land Art, and various other art forms provide suggestive examples for how patina and perishable materials can create affective atmospheres. Instead of looking for some presumably eternal and universal truth, such art emphasises that man and his environment are co-natural. The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes this contemporary artistic approach as follows: A distinct ‘weakening’ of the architectural image takes place through the processes of weathering and ruination. Erosion wipes away the layers of utility, rational logic and detail articulation, and pushes the structure into the realm of uselessness, nostalgia and melancholy. The language of matter takes over from the visual and formal effect, and the structure attains a heightened intimacy. The arrogance of perfection is replaced by humanising vulnerability. This is why artists, photographers, filmmakers and theatre directors tend to utilise images of eroded and abandoned architecture to evoke a subtle emotional atmosphere.12

Atmosphere Literally, ‘‘atmosphere’’ (ancient Gr.: atmoz – steam or smell, and sQaira – sphere) refers to the gaseous envelope surrounding the Earth or any other body. However, soon after being introduced into the modern European languages, the word acquired an extended meaning, and has since been used for a mental-moral, but above all an artistic-emotional environment, as well as for a pervading tone or mood, especially an attractive one. The difference between these two semantic strata is obvious if one compares the quantifiable pressure exerted on earth’s surface, measured in ‘‘atmospheres,’’ with the purely qualitative, only vaguely describable affective atmospheres, whose pressure is felt as tension and release. The affective ‘‘air’’ can be determined sometimes only negatively, as ‘‘the inexpressible rest’’ of our perception or as the ‘‘surplus that is beyond real facticity, being nevertheless felt.’’13 Leaving out here the serious methodological and linguistic difficulties of examining and com-

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municating this phenomenon,14 the presence of atmospheres has been noted in several cultures, where they are known under different names (atmosphere, air, aura, or in Japanese ki, etc.). The fact that all these words were originally related to the air we breathe confirms the supposition that also the metaphorical atmosphere might be something which is primarily somehow inhaled and smelled. The knowledge of atmospheres requires a direct participation; in other words, ‘‘objective’’ moods can be apprehended only if the perceiver ‘‘enters’’ them and experiences them personally.15 An atmosphere is generally emanated by a person or place and – according to Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Bo¨hme – is neither an objectively measurable property, nor the mere subjective projection of the person who feels it. A person’s air is some sort of personal aura or ‘‘emanation of the essence’’ (Wesensausstrahlung), and produces an immediate pleasant or unpleasant effect on the perceiver, suggesting trust or mistrust. Marc Crunelle describes it as a sort of bubble (bulle) or as an invisible, intimate space, specific to every person.16 On its threshold begins intimacy as real, affective-phenomenological nearness, and that is the reason why access to this minimal environment of the embodied subject is extremely restricted: once someone steps into your own space, he/she affects your personal feeling of autonomy. Relevant in this connection is a literary example: in the scene about Albertine’s first kiss, Proust describes how reducing the objectively measurable distance between persons is accompanied by a sensory shift from sight and hearing to smell, touch, and taste.17 Every atmosphere is in principle boundless and lacks at every moment clear spatial borders, due to an immanent movement of spreading itself out.18 What is ‘‘in the air’’ cannot be grasped, not even in concepts, and still is nevertheless real; you can feel it and even localise it (even if only relatively), as if it were filling the place and emanating from a certain point. However, the ‘‘place’’ is not at all the geometrical-physical space known from the natural sciences, but a qualitative, quasi-energetic and affective field of forces. Further, atmosphere is something one enters by accident or sinks purposely in; the condition for feeling an atmosphere is a rather passive Sicheinlassen, as Heidegger described it in Gelassenheit.19 The phenomenological concept of horizon, with its privileging of what lies in front of the subject, is specific to visuality; in contrast, atmosphere has breathing as its sensory model, and its ‘‘object’’ is more likely to be a surrounding milieu, in the midst of which the subject is moving and living, than a Gegen-stand in the meaning of a static being-as-opposed. In other words, man’s sensitivity to atmospheres expresses his being-in-

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the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) and the reciprocal openness of subject and world. As Heidegger put it: Die Stimmung u¨berfa¨llt. Sie kommt weder von ‘Außen’ noch von ‘Innen’, sondern steigt als Weise des In-der-Welt-seins aus diesem selbst auf.20

The atmosphere is spatially open and itself opens moods and lifeworlds; this metaphorically understood air is imparted to the individual subjects without dividing itself (teilt sich mit, ohne sich zu verteilen), grounds Being-with (Mitsein), and is an elementary non-verbal communication form. Atmosphere corresponds to the human essence as ent-fernend, in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, i.e. as overcoming distance.21 By experiencing an atmosphere spread out by a place, the contemporary perceiver is brought nearer to the anonymous succession of all those persons and generations who ever lived and left their olfactory traces there, and becomes himself part of an enormous collective organism. In this respect, feeling an atmosphere is a matter of symbiosis with nameless and faceless bodies. Such individuals cannot be hastily assimilated to the Heideggerian concept of ‘‘das Man,’’22 since they are actually prior to the very difference between authenticity and non-authenticity. The anonymous subject is neither a Man nor a person, but more likely a personne (Fr.), in the sense of ‘‘no one’’ (like in the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus), a certain absence that is represented concretely.23 No less than the patina can also the atmosphere be defined as a precipitate, as a cluster that brings together and condenses quasi-immaterial, invisible particles of inhabitants, that are at the same time highly personal and impersonal. Feeling it demands, as I already mentioned, passivity in letting oneself be pervaded by the ‘‘foreign’’ mood, but also activity in developing a specific sensitivity and acuity for such phenomena, a disposition or ability that is often found in artists or so-called ‘‘sensitive’’ persons with an artistic inclination. In addition, one would expect that cultivating one’s openness for atmospheres might also intensify the feeling of being present in the moment – and, after all, what else does the concept of Da-sein literally mean than the awareness of being here and now? The most common reaction to atmospheres encountered in public or private places consists in a spontaneous attuning or homogenising of moods, a process for which Helmuth Tellenbach found the suggestive name of Einstimmung.24 Also, according to Hermann Schmitz, atmospheres rule over persons as some kind of overwhelming natural, elementary forces. The perceiver is subject to them and is therefore usually

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represented as being rather passively, ‘‘moved,’’ ‘‘touched,’’ ‘‘affected,’’ ‘‘struck’’ or ‘‘seized’’ with them (Germ. ergriVen, betroVen, u¨berwa¨ltigt), no matter if the person agrees or not, even if there are so-called resonant feelings25 too, that can be felt only as long as one lets oneself go with them. On the basis of the artistic experience, however, Gernot Bo¨hme brings an important corrective to this representation of a helpless exposure to moods, drawing attention to the fact that atmospheres are not simply given and immutable. His first argument is found in the stage and film scenery, which produce moods artificially by means of objects (e.g. candles create a romantic atmosphere, black is severe, etc.); no less, atmospheres let themselves be changed, too, for example, ‘‘relaxed’’ or ‘‘poisoned’’ deliberately through individual interventions. And secondly, a person may try to keep an inward distance from the surrounding atmosphere, can observe and analyse it, even describe it and communicate it to other persons.26 The aesthetic attitude implies for Schmitz exactly this middle point between lucidity and blind emotion.27 In any case, no matter how we evaluate atmospheres in our daily life, when we can assign them an aesthetic value, they are interpreted exclusively positively: evoking or creating an atmosphere is already a matter of aesthetics. The aesthetic character itself, or the so-called ‘‘good form’’ – argue Mikel Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Le´vinas – is not at all some static quality, but one that metamorphoses the object’s surroundings and also sets into motion the spectator’s kinaesthesias.28 Moreover, Merleau-Ponty describes this dynamics of the field (champ or tissu) precisely as the irradiation of an essence (rayonnement d’essence); by essence he means, like Heidegger, a verbal Wesen instead of a substantial Sein.29 Although we are tempted to search atmospheres primarily in nature, a historical examination proves that these became an aesthetic topic (i.e. an object for contemplation and a subject for literary and artistic representations) only after the artistic gaze had discovered them and learned to stage with their means a theatre of nature.30 Moreover, atmospheres are encountered nowadays pre-eminently in urban environments. Correspondingly, the postmodern urban aesthetics assumed as a major task in the 1980s and 1990s the task of creating expressive environments, while the entertainment industry began to assign to the ‘‘air of a city’’ the function of an important tourist attraction. Specifically, the local atmosphere is decided also by the quality of life and of air, and refers both to a specific sensory ‘‘smellscape’’ (containing smells of food, of green

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areas, buildings, industrial areas and garbage dumps) and to the cultural scene.31 Now let us compare such an aesthetic concept of atmosphere with Heidegger’s concept of disposition (Befindlichkeit), as it was worked out in Being and T ime. This term is in three respects understood negatively: 1. A mood falls outside the realm of reflection, it suddenly ‘‘falls upon’’ (u¨berfa¨llt) the person who abandons himself to the world. 2. As we all know, Heidegger emphasises in his analyses only negative dispositions (Verstimmungen) and thus cannot find any other immediate effect of entering such a mood than turning away from it and trying to avoid it.32 The direct attack of moods is further described by Heidegger in metaphors of blindness and darkness, which is another manner of stating the lack of consciousness: In ihr [in der Verstimmung] wird das Dasein ihm selbst gegenu¨ber blind, die besorgte Umwelt verschleiert sich, die Umsicht des Besorgens wird mißleitet.33

And 3. Disposition does indeed open the being of Dasein, but solely in its being here (Da), in its facticity (Faktizita¨t) or throwness (Geworfenheit).34 In contrast, an aesthetics that takes into consideration various kinds of sensory experience and not only the visual one might throw a new light over the concept of atmosphere. First of all, man is never totally at the mercy of a disposition, but disposes also over instruments to influence, to transform and even to produce it through his aesthetic work. Secondly, the same negative moods are experienced differently in the realm of art and in everyday life, similarly to the aesthetic categories of the sublime and tragic. And finally, atmospheres do not necessarily dismantle only Dasein’s facticity, but its very being in the world and the interdependence between humans and their environment, too. Aroma ‘‘Aroma’’ is actually the ancient Greek and Latin word for condiments, and its literal meaning is exclusively positive, referring to fragrances, to pleasantly pungent or sweet smells or to spicy dishes. Metaphorically, ‘‘aromatic’’ designates a subtle pervasive quality, some special property of an object that individualises this and renders it unique. As an aesthetically relevant concept, aroma is taken here precisely in this wide meaning and applied to configurations characterised through slight deviations

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from the rule, in which minor but essential details determine the aesthetic value of the whole. For the sake of clarification let us take again a concrete literary example. A well-known popular tale, widespread from the Balkans to Central Europe, tells a story quite similar to King L ear: a king asks his three daughters which of them loves him most. The youngest answers merely: ‘‘as salt in the dishes’’; the king, failing to notice her subtlety, condemns her to exile. The ‘‘salt in the dishes’’ is that inconspicuous element which brings something to the fullness of its nature, just as spices bring food to its full flavour. Unsalted dishes are as insipid as a joke without a punch line. Following an ancient pre-Christian tradition, in several languages ‘‘salt’’ means metaphorically that which gives piquancy and pungency to wits and plaisanteries or renders interesting les ouvrages de l ’esprit. Rhetorical discourses, writings and everything witty have to contain in some way a ‘‘grain of salt,’’ and the ‘‘salt of the earth’’ are not only the better people, but above all the creative personalities. The ancient sculptor Polykleitos interpreted beauty as an effect of para mikron: both an excess and a deficiency, measured according to the immanent law of the ‘‘good form,’’ destroy the configuration’s global harmony. In other words, aesthetic quality consists in fine, infinitesimal differences and should be employed, just like culinary or fragrant aromas, only in small doses. An ‘‘underdose’’ of aesthetic quality is dull and frustrating, conversely, an ‘‘overdose’’ annoys, makes the impression of kitsch, or desensitises the perceiver. In the early 1990s, Wolfgang Welsch examined closely what he called the process of a universal aesthetisation, a trend that pervades life-style, urban planning, economic production and IT no less than the philosophy of science and ethics.35 Once we identify the aesthetic quality with the character of uniqueness, the ongoing process we are witnessing in which everyone tries to be or to bring out something more and more ‘‘special’’ can be seen to be a part of this encompassing trend of aesthetisation. Even culinary trends provide good examples for this reign of the particular over the general, and in my opinion it is not by accident that gastronomy these days considers precisely condiments and flavours as the key-note of taste. Likewise, the food industry produces artificial flavours that simulate or intensify the ingredients’ natural colour and taste; these concentrated flavours or essences (Essenzen) are added to the aliment from outside, the aliment’s real essence (Wesen) seems to be something that can exist also separate from the thing whose essence it is.

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But in a universe of mere differences nothing makes any difference; in a world containing only essences, everything becomes accidental. Each difference has to diverge from something, from a certain standard or a common course of action; to be ‘‘special’’ and ‘‘unique’’ makes sense only in a system of identities and differences, i.e. within an order. Consequently, the aesthetic character has to be defined structurally, as diacritical difference within a cultural field. The example of culinary aromas as perceptible essences teaches us to be moderate in aesthetic styling. Gastronomy – as its classic authors repeatedly emphasised – is made for gourmets and not for gourmands; the French creators of perfumes counterbalance the importance of technical criteria of fragrances (impact, diffusion, tenacity, substantivity and volume) with specific aesthetic values, such as complexity and refinement of the olfactory composition, etc. The 18th century provides good evidence that miniatures and in general an aesthetics of the infinitesimal do not necessarily have to degenerate into kitsch or into a flat idyllic, but may promote aesthetic categories like delicacy, refinement, elegance, subtlety, wit, etc. Art theory is often inclined to a certain maximalism, focusing on those art forms that embody the ‘‘highest’’ values of the tragic, sublime, monumental, eternal and universal. Compared with that, an aesthetics grounded on the experience of touch, smell and taste appears to be rather a minima aesthetica, whose works set in the foreground fine differences, concentrated essences and vague atmospheres. Correspondingly, their production and consumption, too, demand sensorial acuity, tactfulness, discretion, flair and even sapience.36 PECULIARITIES OF THE THEORETICAL DISCOURSE ON TOUCH, SMELL AND TASTE

a. Metaphors Anthropological and ethno-linguistic research has established that the terminology used by the Indo-European languages for the above mentioned three senses is in general distinctly poorer than that of the nonIndo-European languages. It is even speculated that the history of our languages evolved in this direction along with a progressive impoverishment of the experience of these senses. However, since concrete intercultural investigations on this issue were carried out rather infrequently and are still in an incipient phase,37 one can only presume that the common philosophical conviction about the inferiority of touch, smell and taste

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in the modern European and North-American culture might be grounded to a great extent in a specific historical (under)development of the corresponding sensory experience and linguistic discourse. This supposition implies also practically the necessity to initiate pedagogical projects dedicated explicitly to the cultivation of the ‘‘lower’’ senses. It is not only this linguistic poverty, however, but also the prominent synaesthetic tendency of touch, smell and taste which leads to metaphorical descriptions of their sensory qualities (e.g. ‘‘a sweet smell,’’ etc.), raising the question how it is possible to get over this methodological difficulty and work out a phenomenology of these senses. My own position on this point is that theoretical discourse neither can nor should endeavour to leave out all ‘‘indirect’’ descriptions concerning the ‘‘secondary’’ senses, but rather should become aware of the presence of open or concealed metaphors and of specific semantic constellations in different language families. One good example for how acknowledging the metaphoric nature of everyday language may prove itself productive in phenomenology is once again Hermann Schmitz’ theory of atmospheres, and particularly his detailed analysis on the spatiality of feelings. Schmitz argues that atmospheres are inseparable from corporeal affects, although they belong to a different order. Such bodily secondary effects may be vertical impulses of direction (elevating or depressing), centripetal and centrifugal impulses (of narrowing – Engung – or expanding – Weitung), and flow-experiences (the feeling that something runs through one’s body or, conversely, the feeling of being inwardly dry, as in the mystical literature).38 Even the intentional character of dispositions is described here topologically, through concentration (Verdichtung) of the feeling and its anchoring or embodiment (Verankerung) in a concrete point. For a theory that had striven originally to become a strenge W issenschaft, the spatial descriptions of affective atmospheres appear to be stricto sensu metaphorical.39 Not only philosophy, but also modern art is challenged by the immanently metaphorical discourse on touch, smell and taste. One of the most common strategies of contemporary artists is to situate their works, installations or performances that address these senses in between a literal and metaphorical meaning, not so much by constructing new metaphors (as we usually expect from art), but, on the contrary, by deconstructing metaphors. Many artists belonging for example to Eat Art or Body Art (Daniel Spoerri, Piero Manzoni, Joseph Beuys, Orlan, Teresa Margolles, etc.) take common metaphors literally and visualise them or dismantle

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the original metaphorical basis of so-called ‘‘dead metaphors’’ (a trope known in the rhetoric as ‘‘catachresis’’). b. Narrativity From a classical epistemological perspective, sensibility plays the role of the primary source of experience and of a transient stage that should be overcome in reaching the ‘‘real’’ knowledge, i.e. the ideal meaning that lies beyond time. In the case of the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences, given their basic temporality, the representations remain somehow open or incomplete. Hence it follows that such an essentially dynamic experience cannot be apprehended by framing it in a rigid system of concepts, and is more likely to be captured within narrative structures. The visible patina ‘‘tells’’ a – collective – story (Germ. Geschichte) of a common past of people and things, and so does the atmosphere of a historical site and even a tattoo with its personal background-story. Classical gastronomic writings40 prove how fond gourmets are of short stories and anecdotes; this genre was cultivated in the 1930s by the Futurists (Marinetti, Fillı`a), on the occasion of their avant-garde banquets; and since the 1960s it has been continued by prominent representatives of Eat-Art.41 We should also not forget the well-known Proustian episode of tasting the madeleine, a classical example for how fragrances and sapors contribute to the constitution of the self ’s identity. The repeated experience of the same (gustatory or olfactory) ‘‘essence’’ binds together separate lived moments into the continuous thread of a life-story; to be a person means to have a biography. Behind the narrative structure of a phenomenological aesthetics one may find a basic aesthetic principle, summed up by Sartre’s hero Roquentin as follows: Voila` ce que j’ai pense´: pour que l’e´ve`nement le plus banal devienne une aventure, il faut et il suffit qu’on se mette a` le raconter.42

In the moment when the most banal objects of common use or simple dishes begin to tell a story, their own story, in the same moment when one discovers the story behind the muteness of things, these are metamorphosed into aesthetic phenomena. Artists are often in our age not so much genuine creative persons invested with the romantic attributes of genius, but interpretive agents that understand how to let the things manifest themselves, i.e. how to liberate them to their story and unleash

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in them an ‘‘immanent’’ poetry. With an expression of Heinrich Rombach, art is a sort of ‘‘Pha¨nopraxie’’.43 However, this practice is by no means (at least nowadays) the act of a presumed pure aesthetic conscience, and the idea of isolation as the artistic gesture par excellence turns out to be untenable. Specifically, the aesthetic purism intended by the initial phenomenological aesthetics (Moritz Geiger, etc.) should be revised through a ‘‘cultural turn’’ of aesthetics: the aesthetic border of experiences in the realm of touch, smell and taste remains not only often imprecise, but is also deeply culturally embedded, and the corresponding aesthetics lays particular stress on the continuity between everyday life and art. Although art is still at its core, aesthetics should nevertheless be able to give an account ultimately also of cultural rituals that are aesthetic in nuce (like drinking tea, smoking, etc.) or of things having an uncertain status between functional and aesthetic artefacts (like old toys, souvenirs, etc.).

SENSIBILITY – THE PRIMARY SENSE OF AN AESTHETICS OF THE ‘‘SECONDARY’’ SENSES

I noted previously that the very perception of patina, atmospheres or blends requires a fine sensorium for infinitesimal differences or, in other words, sensibility, as the first condition of artistic creativity. Sensibility is always reactive (relative to concrete circumstances) and covers both sensory and an affective experience. And if it is often mistrusted as being synonymous with receptivity and vulnerability, with over-sensitiveness and susceptibility to be affected by external stimuli, let us remind ourselves that sensibility implies also an exceptional openness to emotional impressions, as well as the aptitude to apprehend small deviations in the realm of perception, feeling and interpretation, and to respond spontaneously to the slightest changes of the environment. Thus sensitiveness implies not only fragility, but also sharpness of perception and tactfulness and disposes over its own, usually underestimated power. To summarize, the knot of sensibility binds together various subjective faculties: sensory perception and feeling, ‘‘critical sense’’ (in the original meaning of krinein, as the ability to apprehend differences) and taste, and finally impressionability. Phenomenology stresses the primacy of (personal) experience; the corresponding aesthetics claims even more to develop adequately the researcher’s ‘‘sensibility’’ (in all the above mentioned senses); and, in addition, due to the complex symbolic meaning of

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sensory experience inside a culture, it demands openness for an intercultural experience. The French word sensible was introduced into the German language in the 18th century, at the same time that aesthetics was grounded as a philosophical discipline. In my opinion this is no mere coincidence, but signifies rather the status of the aesthetic experience in the Western world, as a mediating link between (intellectual) sense and (meaningless) senses. To be more precise, the sensible man is neither the Auf kla¨rer, the rationalist of the L umie`res raisonne´es, whose universal essence (reason) ought to be the same in all cultures, nor le bon sauvage, who possesses keen senses but is deprived of raison, nor even the sentimental Romantic. The critics have seen in sensibilite´ a consequence of the process of civilisation; conversely, its supporters have praised its capacity to invest meaning in a perceptible phenomenon, considered as an incipient source of artistic productivity. In any case, in contrast with hermeneutics, an aesthetics of sensibility rehabilitates non-semantic criteria of the aesthetic experience. But let us finally return once more to the history of language: in German, the meanings of ‘‘sense’’ and ‘‘senses’’ were originally undifferentiated in the word Sinnlichkeit, and Sinn referred to a movement and to the effort to maintain a certain direction in the movement.44 Accordingly, sense would be the target and direction of the subject’s search (in other words, sense as meaning), as well as what sets in motion the search itself and its (sensory) means. Sense and pleasure are thus interrelated in the basic movements of attraction and repulsion, understood as spatial forces or vectors (what is pleasant and makes sense attracts the subject, the unpleasant or absurd is rejected). In a topological aesthetics the object may be represented as a milieu that surrounds the subject, as the field inside which differences occur, while the experiencing subject is defined primarily through sensibility as the faculty of making distinctions: in regard to perception, sensibility means sharpness of the senses (Germ. Scharfsinn); concerning feelings, it requires sensitivity (Feingefu¨hl) to atmospheres and moods (which is not to be understood only negatively, as being offended or hurt); and lastly, semantically, the consumer’s sensibility undoes what we called earlier the process of poetical-condensation (Verdichtung) of infinitesimal traces into a perceptible configuration, by breaking down its complex composition and the concrete operations of producing it, or letting it become manifest.45 Academy of Fine Arts, V ienna

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1 First, patina is produced involuntarily on objects of common use that are frequently touched. And secondly, one cannot guess, just by looking at the patina, who has ever touched the object before. 2 See ‘‘la surface d’une profondeur’’ as definition of the visible in Merleau-Ponty’s L e V isible et l’Invisible, suivi de notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 180. 3 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 45. 4 See the etymology of ‘‘digital’’, from Lat. digitus – finger. 5 Friedrich W. Heubach, ‘‘Das «Resopal»-Mo¨bel oder Die Sinne nehmen nicht einfach die Dinge auf, sondern in ihnen auch eine Form an: Jedes gegensta¨ndliche Design ist immer auch ein Design der Sinnlichkeit’’, in Das bedingte L eben. T heorie der psycho-logischen Gegensta¨ndlichkeit der Dinge. Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie des Alltags (2nd ed., Mu¨nchen: Fink, 1996), pp. 126–133. 6 The interpretation of patina has obvious practical implications in the realm of art restoration. In this respect, let us remember that already Alois Riegl mentioned situations in which a monument’s ‘‘relative value’’ and its ‘‘value of age’’ collide (‘‘Wesen und Entstehung des modernen Denkmalkultus’’, in Kunstwerk oder Denkmal ? Alois Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege, ed. Ernst Bacher, Wien, Ko¨ln, Weimar: Bo¨hlau, 1995, p. 94). 7 The concept cristallisation is used by Merleau-Ponty for the process of concretising visibility (op. cit., 174 sq.), and the phenomenon itself is described here as a ‘‘pellicule de l’eˆtre’’ or as an ‘‘extrait spe´culaire’’ (ibid., p. 309). However, Merleau-Ponty considers the aesthetic process as de´hiscence, incompossibilite´, fission, and e´clatement (ibid., pp. 269, 309, etc.), whereas what I have called here poetical-concentration suggests quite the opposite. 8 ‘‘[...] l’eˆtre charnel, comme eˆtre des profondeurs [...] et pre´sentation d’une certaine absence, est un prototype de l’eˆtre [...]’’ (ibid., p. 179). 9 See, for example, Kant about the ‘‘barbaric’’ taste, that finds pleasure in the ‘‘Beimischung der Reize und Ru¨hrungen’’ (ibid., § 13) and, for the critique of the social-historical roots of the antithesis between culture and vital pleasure in the 18th century aesthetics, Pierre Bourdieu, L a distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1979). 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (2nd ed., Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, [Paul Siebeck], 1965), p. 281. 11 Hermann Schmitz finds in Aristotle (De caelo B, 286a 26–28) support for his interpretation of joy as a ‘‘field of lightness’’ (L eichtigkeitsfeld) and opposes lightness, positively understood as the natural movement of materials upwards, to the force of gravitation in the physics (Der Gefu¨hlsraum. System der Philosophie III. 2, Bonn: Bouvier, 1969, p. 116). 12 Juhani Pallasmaa, Hapticity and T ime – Notes on Fragile Architecture, RIBA Discourse Lecture 1999, RIBA Architecture Gallery, London, Typoscript, p. 9. 13 Hubert Tellenbach, Geschmack und Atmospha¨re. Medien menschlichen Elementarkontaktes (Salzburg: Otto Mu¨ller, 1968), p. 47. 14 Schmitz, op. cit., pp. 53–58; Tellenbach, op. cit., pp. 59 sq. For example, according to Schmitz, an atmosphere can be described adequately only in the first person and is present solely for the person who feels it and only as long as he is aware of it. 15 The atmospheres are interpreted from a phenomenological perspective by Hermann Schmitz, Der Gefu¨hlsraum ... (ed. cit., p. XIV); Gernot Bo¨hme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen u¨ber ¨ sthetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Mu¨nchen: Fink, 2001); idem, Fu¨r eine o¨koloA gische Natura¨sthetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989 (3rd ed. 1999), especially p. 148 sq.; ¨ ber das Atmospha¨rische (Ostfildern: Tertium, 1998); idem, Atmospha¨re: idem, Anmutungen: U

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¨ sthetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 11995, 3rd ed. 2000); Tellenbach, Essays zu einer neuen A ‘‘Der Geschmack und das Atmospha¨rische’’ (op. cit., pp. 41–67); Michael Hauskeller, Atmospha¨ren erleben. Philosophische Untersuchungen zur Sinneswahrnehmung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), etc. 16 Marc Crunelle, ‘‘Geruchssinn und Architektur,’’ in Das Riechen. Von Nasen, Du¨ften und Gestank, ed. U. Brandes, C. Neumann, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Schriftenreihe Forum, vol. 5 (Go¨ttingen: Steidl, 1995), p. 173. ` la recherche du temps perdu III, ed. Thierry 17 Marcel Proust, L e Coˆte´ des Guermantes. A Laget, Brian G. Rogers (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), pp. 353 sq. 18 Emotions are usually circumscribed bodily; in contrast, atmospheres designate generally for Schmitz feelings vaguely located in a wide space, being therefore similar to the climatic atmospheres (like weather) and to those related to seasons and moments of the day (Schmitz, op. cit., p. 98). Atmospheres are then classified as supra-personal, personal (i.e. related to persons), and religious (ibid., pp. 98–133). 19 Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (2nd ed., Pfullingen: Neske, 1960), p. 46. 20 Idem, Sein und Zeit (16th ed., Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1986), § 29, p. 136. 21 ‘‘Dasein ist wesenhaft ent-fernend, es la¨ßt als das Seiende, das es ist, je Seiendes in die Na¨he begegnen.’’ (Ibid., § 23, p. 105.) 22 Ibid., § 27, pp. 126–130. 23 Personne was precisely the name given by Merleau-Ponty to the seer before his concrete manifestation in the world: ‘‘Le sujet percevant, comme eˆtre-a` tacite, silencieux, [...] – le soi de la perception comme ‘personne’, au sens d’Ulysse, comme l’anonyme enfoui dans le monde et qui n’y a pas encore trace´ son sillage. [...] Anonymat et ge´ne´ralite´. Cela veut dire: non pas un nichtiges Nichts, mais un ‘lac de non-eˆtre’, un certain ne´ant enlise´ dans une ouverture locale et temporelle [...]’’ (op. cit., p. 254). 24 Tellenbach, op. cit., p. 17. 25 About ‘‘resonanzgebundene Gefu¨hle’’ see Schmitz, op. cit., pp. 148–150. 26 Schmitz and Bo¨hme mention also ‘‘contrastive feelings’’ or ‘‘experiences of discrepancy,’’ like when one’s own mood is in obvious contradiction with the mood outside (e.g. a funeral on a sunny day, etc.). Especially the attempt to avoid negative atmospheres (the uncanny, frightening, threatening) proves that we can experience feelings that belong neither to us, nor to other persons, but somehow lie in the air. ¨ sthetische Andacht: Distanz in der Ergriffenheit,’’ in Der L eib, der Raum und 27 Schmitz, ‘‘A die Gefu¨hle (Ostfildern: Tertium, 1998), pp. 91–105. 28 For example, Levinas reformulates the principle of identity as ‘‘A a-oie’’ and interprets it as the process of ‘‘re´sonnance ou production de l’essence en guise d’œuvres d’art’’ (Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela` de l’essence, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974, pp. 51 sq.). 29 Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 262, etc. 30 By that is meant here the English garden, whose scenes reproduce various affective atmospheres. Moreover, the philosophy of nature found in the last few decades a renewed interest in Romanticism and in its approach to nature as a field of dynamic forces. 31 Here is an example taken from the folder of an Austrian tourism agency that advertises for ‘‘Berlin – Hauptstadt mit Flair’’: ‘‘Die deutsche Hauptstadt zeigt sich lebendiger denn je zuvor. Ob Kurfu¨rstendamm, Brandenburger Tor, Alexanderplatz oder das Pergamonmuseum, die Metropole Berlin hat Kunst und Kultur zu bieten, die jeden Besucher mit seiner Vielfalt an Scha¨tzen beeindrucken wird. Schnuppern Sie Berliner Luft, und lassen Sie sich von der einzigartigen Großstadtatmospha¨re verzaubern.’’

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32 ‘‘Die Befindlichkeit erschließt das Dasein in seiner Geworfenheit und zuna¨chst und zumeist in der Weise der ausweichenden Abkehr’’ (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 29, ed. cit. p. 136). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., pp. 135–136. ¨ sthetische – eine Schlu¨sselkategorie unserer Zeit?’’, in 35 Wolfgang Welsch, ‘‘Das A ¨ sthetischen, ed. W. Welsch (Mu¨nchen: Fink, 1993), pp. 13–47; a Die Aktualita¨t des A revised and supplemented version of this study was then published under the title ¨ sthetisierungsprozesse – Pha¨nomene, Unterscheidungen, Perspektiven’’ in his volume ‘‘A ¨ sthetik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), pp. 9–61. Grenzga¨nge der A 36 See the common linguistic root of sapid and sapient, from the Latin sapire, meaning ‘‘to know’’, but also ‘‘to taste’’. 37 An example is Joel C. Kuipers’ study on ‘‘Matters of Taste in Weye´wa,’’ where he analysed ‘‘natural’’ correspondences in a community from Sumba (Eastern Indonesia): as bitter or bland (from a ritual perspective: as prohibited or permitted) are regarded here women no less than fragrances, dishes, and periods of the agricultural cycle. The author concludes that this categorial pair does not function descriptively, but performatively. (In T he Varieties of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1991, p. 122.) 38 See Schmitz, op. cit., pp. 161 sq. 39 Schmitz himself warns that every distinction between feelings and bodily proprioception in describing moods remains ‘‘imprecise’’ (ibid., p. 152). 40 See Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynie`re, E´crits gastronomiques, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Union ge´ne´rale d’e´ditions, 1997); Michel Onfray, L a raison gourmande. Philosophie du gouˆt (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1995); idem, L e ventre des philosophes. Critique de la raison die´te´tique ([Paris:] E´d. Grasset & Fasquelle, 1989), etc. 41 Spoerri showed himself to be a talented ‘‘story-teller’’ about things already in his T ableaux-pie`ges and in T opographie ane´cdote´e du hasard (Anekdoten zu einer T opographie des Zufalls, Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1998), and this narrating passion did not leave him until the series of collages containing objects found at the flea-market, produced in the last decade and entitled suggestively Histoires trouve´es. Where Duchamp took out the objets trouve´s from their practical, functional context, and invested them with new meanings by introducing them into a total different environment, Spoerri integrates his ready-mades together with the objects’ previous story in the new work of art and creates a surrealistic sort of heterogeneous ‘‘pluriverse,’’ in which objects tell incongruent stories. 42 Jean-Paul Sartre, L a Nause´e (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 57. 43 Heinrich Rombach, ‘‘Das Pha¨nomen Pha¨nomen,’’ in Neuere Entwicklungen des Pha¨nomenbegriVs, with contributions of H. Rombach, G. Funke, E. Ave´-Lallemant, O. Po¨ggeler, K. Hartmann, B. Waldenfels (Freiburg, Mu¨nchen: Alber, 1980), pp. 7–32. 44 See Deutsches Wo¨rterbuch von Jacob und W ilhelm Grimm, vol. 16, Mu¨nchen: dtv, 1991 [1st ed. 1905], p. 1103 sq., and Sybille Kra¨mer, ‘‘Sinnlichkeit, Denken, Medien: Von der ‘Sinnlichkeit als Erkenntnisform’ zur ‘Sinnlichkeit als Performanz’,’’ in Der Sinn der Sinne, ed. Claudia Neumann, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Go¨ttingen: Steidl, 1998), pp. 24–39. 45 It suffices to have here in mind how the connoisseur ‘‘interprets’’ wines or the creator of perfumes judges fragrances.

MAO CHEN

THE PERSISTENCE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL TIME: REFLECTIONS ON THREE RECENT CHINESE FILMS

Recent Chinese cinema demonstrates that temporal experience is crucial to the lives of individual characters, not only in helping the viewer understand the place of the particular life in a general historical setting, but more importantly in demonstrating how the individual can maintain a small but crucial distance from the historical forces that threaten to destroy all remnants of personal integrity. It is true that many of the new films seem to represent a static situation in which major characters largely repeat the roles assigned to them in advance. However, the role of the individual in the recent films often suggests how personal performances are related to narratives that unfold in time. The character invariably acquires the significance of an individual who acts in response to various pressures that provide the self with a relative sense of identity. Hence the meaning of time in the recent cinema is related to the quality of each performance as it combines the possibilities of freedom and constraint in a delimited social world. The purpose of this paper is to examine three works of major ‘fifth generation’ Chinese film directors in order to indicate the phenomenological meaning of time as constant in human affairs. Chen Kaige’s ‘‘Farewell My Concubine,’’ the first film under consideration, is concerned with how various roles confine the individual but subsequently provide a basis for self-assertion. The protagonist of this film, Chen Dieyi, is forced as a young boy to perform various female roles in classical Beijing opera. His early success is impressive, but it also entails psychological distortion, since it imposes antiquated cultural roles on the potentially modern Chinese subject. Nonetheless, we cannot be certain that the imposed identity is in any case entirely false. Chen Dieyi manages to harmonize various female roles with his operatic performances in a flawless and seemingly natural manner. Moreover, as Xiao Shitou, he establishes a functional relationship to a male counterpart, Xiao Douzi, enabling him to employ his singing abilities for social purposes. As long as classical opera commands a degree of respect in Chinese society, Chen Dieyi can comfortably integrate an artificial persona into an artistic setting that stands in for the aesthetic autonomy of the privileged individual. 149 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 149–156. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Artistic performance, however, is not unaccompanied by violent rejection during the various stages of Chen Dieyi’s career. Even as a child, he is abused by his opera-school master for violating well-known conventions related to matters of gender representation. It may be observed in this early stage that his artistic performances do not have a purely aesthetic significance but signal a complete departure from established social norms. His contrived persona, therefore, involves a degree of distortion when considered in terms of a cultural system that has adopted a conservative view of gender. From this conservative standpoint, we might be struck as well that the filmmaker has chosen to employ classical opera as a metaphor implying cultural distortion, since the classical is generally identified with what is normative rather than with what is socially deviant. Chen Dieyi’s fate as an artistic individual is intrinsically related to the eruption of China’s Cultural Revolution as a destructive force that threatens his entire career and seriously damages his self-esteem. The director of this film, Chen Kaige, demonstrates how art and history can be entirely at odds in a period of intense social change. Once classical opera is denounced as culturally decadent by political authorities, Chen Dieyi must face violent opposition to his carefully arranged public life. It is perhaps true that his performances are not merely intended for the select few but are in some sense popular in appealing to the typical Beijing opera enthusiast. However, with the coming of the Cultural Revolution, popular attitudes themselves undergo considerable change in an atmosphere of fear and repression. Chen Dieyi is singled out for special humiliation at a moment when anything that bears the slightest relationship to the old order is violently attacked. As the opera troupe is placed under surveillance and ultimately disrupted, Chen Dieyi survives by accident as a cultural refugee who has been cruelly humiliated for threatening the integrity of well-established gender roles. A final episode that derives from classical opera not only clarifies the title of the film but provides crucial insights into what has been important from the outset. The title, ‘‘Farewell My Concubine,’’ refers to an ancient legend in which the emperor’s favorite lover decides to die in honor of her revered lord, who is doomed to be defeated by his enemies. However, when Chen Dieyi stages this tragic event by assuming the female role in what turns out to be a last performance, he willingly falls before his lifelong companion and commits suicide in a deadly ritual that ceases to have a purely aesthetic meaning. Chen Dieyi’s actual suicide, therefore, becomes a shocking reminder of the violence and distortion of humanity to which he has been subjected all along. Moreover, it also comes to

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represent the temporal experience of being limited to a human fate, rather than firmly related to a mythic sphere of unchanging values. This climactic scene demonstrates how the film as a whole integrates the classical tradition in a predominantly ironic manner. Hence, instead of representing the continuation of classical tradition in modern guise, the major character in this film ultimately comes to remind us of both the violence of history and the limited capacity of any human performance to forestall the advance of time, which remains inexorable, despite the importance of aesthetic form to the human subject. Zhang Yimou’s film, ‘‘To Live,’’ the second film at issue, is also concerned with the way that performance can lend meaning to the passage of time and enable the individual to confront humiliating public experiences. Unlike ‘‘Farewell My Concubine,’’ this film is often sardonic and humorous as well as deeply disturbing as a commentary on modern Chinese life. ‘‘To Live’’ employs a semi-documentary style, which was commonly exploited for political ends during China’s communist period; instead of supporting an optimistic ideology, however, this film constantly reminds us of the gap between political promises and everyday realities that gradually discredits the custodians of power. ‘‘To Live’’ is a film about survival, but it makes use of various cinematic devices such as a wide panoramic screen and pseudo-heroic posturing to deflate the pretentious rhetoric that often accompanies grandiose political discourse. The difference between sheer survival and the illusions of ideology lies at the heart of a film about what so often happened to the ordinary people during turbulent periods in modern Chinese history. The main character in ‘‘To Live’’ is Fugui, a good-natured Chinese aristocrat who loses his home in a gambling fiasco, but becomes a puppetmaster in order to survive the succession of regimes that rule his homeland. Fugui’s skill for survival is no doubt one of the basic themes of the film, which demonstrates how a combination of luck and cunning enables him to confront the changes inherent in politically unstable circumstances. By adopting the vocation of puppeteer, Fugui demonstrates how the simplest act of performance can serve as a safety-net in an increasingly precarious situation that relegates the performer to the margins of history. It is particularly ironic that Fugui’s instrument of survival is the puppetshow, since the puppet is an inanimate object that must be manipulated in order to be given the illusion of vitality. Nonetheless, the puppet-show becomes the key to survival in a world that requires entertainment and can make allowances to the performing artist in a time that normally

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calls upon the individual to choose sides in an unending contest between rival powers. As a parody of the socialist propaganda film, ‘‘To Live’’ reintroduces the theme of lived time at specific junctures when the events at hand begin to lose their political credibility. The episode involving the birth of a child that occurs at the height of the Cultural Revolution dramatizes how a modern medical system cannot function once it is dismantled for political reasons. In this case, the trauma of child-birth becomes catastrophic with the passing of time as needed professional help cannot be secured for the purpose of delivering an infant. By the same token, Fugui’s readjustment to each new regime always occurs in the nick of time, suggesting how every compromise with state power is both fragile and subject to shifting conditions. The reconstructed ‘family’ that emerges at the end of the film is less of a symbol of China reborn than a reminder that survival is often fortuitous, rather than intelligible within the broader context of an unfolding political destiny. In truth, the use of parody constantly undermines the notion of a grand narrative as enshrined in modern progressive discourse, and yet it also allows the viewer to construct a more subjective alternative to the predominantly political narrative that no longer serves the purpose of sustaining the belief in a rational future. ‘‘To Live’’ is largely based on the essential opposition between the lived time of the imperiled self and a false sense of the absolute that is fostered by political ideologies. Fugui is a true performer who begins as a gambler and ends as one individual among others who have also survived due to a happy conjunction of personal gifts and unforeseen circumstances. The metaphor of gambling is important to the film throughout, since the dimension of chance is not only related to Fugui’s initial performance in a game that results in his loss of home, but it is also a crucial aspect of his performance in life. When Fugui becomes a puppet-master, he turns himself into a performer in a basic sense: his success as an entertainer becomes the sole guarantee for his survival in life. The metaphor of gambling is at odds with the implications of the official ideology. Zhang Yimou uses the ‘monumental’ qualities of the conventional propaganda film in placing the elements of risk and uncertainty that permeate individual life in opposition to the static qualities that are promoted by inflexible political agendas. The evanescence of life becomes a pretext for pathos as well as humor when characters demonstrate a capacity to respond to various challenges in a spirit of generosity and good will. In the end, the

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passing of time quietly indicates the limitations of the ruling ideology to impose its iron will on the fragile human subject. Temporality as a category of human experience also serves an essential function in ‘‘The Road Home,’’ the third film at issue in this phenomenological study. This remarkable film, also directed by Zhang Yimou, indicates how a rift between political culture and lived experience casts light on generational differences, submerged social conflicts and the human sensibility in all its complexity. The main character in ‘‘The Road Home’’ is an old woman, Zhao Di, who recalls her early life in a Chinese peasant village during the early years of socialist upheaval. The film is mostly composed of an extended flashback that reveals Zhao Di’s youthful love affair with Luo Changyu, an itinerant country-school teacher who represents a relatively idealistic moment in the history of Chinese socialism. The film begins with a frame story in which Zhao Di’s returning son, Luo Yusheng, becomes a double of his father as a country-school teacher, soon to be recalled, while the heart of the narrative takes the viewer to a vanished time that is more promising than anything that exists in the present. The use of the framing device has important implications for the way that time is recreated as a human experience that divides the protagonist’s life into two distinct phases. The early scenes in the film draw upon Zhao Di’s present-day situation as a disillusioned survivor, remembering China’s violent political past but also recalling her love affair with the young country-school teacher who, long ago, inspired respect for learning and hope for a more humane world. This early part of the film, however, is presented in black and white to emphasize the monotonous quality of life in contemporary China. After her son returns home, Zhao Di becomes increasingly absorbed in the past. Her retrospective tendencies are probably encouraged by the fact that her own son in many ways resembles her late husband, Luo Changyu, the honored country-school teacher, particularly in his idealism and interest in restoring the nearby schoolhouse in which the village children met for lessons in a bygone era. Hence, as the film begins to focus more and more on the Zhao Di’s memories, the spectator is invited to view the past as a radiant place of vibrancy and color. The movement of the wind across the yellow fields, the red flowers that glow on the abundant sunlight, and the firm structure of the village schoolhouse are only some of the vital images that turn the second part of the film into an intensely emotional experience. In structuring this film, Zhang Yimou skillfully inverts commonsense assumptions about the relationship between past and present. ‘‘The Road

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Home’’ is based on the idea that the remembered past can be more vivid than the endured present. However implausible this idea may seem to be, the film convinces us that past experiences often contain existential possibilities that were more alive yesterday than today and can become important to the present. The person who can recall the past is therefore in the special position of being able to voluntarily re-live what would not be available to an individual who is differently situated. As the film offers us a dynamic vision of what actually occurred in a more optimistic time, we gradually begin to understand how the past is in some sense reclaimed as a guide to the future. The late country-school teacher who strove to educate the village schoolchildren under difficult circumstances becomes the distant precursor of his son, attempting to restore the abandoned schoolhouse, damaged by time but sufficiently intact to inspire hope for a brighter day. Zhang Yimou’s use of cinematography in this film sustains the difference between scenes from the present, which are monotonous and colorless, and those of the past, which are remarkably beautiful and bring what is distant in time very close to the viewer. Thus, instead of emphasizing how immediate perception – in the sense of what can be perceived in the here and now – provides the most potent image of everyday reality, ‘‘The Road Home’’ demonstrates how memory can produce a more vital sense of life than what appears to us on the basis of direct experience. The concept of lived experience is broadened in a manner that takes into account the emotional and volitional aspects of perception, which are perhaps more strongly brought into proximity through a special combination of memory and imagination than through the pale image of the world that constitutes the barren landscape of the present. The title of the film is truthful and ironic insofar as it faithfully expresses the view that Zhao Di’s past is her final destiny, just as it seems to suggest, against the message of the film, that home lies immediately ahead, when, on the contrary, it is available partly through the vehicle of the returning son, who unexpectedly restores the past to a new position of importance. Ultimately, the past is no longer past but transforms the present into something that can be experienced in a more intense way, not only because the past provides the setting for the present, but also because the present resembles a practical moment that is being repeated in another time. Repetition in this case, nonetheless, is not a blind action but an informed engagement with the realities of the present, which turns out to be much like the past, particularly in the way that it invokes the possibility

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of bridging the gap between old and young through a renewal of the school as a symbol of shared knowledge and generational continuity. ‘‘The Road Home’’ is veritably unique among recent Chinese films in demonstrating with great clarity how human consciousness can sustain the conditions for existential rebirth in changing circumstances. ‘‘Farewell My Concubine’’ and ‘‘To Live’’ are concerned with the capacity of the individual to survive, if not to flourish, in a world of diminished prospects. Both films show how historical events impinge on the lives of individuals, deforming their potential but never entirely destroying their creative capacities as human beings who continue to demonstrate their skill and ingenuity in social contexts. ‘‘The Road Home,’’ however, is more phenomenological in presenting all of the actions at issue within the purview of a single consciousness. The dramatic contrast between past and present is shown to favor what is most vividly remembered over what is limited to immediate perception. The single consciousness that is inscribed with the memory of lived experience, however, becomes the fulcrum of a more compelling view of the world, since the gloom that overtakes Chinese society as it comes to understand the limitations of a dying ideology finally loses its hold over human consciousness. In the moment of awakening, the dawn of hope becomes coextensive with the memory of new beginnings. Skidmore College

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, Chris. ‘‘If China Can Say No, Can China Make Movies? Or, Do Movies Make China? Rethinking National Cinema and National Agency.’’ Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 129–50. ——. Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China. London, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2004. Braester, Yomi. ‘‘Farewell My Concubine: National Myth and City Memories,’’ In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New T akes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 89–96. Chen, Xiaoming. ‘‘The Mysterious Other: Postpolitics in the Narrative of Chinese Film.’’ Boundary 2 24, 3 (1997): 222–38. Chow, Rey. ed., Modern Chinese L iterary and Cultural Studies in the Age of T heory: Reimagining a Field. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ——. ‘‘Silent is the Ancient Plain: Music, Filmmaking and the Conception of Reform in China’s New Cinema.’’ Discourse 12, 2 (1990): 82–109. ——. ‘‘We Endure, Therefore We Are: Survival, Governance, and Zhang Yimou’s T o L ive.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 95, 4 (Fall 1996): 1039–64. Clark, Paul. ‘‘Distance and Memory: Chinese Film in 1990.’’ 1990 Hawaii International Film Festival V iewer’s Guide. Honolulu: East-West Center, 1990.

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Dai, Jinhua. ‘‘The Criss-Cross Vision: Multi-Identification in the Artistic Film in Post-1990 Mainland China.’’ Seminar paper in Chinese Lingnan University, February 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and T ime. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Macmilllan Company, 1931. ——. T he Phenomenology of Internal T ime-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1964. Kaplan, Ann. ‘‘Reading Formations and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.’’ In Sheldon Lu, ed. T ransnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Larson, Wendy. ‘‘The Concubine and the Figure of History: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.’’ In Sheldon Lu, ed., T ransnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. ——. ‘‘Zhang Yimou: Inter/National Aesthetics and Erotics.’’ In Soren Clausen, Roy Starrs and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, eds., Cultural Encounters: China, Japan, and the West: Essays Commemorating 25 Years of East Asian Studies at the University of Aarhus. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995, 215–26. ——. ‘‘Zhang Yimou’s T o L ive and the Field of Film.’’ In Michel Hockx, ed., T he L iterary Field of T wentieth Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. ‘‘National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital: The Films of Zhang Yimou.’’ In Sheldon Lu, ed. T ransnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. ‘‘ ‘Farewell My Concubine’: History, Melodrama, and Ideology in Contemporary Pan-Chinese Cinema.’’ Film Quarterly 49, 1 (Fall, 1995). Ricoeur, Paul. T ime and Narrative, vol. 1–3. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Sutton, Donald S. ‘‘Ritual, History, and the Films of Zhang Yimou.’’ East-West Film Journal 8, 2 (1994): 31–46. Tam, Kwok-kan and Wimal Dissanayake. ‘‘Zhang Yimou: Dramas of Desire and the Power of the Image.’’ New Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Wang, Rujie. ‘‘T o L ive Beyond Good and Evil.’’ Asian Cinema 12, 1 (Spring/Summer): 74–90. Ye, Tan. ‘‘From the Fifth to the Sixth Generation: An Interview with Zhang Yimou.’’ Film Quarterly (Winter 1999).

LAWRENCE KIMMEL

NOTES ON THE ART OF MEMORY

Memory believes before knowing remembers Believes longer than recollects Longer than knowing even wonders. W. Faulkner, L ight in August Let us go then, you and I when the evening is stretched out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table. T. S. Elliot, T he L ove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

A few years ago I was asked to write a piece for a memorial Festschrift for a friend and colleague who had just died. It occurred to me then that remembrance was a very special faculty of mind; this essay takes up the threads of that remembrance. The task of understanding memory is daunting: it is ubiquitous in every aspect of life and thought. I will try to distinguish important features of memory as it functions in our individual and collective lives, but my primary concern is with a particular aspect of remembrance that is a creative resource vital to the lives of individuals and to stories of those lives in the literature of culture. I

Memory is an essential aspect of all thought and feeling. It is engaged and involved as a matter of course in each sentient moment of our lives. Studies in neurophysiology and the science of memory investigate biochemical processes that account for different functions of memory. Recently Barry Gordon (M.D., Ph.D., a professor of neurology and cognitive science at John Hopkins Medical School) in a coauthored book, Intelligent Memory, makes a distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘intelligent’ memory particularly in reference to the loss of memory that occurs with aging. What we might call the ordinary labor of memory is employed in the recording and storing of data, a routine accumulation that constitutes the body and resource of mind that constructs a stable environment and supporting identity. Mostly automatic and a matter of repetition and patterning, this activity is located in a relatively small hippocampus section 157 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 157–177. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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of the brain most vulnerable to the atrophy associated with aging. There is however, a different kind of memory that is a property of nerve cells located throughout the brain; this ‘intelligent memory’ funds an activity that corresponds more to creative work than the routine of labor. This aspect of memory represents a crucial resource of the mind as the residuals of routine memory fade, one that remains active as long as it is engaged in new activities of learning, a locus of memory vital to creative experience. The creative work of memory in the re-emergence of the past breaks the routine of conscious experience, and in this capacity opens a domain of remembrance to which the poet has recourse in the appeal: ‘‘Speak Memory.’’ Our interest in this essay has to do not with the science of the brain, but with the art of the mind – in the creative work of memory as it expands consciousness and restores creative possibilities for transcendence. The central issue of self-understanding in philosophy is also, of course, the understanding of life and world and other. The world is my world – in the peculiar sense that I am my world – the world is the totality of my experience. But in an equally important and obvious sense it is not only my world – I am born into it, as I am born into a language and culture. In a no less puzzling sense, my existence is a presence, in a present that is a kairic moment in a continuous flow of experience in which all I have been leads up to and away from this moment. Time and life is this flow, the current of existence that I am. The currency of memory in consciousness is widely discussed in the literature of phenomenology, but we will here be concerned less with the detailed structure of consciousness than in the special resource of remembrance that abides in the thoughtful individual and feeds the poetic imagination. Whatever the complexity of its structure, memory is a generative force in the natural history of human beings from oral cultures through the development and codification of literate discourse. The theme of memory has been an essential feature of literature from its first emergence in myth and ritual and the mnemonic gathering into epic in the formation of cultural identity. In philosophical discourse, remembrance has been a central issue from its Hellenic beginnings to the recent renewal by Heidegger as essential to the authentic existence of human being as aletheia – un-forgetting. Whether or not Socrates was right that the unexamined life is not worth living, reflection – the playing back of experience to oneself – is the first movement in understanding what is worth living. The meaning of reflection requires the use of metaphor in both its process and description. In terms of movement, reflection begins

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a journey: to think back, to think again, to think about my thinking, to examine the horizon of my mind, to remember are all part of an adventure to search out the depth and detail of one’s life. The larger process of humanistic self-understanding can be understood through metaphor as a concern for Being through remembrance. The story of my life exists within the collective story of our lives; indeed, as many stories as can be imagined or remembered. Memory and imagination are the creative confluence of these stories. But in the metaphor of journey, where does one travel to in these cases of memory and imagination? Memory is a present journey into past times and places in which we seem to constitute a separate world from the ordinary of continuing consciousness (as if that itself were a clear concept) – a world apart from the ongoing current of our lives. We are continually doing this in an autonomic process, of course, constituting our lives reflectively with the invested meaning of past events and activities, people and places, hopes and regrets, procedures and projects. Our mutual lives and language embody the possibilities of our next encounter: we constitute our lives in the things we do and do not do, within the framework of what we have done and left undone, in the relations we make and break, in the things we think, and choose, in the stories we invent about ourselves and each other, in what we remember and have forgotten. In the phenomenology of my everyday existence there is a natural order of things and events, a causal nexus of sight, sound, and motion that I think of as the world. I am the focus of that causal order, as well as the center of an interpretive, rational order. I think of this double order of things, causal and rational, only on occasion as my world, when something is ajar or amiss when the continuing current of existence is somehow broken. I think the world as I live it, but also I can think about it, withdraw from it in thought, in reflection, in imagination, in memory. This withdrawal is not so much a leaving of the ongoing natural world as a reconstituting of it, or of a parallel construction of a temporary world of fiction, or on occasion fantasy that in turn modifies the natural world to which I return – a lateral activity that continually occurs, serving to set out myriad possibilities that run in parallel as I consider some task or person or event. The emotional importance of taking time out from the driving current of expectations and obligations that otherwise control our lives, of letting go (‘‘and letting God’’ as it is sometimes expressed among both devoteds and debunkers) is a commonly acknowledged therapeutic benefit, the waking equivalent of a dream.

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Empirical studies in neurophysiology and psychiatry have set out the mechanics and dynamics of brain and mind in the operation of ordinary remembrance, including clinical studies of pathology of Freud and others about traumatic remembrances of childhood. Our concern, however, is not with causal processes or the how of memory, but with a preliminary analysis of the experience of remembrance independent of causal process or clinical remediation: the simple question of what do we remember, and why? Very likely one kind of remembrance is simply the memorable – not the traumas that scar the soul, but the good and bad together, the important junctures in our lives – turns in the road and roads not taken, roadside attractions, places we have stayed, places we have built or left, things we are proud of or regret – the mundane vitae of our ordinary but on reflection remarkable lives. There are common categories of description as well as peculiar or singular occurrences that a given individual will claim in thinking back on her life. For example, both athletes and scholars, when invited, would likely begin by remembering early periods of life as a growing sense of competence and achievement, marking occasions of laurels and recognition. For those who have been to war, images of death and destruction, of comrades and chaos may be the stuff of remembrance and shared stories – or else be buried in repressive or dismissive alternatives. Those who are blissfully or tearfully married may remember a defining event in their lives – of commitment and optimism about an open future met together with another that fulfilled or failed in its promise. Those who have children will remember births, birthdays, broken hearts and bruised bones, the many faces of joy and disappointment as their children grew into themselves. Our remembered lives are all a patchwork; yet all of it somehow is the nurturing ground of our identity and continuance. A common occasion and resource in the building of memory is the process and product of repetition: how much of our lives is taken up in the correlative activities that lead up to or follow from some event? Psychologists study the familiar procedures that make up and take up so much of our conscious life in the correlative activities of rehearsing and debriefing. We seem to routinely enact elaborate rituals preparing to greet the faces that we meet – cognitively and emotionally, as well as cosmetically and sartorially – solitary run-throughs of what the day is likely to bring. We get ready, practice, go-over, plan, preview, study, imagine, plot and project. Later, after the fact, we similarly engage in a fictional debriefing; depending on how the interview, meeting, or engagement went, we tend in memory to think over, think through, repeat,

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re-hash, re-construct, reconsider and otherwise correct and repair the episode in consciousness. In the process of such recollection, we can and do misremember, reinvent, change and otherwise rearrange what happened to make ourselves in our own minds better, sharper, more intelligent, responsive, confident, successful ... than perhaps we were in fact. Both facts and fictions thus constitute the ongoing process of our development as persons. The fiction of memory may be one of selfreassurance, or more radically, re-constitution. The character of a person is developed through what she decides and does. That is, actions have residuals not just in the world but in ourselves: actions become habit become character – they make up what we become. But this becoming is also a matter of what we think about what we have done, what we reflectively index as part of a projected character. How much of character, so constituted, is invention – the product of imagination and projections of fantasy – fictions of belief and remembrance? We constitute ourselves and each other through what we do, chose, think, remember, imagine, through that to which we aspire, but also through that which we regret. Guilt and shame are indelible and enduring marks of memory, for which a given place or person, unawares, may be the prompting. Dostoyevsky’s Fyodor Karamazov remarks that he once did a man a terrible injustice and that he has never forgiven the man for it. Memory can shift responsibility in perverse ways, but still exact its pound of flesh. II

So far, we have been speaking of the process of memory, and of recollection as a journey. We can also inquire into the world of memory, and the same question occurs again: where is this world and of what sort of world is it? Where do I go to, remembering my childhood? I can review, and in some acute cases, re-live events of my life. And in such instances, we may be surprised at which ones present themselves at any given time – parts and pieces we somehow have indexed in our self-life-stories; as it were, footnotes in the annotated biography of our lives. Reflecting on this process, it seems very much a return in time to places once lived and now revisited. What is the language in which we can make sense of this? At such times it seems as if the mind is its own place, and of itself, can generate moments and images of what is past, of what had been forgotten, and provide a way to reach past places and times. We recover the past in stories retold: of old times, and former places – markings and remarkings along the way.

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Here is a particular thought experiment; the detail of this remembrance is my own, but yours will not be so different: remember the house in which you were born and grew up. The detail of the place – the door to the cellar, the smell of the kitchen, the dust of the coal bin, the lint of the laundry room, the grain on the wood doors in the hallway, the window looking out into the garden. Remember the porch in summer, the neighbors gathered, talking in the darkening night air, fireflies blinking, mosquitoes biting; recall the feel of leaving for school on a Spring morning, the driveway with your father’s car on the weekend; the leafless trees in winter, the sidewalk shoveled free of snow, the shouts of children on the playground in summer. It is as if we move though a world still there, knowing full well it is not. What is the nature of this experience, its meaning, and its possible effect on our continuing lives in remembrance? We are likely less interested in the veracity of the experience, than in its emotional substance and effect. Remembrance seems to be a psychic resource of some worth in the simple fact of its continuance and availability. It is a familiar experience to go as an adult back to a childhood home or place and remark how small it is; how large it had become in memory. Some of the remembered places and people are long gone or no more – destroyed, overgrown, dead – and still they come to life in memory. It is not untrue to remark that all the places of remembrance are dead and gone. The photograph as ‘‘l’image du morte’’ as pictures of those no longer – of my father, in a photograph once as a boy, that I look upon now that I am an old man, or in a similar sense, pictures of myself as a child. There is a sense of the uncanny in looking at such photographs – looking at what we were, looking onto the hopeful eyes of the dead. This process of remembrance is not unlike reading a novel: deliberately initiated or not, we are drawn into a fictive world in which we live for awhile – which may indeed intrude upon, or detract from the ‘‘real’’ or natural world of our continuing lives. People can be lost both in and lost to memory. We say of such people that they ‘‘live in the past.’’ Faulkner’s characters come to mind here; the old woman recluse rumored to have been jilted by her lover as a girl, in ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’, and more generally the whole fixation of cultural remembrance in Faulkner’s stories of a dying Southern aristocracy. The familiar literature of clinical psychology often fixes the paradigm of remembrance in terms of pathology such that in extreme cases the line between what is real and imagined completely dissolves so that one is unable to clearly distinguish between past and present. It is not surprising,

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perhaps, that in a less virulent form this also is a regular feature of literature, both in writing and reading – for example in the autonomic or willing suspension of disbelief, or the related process of a willing appropriation of fictive belief. In literature, however, there is no special problem of reconnecting to the shared and public world of an ongoing present. Plato was inclined to credit the poet with a singular faculty and access to the irrational that he called divine madness; however in ordinary cases of madness that do not achieve divinity the line between what is real and what not is less acute and therefore less re-presentable as art. For the pedestrian mad, if there is such a thing, the present and what has passed is simply blurred. The point here is not that madness is a risk of intrusive remembrance, but the appeal of the past and the lapse into memory may share something with such cases. If madness begins in a release from the solid insistence of a continuing time and place, sanity becomes, in the normal course of events, the constant recovery from continual excursions of imagination and memory. However, some kind of fantasy life no less than the deep sleep of dreaming is apparently critical to the health of human life and mind. Freud’s theoretical structure of the person and personality in terms of three developmental stages are framed within three correlative principles: of pleasure, reality, and ideality. As a moralist, Freud was concerned to advocate the health of a secure reality orientation, a development of ego-strength to govern the conflicting demands of id and super-ego – the moderation and control of immediate gratification on the one hand and an anchor from the remove of abstraction on the other. His intuition is that the self can be equally devoured in the immediacy of sense, or in the distractions of the ideal. Even so, the health of the organism, no less than the person, seems to depend on such excursions – psychic breaks into the immediacy of sense, but also into the mediacies of fiction. Our shared language constitutes a network of common sense and sensibility; a web of belief that supports both public and personal perceptions and relationships. Memory connects with belief in the crucial sense that to believe that something is the case is to hold it in memory, and to hold to memory as a foundation and operational resource. To believe in something or someone, is to hold in another way to a conviction, a trust stored in memory. The current of consciousness exists on a grid of memory and belief that constitutes the self, world, and others. The creative act of imaginative remembrance makes use of this grid to break with the present, with the ongoing continuance of what is before me, to disengage from the pressing insistence of world and time.

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Philosophical interest in ‘‘the given’’ in traditional epistemology and ontology – as the root datum of experience, and as the primal ground of being – can be usefully extended to the context of memory in the continuance of person, community and culture. In addition to what is given in perception there are resources of the given in memory, dreams and imagination that have special access to the unconscious, which inform and transform consciousness in the contexts of culture. III

To fully understand the working of memory in the identity and continuity of a given life and culture is obviously a complex task that requires the perspectives of many disciplines, but the phenomenon of remembrance is also a simple experience common to every person, which provides a key to its significance. In the simple matter of remembering myself, what is it that I do, and what is it that I bring to mind? The times and places and people, issues of the day, the hopes and regrets that were building then until now – all come to presence once again, in retrospect. In such cases of deliberation, one begins always in medias res, and the time may be chosen arbitrarily. Say, twenty years ago this summer: that would make it 1984. I was at Oxford, the children were in school at Radley college; we had a house from the college on the grange overlooking the upper reaches of the Themes river ... What I now select to remember is not only a function of who I am now, but what I am doing now in selecting – thinking about the process of remembering, remembering in order to examine the process and profit of remembrance. If I give into the tug of recollection of 20 years ago, there are glimpses, for the most part, of a place – The Vicarage in Radley, a face of the Welsh Vicar, his ruddy cheeks, his kind uncertainty and gentle eyes, the concern in his voice as he begins the daily office of his late calling to the Anglican priesthood ... but the image of my son at Radley college at that time intervenes in my recollection of the Vicar, and a mix of scholar gown and playing fields, the still acute horror of learning of his brain aneurism, the hospital visit, and Gaudy celebrated later on the pitch, cars gathered about with picnic baskets and blankets spread to watch the Cricket game, High table at Christ Church, Evensong in the Cathedral, an invitation to publish a journal piece recollecting my time with the philosopher O. K. Bouwsma. And in the process just now I remember that my father had just died. Suddenly the years seem all to run together in ways that disrupt the

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intention of examining a particular time. There are in memory times within times, a collusion of thoughts, images, feelings that have a life of their own, an insistence that I give into in reverie, or not. Unwanted and intrusive feelings arise here – an illness that I have inherited, and passed on, my sense of loss, my wanting to remember my father earlier in his life, young and vital, decades younger than I am at the time of writing this. To what end memory? At the very least, something in me remains alive and returns to life in this process that is the gift of remembrance. In looking at one’s own children as adults, now older than my first memories of my father when I think of him, memory is intimate and integral to this perception – one sees the knicks and scars of their adventures, sees through their present looks and lives to everything they have been. These images and feelings granted by memory are an essential part of my continuing and changing perception of them. The sense of one’s life – what I do, what I am, with whom I am, both with others in the community and in the world to which I belong – is tangled in a web of memory To remember my parents, who are now dead. To remember the birth of my children, now with children of their own. To remember the first day of school, my first date, first kiss, first car, first job ... . first everything: the memorable, what signals a formative event, made so by the decision to mark it as a defining moment or chapter in the building story of my life. These are all kairic moments in the flux of time such that we date our consciousness of ourselves in the events. Not everything goes into memory, into the available resources of consciousness to be called on in times of self-doubt, or occasions of reaffirmation. Moments of sudden recollection in the sound of a song, the smell of a flower bring, undirected to conscious attention that moment in my life: lilacs in spring and the filling of May baskets for childhood friends in the old neighborhood; or at another time hearing the sound of the blues, I see and feel the wet night streets outside a club the name of which I no longer remember in Manhattan fifty years ago. There are common and shared historical moments in memory that serve to index both a time and cultural identity. For a certain age of people, the question: ‘‘Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been assassinated on the streets of Dallas?’’ is a significant way of connecting not only with an event in the past, but to a relationship with the asker in the continuing narrative of the present. Man is a storytelling animal, and the natural emergence of narrative in memory sometimes comes of its own – a sound, a smell, and I am back among things of childhood. Sometimes it comes with effort: I want

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to remember when it was that I last met with a colleague who has just retired. Or, as with the assassination of a president, it may become an automatic point of reference that when asked where I was when the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, I can say without thinking ‘‘I was preparing for class in my office at the university, the department secretary, eyes wide in shock of disbelief came in to announce what was happening in New York City as if to confirm the reality of a world in which she no longer felt secure – and once again, in this process of remembrance, the mind leads away into a domain of details and images some real some second order electronic from the television of that moment and the ensuing day. The point in citing such remembrance is that when I recall some remembered time with only a few details or images the mind is so structured that it weaves them into a story, as much for myself as the questioner, of who and what and where, and when of the day and incident of ‘‘9–11’’. What is it I ‘‘intend’’ in remembering the school, the hallways and classrooms of my first school experience? Not each day, or a particular day; nor the exact shape of the building; rather there is a sense of the place, on a rainy day, of a soccer game played out on the sandlot in the spring, a game of tag years earlier in the snow at recess, of a boy who chewed his pencil into fragments, of a girl who insisted that I confess to grinding up an eraser in the pencil sharpener so that the class could be released from being kept after school until someone confessed (I had not done the deed, but she seemed so genuinely angry and so sure in her accusation that it still makes me wonder) ... and now I think of that little girl – Patricia Westcott, which I recall because the brand name on the school ruler at that time was Westscott) whether I had ever talked with her before or after that accusation during those years in school – I don’t think so – but here is the name and the child’s face more than sixty years later. I am quite sure this is not an invention of imagination – we were there, next to the water-fountain, standing on the soft cork of the hallway floors, on a sunny afternoon. Someone finally must have confessed, or else the teacher wearied of it all and sent us all home with a reprimand about character, the wages of sin, and what will become of such evil doing. There was no trauma in this, no repressed childhood memory that needs exorcizing. No special reason to remember any of it; but there it is, long dead and half buried, but the gentle winds of memory strip away the years and all the things piled on ... and now other memories come of those times, the ‘‘victory garden’’ in a field just up the way from the school, raising our own vegetables to help the war effort, I thought – and

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so I collected newspapers, aluminum foil, the flag with the service stars in my grandmother’s window for her four sons somewhere in the military in a world at war, the evenings gathered among the women, my great aunt at the piano playing some of the songs from an earlier war, soft lights and soft conversations, hearing somehow in the whispering of women the sounds of war – I see the uncertain child I was, feeling once again the fear, the longing, the hope, the absence ... And so it goes, a collage of sights and sounds, random pieces of a puzzle I may have no need to sort out or fit together, but there is a story and a life there, roots and remnants – habitations of the heart and mind in the soft tissue of personal history. IV

I awakened this morning in Prato, Italy. I am here to present a paper at an international conference on the future – seemingly dismal at times – of the Humanities. It is a good question that seems not to be addressed whether the future of humanity is somehow allied with the future of the Humanities: living beings enscripted with values which their disciplines more or less independently study and seek to shape. The Humanities constitute the collected memory of a sometimes comparative and conflicted cultural tradition in terms of which nations and peoples, independently or mutually, seek identification and continuance. Coming to consciousness from an exhausted sleep, jet-lagged, my first effort is to remember where I am and what I am doing: I have awakened to memory. This room becomes familiar from last night, I remember the hallway, the elevator, the lobby, the clerk, the bellman, the elaborate Persian carpets in the lobby, and now a sense that the staff were all middle-eastern, and that the hotel is likely owned not by Italians but Arabs. I remember the front of the hotel in the dark of night as the cab passed it by to make a u-turn to deposit me. I now remember that my baggage did not arrive with me, and that I will have to call the airport to see if they have yet arrived. I remember the difficulty of registering at the airport with lost and found, the incredibly understaffed and inefficient process, standing in a queue of 25 people, all of whom arrived without luggage, all having intended to disperse into the outreaches of Northern Italy. I recall the expression of anger and anxiety in the confusion and fusion of many languages as we endured the slow and individual remediation of our mutual inconvenience. My own anxiety now, in what I will have to do or buy to get by until the luggage arrives. I am aware of

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regretting, as I often have in the past as I now remember foresworn against, that I am traveling in a country whose language I barely manage. And so on it goes, memory mixed into a cognitive reorientation to a place and time, a presence from which to meet the day. Memory even in this common sense as a ready and ongoing source of appeal is not so far distanced from literature as a mediating resource of cultural identity and community. Nabokov’s autobiography is entitled ‘‘Speak Memory’’, as if the faculty has its own energy and voice. It is through the invitation to have memory speak that literature discovers the mediated reach and embodied domain of heart and mind. The citation from Faulkner’s L ight in August at the outset of this essay suggests the existence of a more remote source of sight and insight in the appeal of remembrance, a pale light, not the fire of passion, but not the dead light of winter. Remembrance is a kind of light in August, an infusion of light and life from a season distanced from the spring of its origin. Faulkner’s poetic remembrance is both collective and systematic and of a studied and opaque character; indeed the body of Faulkner’s literature is an imaginative journey into a remembered but dying Southern culture, of a people caught in the remembrance of a glory that was, in fact, an illusion in its own lifetime. This literature strives to capture the echoes of memory that has become belief. Another familiar metaphor in literature speaks of the mirror of memory that allows us to see ourselves as we were through the prism of what we have or have not become. Even though selective or distorted, the insight of remembrance may be genuine. Honesty with oneself is no easy matter, however – no more in remembrance than any other human activity of self knowledge. V

While our interest is in memory and mind, it is important to acknowledge that there is memory in the body as well. Quite apart from the miracle of the billions of neurons going about the extraordinary if routine tasks of monitoring thought, the body remembers to breathe; it remembers the motions which coordinate its movement. In healing a wound to its surface, it remembers how and when to stop the process of the repair of skin to make itself whole. The mind of memory, and the memory of mind are extensions into the assimilation of consciousness in terms of the logic of a natural process, whatever theory otherwise accounts for its operations. Memories come as they will, are internalized on their own logic. There is more than a fine difference between memory and memorizing: the latter

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is a matter of repetition until the recall of some face or figure or sound is imprinted. Remembrance, on the other hand, is not in this way contrived but natural. Numberless kinds of occasions and causes imprint on memory – excitement, desire, fear, awe, and the many kinds of trauma that haunt human beings beyond the moment of the experience Apart from the current of existence that is the backdrop of our lives individually and collectively, a special occurrence of remembrance sometimes comes to us as a gift. It is as if something deep in us, in our past, a residual unrealized in our conscious and continuing life comes to presence in us and presents us with an uncanny insight that we have either forgotten, repressed, or did not consciously notice at its first occurrence. Memory in this instance comes to disrupt the routine course of perception in our affairs and re-minds us of a possibility that has escaped us: This is you: this is something you have been, or done, or felt ... It has the function of restoring to us a possibility of becoming something other than what we are tending to become. Something appears that has been missing. Remembrance in this special addition is very much like dreams. There is a need demanded on some level for the well being of the complex organism of the self; the function of the dream is in part to knit up the raveled sleeve of care, or in memory renew a resource that has fallen away. The restoration of possibility in what was lost may or may not come to conscious awareness, but the heart has reasons that are realized in the resource of dreams and memory. This aspect of memory is celebrated in the ritual of commemoration; in the practice of birthdays, the observance of holidays. Christian scripture expresses the healing of memory in the sacrament of the Eucharist: ‘‘... Do this in remembrance of me.’’ There is a promise in such remembrance, not unlike the celebration of a birthday: a reminder of the promise of a birth, of new life, a re-calling of the gift of life itself, which requires a waking and renewal from the routine wearing down of time and care. Elegy and expressions in memoriam are parts of the process of grief and mourning, which like remorse, draw on memory to repair a tear in the fabric of consciousness, to bring the remembrance of a person or event to consciousness in order to align the pain of loss with the continuing energy of life. Just as we are restored to a forgotten resource in our lives in the past, so are we invited to transcend whatever it is we have become in its absence. The impulse of memory is not unlike a form of desire: this is what I was, and can be – the past comes to present in the promise of a future. The faculty of remembrance has a vital role in the process by

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which self-awareness, through reflection becomes self-understanding. Remembrance in this sense, becomes a mechanism for self-transformation where the past, experienced upon re-emergence, becomes a provocation – an instrument for cognitive change. This use of remembrance figures centrally in the art of fiction, both in the life of writers, and in the lives of their characters. While self-awareness is in an immediate sense automatic, it is also cumulative: as we reflect upon and make growth a matter of concern, habits become dispositions that, reinforced, become the character of the person, or the personality of the character in fiction. But character becomes habituated to the presupposed and predictable, and in the routine of our lives we become locked into a self-image through the expectations of self and others. There are many ways in which this routine may be effectively altered – sometimes the course of our lives is shattered, sometimes merely adjusted in terms of some new erotically charged altercation. In the poetry of fiction we are released into a world of imaginative remembrance – a window not simply to the lost fragments of past life, but to a field of creative possibility. Remembrance serves in this way to restore possibility or otherwise reorient one to a continuing life in need of repair. Sometimes, to go forward in our lives, we must regress, not merely to see what it is we have come through, but what in the ordinary of the past was significant in deciding what we have become. We are enabled through remembrance to look along a line of development of past and future; at times deliberately taking stock, and judging our judgments in retrospect we search in our past for some key to what we have become, to find some resource or insight that will make change possible. Memory generally provides a residuum of affirmation through which poetry gives expression to transcendental possibility. In the individual case, the poet takes the kernel of remembrance and gives life to its potential in images such that the poem becomes for the reader a crystallized memory. I experience the poem as if it were memory speaking. ‘‘Recollected in tranquility’’ may be the particular watchword of Wordsworthian Romanticism, but there is a common appeal in poetry to the transcendental residuals of experience not used up in the ordinary affairs of life. Whether tranquil or fevered, recollected or renovated, the poet consciously draws on an unconscious cauldron of energy available from the untapped resources of what the organism of the self has retained from the past. The cognitive occurrence of remembrance is a complex phenomenon employing a recollection and separate sense and investment in time and

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place, along with images drawn from that time and place. I recall a trip I made with my son to celebrate his 16th birthday, the hotel on the cliffs above Naples, sitting on the porch, Easter morning, he was still sleeping, and I remember his face in sleep, so like a infant or an angel, the spring morning alive with orange blossoms mixed with the smell of lemon trees, the bells begin to peal from the church far below ... I can walk into and through this experience as though it were a stage set, or as if I were once again alive in that time and place. We have seen that such a deliberate process, once initiated, may develop a life of its own. And so I now recall what led into the decision that the two of us would make the trip, the excitement and disappointments of being thrown together, my gradual realization of what a different person he had become, seeing myself in his anxieties ... Once I have located a time and place, however deliberately, memory has a creative and independent logic that has to do not simply with a given time and place; on this occasion of regression it gathers together both prior and continuing concerns that make up my relation to my son. The engaging of imagination in memory has limits such that I am drawn into the context of memory as an observer rather than participant, or rather, I suffer the memory, I do not command it. The point at which I speak rather than listen in a particular occurrence of memory suggests that invention threatens to displace memory, which, even as a derivative activity, draws its energy from spontaneous imagination. VI

Memory, like perception, is always a memory of something, and so characterized by intentionality. Not some thing, necessarily – it may be a time, or place, or event, or feeling, or person. How is the content of remembrance different from that of perception or thought? Perception, of course is contextualized in present and continuing circumstances. While thought generally is limited only by sense, memory seems to have additional contextual boundaries. A significant counterpoint of relevance exists in the relational ideas of the intentionality that key the insights of Husserl, and the idea of contextuality as it is central to Wittgenstein’s analysis of meaningful experience. Both play a crucial role in understanding memory. In its phenomenological appearance memory has both mixed content and a split or doubled context. Meaning is discovered and recovered in remembrance both in its intention and the simultaneous experiencing of the context of present and past. Patterns of association are further compli-

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cated by the feeling tones that accompany the experience. Whether wandering in memory, as in the familiar sentimental song about taking a ‘‘sentimental journey,’’ or discovering a more intense reminiscence in the Beetle’s lyric of ‘‘Yesterdays,’’ thought follows sentience into moods of understanding and disclosure. In terms of intentional content, what I remember is ... a place/ a person/ a feeling/ an event. In each case I focus on something distinct: in place, I can walk through it; in time, I can persist through it; in person, I can examine the features, character, face, shape of the body, grace of the carriage; in feeling, remembrance re-experiences specific emotions that bridge recent and remote times. The problem with this analytic procedure is that it seems to make of memory a process no different in kind from what takes place under the directions: ‘‘Think of ...’’ or ‘‘Imagine that ...’’ Examining the content or intent of remembering in an analytic frieze thus seems to lose an essential element that distinguishes it from thinking and imagining. To correct this, it may be useful again to return to the analogy with madness. Just as we may suffer the intrusion of remembrance in a way that breaks the consciousness of the moment, of the actual time and place of our continuing lives that we associated remotely but in kind with madness, so there an important comparison of the process of remembrance with the dream – in which one has a dream – the dream presents itself to consciousness on some level. The importance of this very human faculty of remembrance may finally be, in any particular case, as with dreaming, not the detail of what we remember, but the fact that we remember. Memory functions in all these many ways to constitute and make possible who we are individually and collectively. Insofar as we are human, i.e. persons with an identity, it makes possible that we are. In a deliberate act of remembrance – last night with my friends at the pub – I recall not just what happened, who was there, what was said, I recall the meaning of what happened, the situation, actions and reactions of my friends – the occasion and what was made or not made of it. Such focus is not only intentional, but interpretively so: I am searching and sorting through what I can re-present, aware that there is something here to be understood, to be considered, to be assimilated toward a revision of my ongoing project of self and other, of life and world. It is the same with the unwanted or gratuitous emergence of remembrance: I may or may not be surprised or troubled by this intrusion into consciousness of the past, this insistence of some sub-strata of mind that this particular thing of remembrance is important, but I can take an

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interest in it as a reminder, as a gift, as a warning, as a key to what is on the border of currency in my life. We can learn to listen to memory, and here as elsewhere, Santayana’s familiar after-dinner reminder is worth a moment: should we fail to listen to memory, we miss an invited moment in which our lives might take another turn, albeit for better or worse. I am inclined to think ‘‘for better’’ in the sense that such emergence is not without meaning whether the organism itself requires this remembrance as a kind of updating or stabilizing of health (wholeness), or whether it is the soul that needs this resource for healing. It is important, finally, to address the other side of all this, in the imperative of forgetting. Remembrance makes possible the identity of the person and of a people in the shifting occurrences of time and place, makes possible the continuing narrative of our life and lives, the self-lifewriting of relational scripts for world and other. But forgetting is also a critical moment in this process, for example in the simple feature that allows a renewal or continuance of consciousness without the encumbrance of all we assimilate. A further essential aspect to forgetting discussed by Ricoeur argues the need for the oblivion of forgetfulness to free the mind generally from the binding residuals of the past, and by Arendt in the context of political life that requires forgiving that we may begin again in the freedom of action. We are, in fact, worth more than our acts. We are what we have done, and thought, and said – the totality of experience, that is, of consciousness, of memory. But, as we have argued, memory exceeds consciousness at any given point. Memory resides in the body and culture as well as in individual consciousness; it is inclusive of the unconscious and what may be operative and manifest in the life energy of desire and culture whether or not we are aware of it. Individually and collectively, we exceed the sum total of experience in that we can forget and forgive – give over to oblivion what would otherwise be held in consciousness and character, tradition and history. It may be that residuals in some sense always remain, that although I can give up my resentment or hatred for what you did, a trace always remains. Aristotle claimed as a point of moral autonomy no less than law that one may be blamed only for what he does, not for what he thinks or feels. Whatever we retain in active memory is a resource we dispose ourselves toward in terms of choice. I may not choose the anger I feel at your betrayal, but I need not nurture it into resentment or hatred. Nietzsche’s idea of master morality is in part recognition of the possibility that we are not simply subject to memory, not simply organ stops with respect to experience. We are not creatures

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condemned to resentiment. We can and do alter memory, as we filter experience, and this is our mastery which makes of morality something more than rationalization and habit. VII

Within the structure of memory in Husserl’s accounting and in addition to the autonomic feedback loops supportive of the ongoing current of existence, remembrance thus serves a creative resource of restoration and transformation. There is a mending feature to remembrance in the process of reconciliation for example, that is critical for both identity and growth. Remembrance, coupled with the reciprocal movement of forgetting, or in the further movement of forgiving, makes possible a revaluation of the whole life project. This is a process of letting go in such a way that there is a deeper understanding and retention in memory, and a remediation through memory. If it is impossible to remove the residuals of the trace, it is possible to revalue and reinscribe the tenor of a life-script. Shoah is a point of remembrance without resolution in oblivion or forgiveness – it is simply and insistently a bearing witness to pain in memory. The point however, is that there exists an option. In individual and collective terms the residuals of memory require both retention and removal; they may be constructive or destructive; be that with which we learn and grow, or that from which we wither and die. In the dynamic of memory, the reciprocity of retention and remediation must sometimes be attended by a deeper movement in which, e.g. remorse and guilt are transformed through forgiveness, so that one can begin again or be enabled to go on. The adage attributed to Santayana, that those who fail to remember their past are doomed to fulfill it, is an additional reminder that we must both remember the past and somehow work through it to be freed of the consequences of its determination. Both Freud and Derrida speak of the encumbrances of residuals in the trace of memory, and Ricoeur’s analysis of the three modes of remembrance, history, and oblivion addresses at length the imperative of oblivion as a counter force against the chains of memory and history. Anger may be a simple matter of the moment – felt, acted upon, and forgotten. But it may be retained and sour into hatred. Memory in this way becomes pathological: hatred is destructive of the subject, not its object. Forgetting is a critical therapeutic issue here. In the general course of individual and social development, remembering passes into history – natural, cultural, historical, individual – in ways that we are bound by it

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in habit and habituation, character and custom. It is essential to the freedom of mind and spirit that there is an enabling power of disengagement from the bounds and bonds of memory and history, the examples of which are legion. Nietzsche analyzed the cultural foundation of traditional morality in terms of the negative trace of memory in resentiment and Shakespeare makes the more general point without cultural moralizing in Hamlet’s remark: ‘‘Thus doth conscience make cowards of us all,’’ – both of which suggest the scope of this difficulty. The psychoanalytic focus on the negative aspects of memory in the forming of pathology through anxiety, guilt, resentment, remorse and shame indicate as well the need for a creative faculty that integrates the reciprocity of selective remembrance and forgetting. The savage energies of war generate an intensity of feeling that often carries into indelible memory. In the violence of action, life becomes meaningful in ways hard to relinquish in its aftermath, so that its carnage for both perpetrator and victim remain long after the offense. Reconciliation with self and other, in and after war, requires more than forgetting. The political instrument of general amnesty as a kind of formal and public forgetting is exemplary: there is always a trace of remembrance written on the soul of a person and a people, such that more than a political act is required for reconciliation, for a healing of the self in relation to the other. If forgetting ensured oblivion, it would be ideal: the terrible sense of the other as alien, an object of fear and loathing simply deleted from living memory. But the deeper healing of reconciliation that makes community possible seems to require a middle ground that includes remembrance as well. A spiritual sense of wholeness and a democracy of cultural sensibility cannot be legislated by government. It is at just this point that the world of literature, art, and music transcends times and cultures to become a mode of translation and transformation, of recognition and redemption. The most obvious example of this is found in tragic drama, which identifies suffering as universal; it creates a space in which we can identify with and take on the suffering of the other. The Greek writing and viewing of T he T rojan Women is one example that Martha Nussbaum has examined. The drama is far removed from the aftermath of a mythic war, of course, and written in Greek for Greeks, but the transforming point of reconciliation in the imaginative use of memory is still in force. Another familiar example of humanity in the remembrance of the other in literature is found in the memorable episode in the war-poem of the Iliad, in which man-slaying Hector, taking off his war helmet at the frightened cry of his child, comforts him in an

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unquestionable and intimate moment of humanity. Remarque’s novel All Quiet on T he Western Front, is another familiar example of an expression of humanity with which any side of a conflict can identify, and through this recognition of a common humanity, find reconciliation with the other. It is not hard to envision what Man would be in the absence of the faculty of remembering or of an interest in the preservation of memory. There would be neither character nor culture, creatures living only from moment to moment with no thought of either past or future. It is in this way of course that the idea of future exists only in the conception of the past. The assimilative character of consciousness is rooted in the background connectedness of the moments of its lived-time, and the fact that the moment just past is still retained as part of the living structure of the present. Husserl’s three modes of consciousness: primal impression (consciousness as such); retention (original consciousness of past that preserves and modifies the just lapsed phases of the object), and protention (immediate consciousness of the future phases of the object as possibility) together constitute perception, memories, and strivings, a phenomenology of time consciousness as a flow of continuous moments of past-present-future. Both world and person exist in this continuous flow of duration: that we have a past, makes the conception of the future – of a different and better life – possible. However difficult things are, we remember that times can be better and find therein the resources for making them so – thus springs hope and a strength of endurance. CONCLUDING NOTE

I had in mind to reference and analyze the importance of remembrance though various literary works, but that must await a further writing. In addition to Faulkner and Elliot cited at the outset, and aside from the obvious and usual inclusion of writers like Proust (On the Remembrance of T hings Past), it would be instructive to contrast remembrance in writers such as Conrad (Youth, Heart of Darkness), Dostoyevsky (L etters from Underground), Joyce (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Thomas Wolff (L ook Homeward Angel), Nabokov (Speak Memory), and lighter pieces like Harold Pinter’s Old T imes, among many others that you might recall as well. Aristotle cited the remembrance of great words and deeds as that which makes possible the history and identity of a people. Marx’s analysis of man as a species-being whose identity is a product of his history – what

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he makes, what he does, what he incorporates into the memory of his constructive achievements – also speaks to the essential importance of cultural memory. But it is in the transcendental character of remembrance in art and literature that human beings become conscious of and reconciled to the essential strangeness as well as possibilities of a shared and common world. The wonder of invitation in human life is to think, to dream, to remember, to imagine. We began with the metaphor of journey to describe the life of memory. The metaphor of journey is also essential to an understanding of human life as such. T. S. Elliot expresses in poetry the argument of Plato about life and learning: that all human strivings may result in returning to the place where we began, and of recognizing it for the first time. Remembrance is an essential modality in the journey of recognition and realization that leads us to ourselves, which is the crucial point of Plato’s reminder that philosophy is coming to understand what it is we already know. Heidegger’s lesson in the repair of humanity that envisions truth as aletheia as unforgetting – is also a remembrance that brings to presence that from which we have fallen away – most of all that we have fallen away from ourselves, from the being of the becoming which we are. But essential to the correction of forgetfulness is the reciprocal dynamic and existential dialectic that joins remembering and forgetting: both are essential in the mind’s freedom and identity and to its outreach to world and other. The contribution of poetic literature to this constituting of self and world is the collective idea of humanity in which presence and absence exist each in the other so that the mind of memory is discovered already in the shared world of culture, in the living tradition that binds experience into the possibility of the moral life of human beings. T rinity University San Antonio, T exas

ALEKSANDRA PAWLISZYN

THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING ( LEVINAS ) AND THE TRUTH CRYSTALLIZED IN THE WORK OF ART

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary humanistic reflection draws inspiration from phenomenology, which still seems to penetrate the source of the world’s sense – only in the dimension of sense does the world become the specific human world. But the sense manifests in different ways. One of them is Levinas’ grasp of time revealing time as the real difference, which is able to interrupt a subject immanence. The real difference relies on opening oneself to the Other, who is not connected with me even by the dimension of the present, without prejudice about the future, which becomes completely strange to the present. In that transcendence to the Other the time in constituted.1 The base of the relation with the Other is here acceptance of his difference, which one is not able to rule by way of learning, because this way does not tolerate the difference. So, knowledge is not the way out of the isolating situation of a loneliness of being. Only the mutual confrontation with the face of the Other, according to Levinas, is a means of interrupting the isolation of human existence. It is possible to establish the real social relation of responsibility for the Other by community.2 In Gadamer’s opinion, a human community secures for us the possibility of participating in a collective memory. Hermeneutics as a domain reaching out of scientific truth, is first of all the domain of art. So, we ought to question scientific truth and transcend the scientific sphere. We should go beyond the limits of scientific statements and be concerned with the sphere of conversation. According to Gadamer, from the philosophical (hermeneutic) point of view, truth occurs when there is authentic asking.3 The temporary character of the human condition contains finiteness, which is revealed in fragmentary solutions acquired by humans and illustrated by a language of dialogue with the world, other people and ourselves. On the other hand, the human dimension of temporality enables our participation in a spiritual dimension beyond the limits of time, where it is possible to stop what is going by.4 So, the world of the past, where reminder reigns and commemoration muses, is for Gadamer the essence of humanity, the expression of human nostalgia for immortality, to com179 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 179–195. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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memorate that which is changing and is neither perceptible nor constant. It is possible to grasp the past, however, which escapes nature, but for us has stopped. Our chance to commemorate what has happened teaches us about the present – it is possible to commemorate what is happening. The past teaches us about the present and in this way these time dimensions mix with one another. From Levinas’ point of view, our existence as the present lonely being preceded by an anonymous il y a, should be related to the future in order to be authentic human existence. Because the future is unpredictable in the face of the Other and death, so it is the real difference which is the essence of human existence. According to Levinas, the proper attitude towards the human dimension of life calls for explanation in the il y a category, which means an anonymous impersonal existence without an existing (man). An anonymous roar of being, which is like a sleepless vigil, could be interpreted by an ethics in relation towards the Other, when one can forget about oneself and at the same time can create a social dis-interest-ed relation of responsibility for the Other. Gadamer notices that our creativity is a kind of game that human beings play with the world to conquer their finiteness. Death in a daily world is a symptom of surpassing the dimension of constant movement. So, the essence of human life is to commemorate everything that is changing (the transientness of the commonplace) – to conquer change by taking a pause. A DECLINE OF HUMAN POSSIBILITIES IN THE ARTICLE OF DEATH

Levinas’ philosophy is connected with Gadamer‘s hermeneutics by a positive attitude to the community, to Others. The authentic time of human existence, according to these philosophers, is realized in the contact with other people. And while Gadamer does not talk about the solitude of an existing man who, as Levinas says, is sentenced to life, in his analysis Gadamer emphasizes that human beings are involved with time and changing, but the certain form of this changing surpasses them. Gadamer is concerned with such involvement as the positive condition of existence, which can make this existence authentic. Levinas grasps the Other in the aspect of the authentic, unpredictable future of an existing man; he emphasizes the moment of complete surprise by the future, where death lies in wait. Gadamer also notices a decline of human possibilities with regard to the future, which for him does not explain time or existence,

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and which is a symptom of the end of causality. The unpredictable future can be connected with the surprise meeting with someone who is not me, with the Other. That moment of the completely unexpected future makes both philosophies similar. However, the essential difference between them is that for Levinas the future does not yield activity of humans, and this situation causes ontological pluralism. Thus, according to him the difference between the existing (man) and the dark, mysterious future ought to be treated as a symptom of the ontological difference – it means the existence of the Other out of the solitude of an existing man. Levinas emphasizes the absolute difference of the future, its metaphysical separateness, which is not reduced to the sphere of the solitary being. This view follows from the belief that it is impossible to exchange existence between entities, that an entity is in a prison with ‘‘walls’’ of existence. IT IS AN ILLUSION THAT ONE CAN REACH A NON-NOTIONAL DIMENSION

Levinas wants to start his considerations from the level where there is no notion; the question is to reach time itself, not our notion about time. It seems that Levinas takes for granted that it is possible for a contemporary man to suspend earlier knowledge, to transcend it into a non-notional sphere of entity. However, is this conviction an illusion? Is it possible to dispose of nationality as a feature of either the process of thinking or language? After all, Levinas’ desire to grasp the essence of pure time is realized in language, which has a notional character. Levinas uses such notions as: an (entity) existence, a time, and such expressions as: complete difference, or il y a, which one can only grasp indirectly as the result of a thinking process realizing an unattainable aim. The situation that it is impossible not to exist is a result of an abstract idea. The il y a notion (existence without an existing) should be the starting point for searching time as time, it also should be the strangest foundation for concreteness (occurrence ness). Whereas hermeneutics shows that it is an illusion to entertain the possibility of transcending reason (as the process of thinking and also as language). So, every speech, or thought about time is a kind of notional process, which on the ground of hermeneutics can be interpreted as a sign of human existence (temporality). For Gadamer both notion as well as time are limitations of human existence, but they are also possibilities of being, which ‘‘is realized’’ by our life. It is difficult to imagine a human being beyond history and time, beyond tradition, myths

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and stories. A situation of an existing man is always described in such a way, and is conditioned by history, which was made by other people. THE DIFFERENCE CONFIRMS LONELINESS: LANGUAGE AS A MEDIUM

The proper human way of existence needs to find a contact with everything that is not human. My lonely inward world should reflect that what is not mine and this situation makes every different phenomenon paradoxically familiar. Thus, loneliness is confirmed when a difference appears and in this sense the difference is included into the relation with the loneliness which becomes familiar. Though one cannot interrupt the loneliness, or as Levinas says brake it, nevertheless its influence on every man is unquestionable. A man’s life is not secluded from other people. His loneliness is set in relation to the loneliness of other people. So, human existence is not a monad completely out of communication. The ontological loneliness of existence cannot be considered separately from an understanding: as a way of being human, and from the language side of existence. In Gadamer’s opinion, the temporality of being human leaves an indelible sign on human’s existence, manifested by the medium of language. We are absorbed by language, which means we think in language, and the world around us ‘‘speaks’’ in its own language. The subject–object relation yields to annihilation, because the subject and the object become partners of one conversation: they are connected by one language. In the third part of T ruth and Method Gadamer executes the ontological turn in the grounds of language. He uses Hegel’s expression and states that in language is the realization of the total mediation between the subject and the world. We are surrounded by language and we become kinds of words of this language. According to Gadamer‘s metaphor, we can say that the object and the subject horizons are fused together in the medium of language and at the same time out of notion. When we are there is also the reason and our human reasonable way of being. It means that in the ground of our existence there is the relation between an existing loneliness and the world. Here, the conviction that entity can be tired by the future hiding the Other, conflicts with the ontological view of language as the ‘‘environment’’ of the human being. So, a loneliness is involved into interhuman communication. The personal, individual character of every human existence gives expression in the private, individual language of every human being. But, if we use an extremely individual language in speech, it is impossible to communicate

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with each other. Whoever speaks in an incomprehensible language does not speak at all, but after all, communication is the fact.5

THERE ARE DIFFERENT MOMENTS OF ACCESS TO THE WORLD: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ABSOLUTE LONELINESS

It seems that a divergence of both ideas follows from the fact that philosophers emphasize different moments of access to the world. For Levinas the context of relation between a man and his being is important. He stresses that this relation is unchangeable and the power of its immediacy causes a situation in which it is impossible to authentically access the difference, unless death breaks an ontological unity. Thus Gadamer makes access to the world the subject matter of his considerations. He accepts that the reason manifested in any conversation testifies to the possibilities of proper realization of this access. The category of death does not need to be described according to Gadamer. This category is rather a sign of the finiteness of human beings, who however, have a chance of existing on a level different from a biological one. This, which for Levinas is a cause of separating entities, is for Gadamer interpreted as a condition of existence, which is a kind of articulation, thinking or creating. The loneliness of a man has never been complete. According to Gadamer it is dangerous to think about an abstract situation when we imagine an emptiness of language and about the first word, and also about our absolute isolation.6 The loneliness cannot be treated in the category of an ontological structure of existence as the essential characteristic of an existing (man). On the ground of hermeneutics one could say that even the moment of birth of entities the existing (man) is a sort of process including into ‘fulfilling’ an anonymous, impersonal il y a. ‘I’ as the way of being as being brings to the loneliness a kind of relationship, which annihilates ‘I’ as an absolute secluded monad. So, the principle of the relation between the existing and existence excludes complete loneliness. The lonely ‘I’ and connected with him by hypostasis the impersonal il y a are in mutual relation, which influences both its elements; and moreover, its essence is to connect these, not other parts. And here the relation of hypostasis is the present presence, which causes sense to rely on appearing and disappearing, that is a function of existence and the existing (man). So, the relation used for describing an ontological scheme of existence (Levinas) should exclude the possibility of reasonable talk about absolute loneliness.

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When Levinas talks about loneliness he emphasizes that we are sentenced to life, to existence; and this existence, this being, is untransferable. He talks about an existing (man) in the sort of paying costs for the selfrespect of beginning and reigning, which causes the existing (man) not to tear away from himself and nobody can exchange with him on this ‘attachment’. The individual character of life does not allow it to share with anybody and in this meaning we belong to our own impossibility to break through the limits of our existence. That murmur of entities, as Levinas named it, that hurly-burly whispering of entities, in which power we are and are not able to deliver from it – is an extreme of loneliness, where the loneliness finds its own confirmation. The specific dialectic of that ontological scheme should illustrate, in Levinas’ opinion, that the illusion of every scientific theory could transcend limits of loneliness. According to Levinas, both science and hitherto philosophy are not able to interrupt the isolation of subject. In their essences they could only confirm that isolation, and bring to the surface a dangerous conviction about world unity, which implies the totality in every human activity. Because everything that is different is brought to the subject. As the result of learning about the world, the authentic difference of the world is annihilated and grasped by these categories, and the human being becomes the object. Time becomes the present with the future as projected (Heidegger) which is not, for Levinas, the authentic future. Levinas is searching for the sources of the real human life – in death, which escapes every attempt to describe the mystery of death. Death is out of any human activity and it is the authentic future, which difference cannot be conquered by any human attempt of learning. This context describes the category of the Other, of the other human face, where there is a prohibition to kill and where there is an imperative to take responsibility for the Other, until expiation; and not before, in Levinas’ opinion, does the human being have a chance to be in an authentic way in human temporality. Levinas bases the conclusion of his considerations on the unquestionable impossibility to participate in a way of life different than our own life – on the statement that human being ‘is jammed’ in existence, in his loneliness. Although ‘I’ is only a chance, a way of existence (which is expressed in the verb ‘is’), nevertheless this ‘only’ is a kind of fettering of existence, out of which no-one can escape. It leaves an attempt to transcend by taken responsibility for the Other, which means leaving the position of learning subject and getting to the ground of morality, ethics.

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As in philosophy, Levinas here adduces that in Husserlian and Heideggerian philosophies that possibility has been omitted. Ethics is more fundamental than phenomenology as the method of radical experience. Heideggerian analysis from Being and T ime does not solve, according to Levinas, the problem of the Other man and other people. So, they do not solve the problem of authentic time and its source in human pain following from our involvement in life and death – where the Other is announced. Responsibility for the Other and justice when the third appears – this is the principle able to rule society where only the real man can live. Also Gadamer in his hermeneutics stresses that it is impossible to imagine a human being beyond community, having tradition and history. He states admittedly that Heidegger‘s conclusions follow from analysis of Dasein constitution; though Gadamer does not treat other people as the cause of non-proper existence and Dasein’s fall. Nevertheless they provide the sense and the aim and, mainly, the possibility to transcend the time of individual life limit and to participate in the level of common communication time, when everybody can contact with everybody and can reach the access to every dimension of time at once. In the tradition ruled by Mnemozyna this is the past, whose constant presence in the present is, for Gadamer, the fundamental category of his hermeneutics. We understand something that we contacted before in such a way. Our life is a kind of constant fusion of the past and the present. But the future is unpredictable and astonishing, and this conclusion makes both philosophies familiar. THE PAST TRADITION AND THE HISS OF ENTITY

However, the past, so strongly stressed by hermeneutics, is not so markedly exposed by Levinas. He considered it in the context of ontological exertions in searching the beginning of the existence as an anonymous, impersonal background to the contract of an existing (man), which is the presence of the present. As if the past has not been important to existing. We can only find the sign of the past in recalling Heidegger‘s idea that Dasein is thrown into existence. We can treat the intellectual experience revealing il y a as the sign of the human thinking process and at the same time, as the sign of human being and time. When we are there, also our existence and time are – our existence as time. When we are our time, it is with us and we cannot get rid of it. Our wish to be before (or beyond) every experience is impracticable. For Levinas this hiss of entity expressed by il y a is that something which is a prelude to history, tradition and

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every kind of past. From the point of view of hermeneutics, human existence introduces to entities the memory of the past and a man ‘breaking out’ of his roots – tradition does not exist. The situation essentially describing man’s being in the world contains temporality – manifested by reason, word, history. Every attempt to reach initiation into the matter is from the ground restricted by the hermeneutical situation of a searching man. Thus, also Levinas does not act in a vacuum; he has philosophical masters and his own experience. So, why is an existing ‘I’ deprived of that kind of characteristic? That way of existence as existence is also language and history founded on the grounds of mediation with the world. WHO IS THAT MAN WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

Reason and speech are symptoms of interrupting loneliness; and painful life experience teaches us about our contact with the other, uncontrolled by any difference. Because we experience on our own account when we break our limited prejudices, it is not a pleasant process. However, a constant movement of our life is a kind of course, which clamps down life and death. We recognize ourselves in an authentic way when we are able to choose the responsibility for the Other, the self-sacrifice for him. We are truthfully existing, in Levinas’ opinion, when we reveal the Other in our own responsibility for him, but one can ask: how is the way leading to that moment? Who is that man who is responsible? From where in that man is this concern about the Other? In life or death is there heroism? It seems that attempts to reach the sources of the entity drama are based on the conviction that the way of being (an existing ‘I’) is something ready to ‘allocate’ by being as being to existing man as if without their activity in creating ‘I’. Relative separation ‘I’ and existing (men) – where ‘I’ as if circles such as the presence of the present7 should surely illustrate an unpredictability of the concrete, individual existence, a feeling of hopeless lack of the sense of life, which in Levinas’ opinion could be found by ethics as the first philosophy. Time has to be an expression of both our weakness and control over entities. Because we have been involved into existence in general and we have been given the power to sacrifice and to be responsible for the Other, which although dramatic, nevertheless grants an authentic sense to our accidental life. COMMUNICATION BASED ON LIFE AND COMMUNICATION BASED ON DEATH

Levinas, the author of the ontological conception as a scheme, wants to be out of phenomenology and science, out of philosophy in general: he

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wants to be at the foot of the existence as existence, but he forgets that humanity is not able to overcome the circumstances of existence. Husserl proposed phenomenology – philosophy as a science, but this science should be a specific one, founded on a special attitude, opposed to the natural attitude of the world. Heidegger in his considerations called in question all previous philosophy, because that philosophy missed that being moment – is – and gave all attention to reckoning that which is motionless. Gadamer‘s philosophical hermeneutics unmasked a claim that science has a monopoly on the truth, and showed that scientific method gives rather certitude, not the truth, which is out of science in the area of art. It turned out that humanity’s involving into existence is also his involving into language, history, truth, because Heidegger grasped these categories as ontological. This Heideggerian way of thinking presents a rich ontological scheme of being, which at the same time is a simple one, because every different category explains by a circle the order of its changing. Time manifesting by an event is aslo here, and as in Levinas, the factor chains together its different forms (history, reason, language). From this point of view one can raise the objection to Levinas that he does not notice the influence of these forms of time on the existing ‘I’. That transgression causes loneliness to be considered as almost absolute, which could be interrupted only by death – when ends an objective activity. If we admit that every existing man exists by the way of understanding, then his ‘I’ speaks something to another ‘I’ and this provokes ties of communication between existing men. One could say that the interhuman communication, as for Gadamer, is based on life, while the contact grasped by Levinas follows from death. Levinas’ option presents the process of being as a sort of blindness by our own participation in this process. A lonely ‘I’ is not sensitive to another ‘I’ as well as not experiencing the passivity of death – the difference of the Other. The learning process pulls an object within the limits of this process and at the same time has no chance to be unknowable. This particular concern with science, which pretended to become the owner of the truth and the world, calls everything situated out of scientific method absurd. THE MYSTERY OF DEATH IN FRONT OF THE WISH TO BE IMMORTAL

Levinas’ view about the unknowable sphere of existence, about the darkness and opaque mystery of death – is situated out of every attempt of learning, and which, as I understand it, we experience, but not in learning.

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In philosophical hermeneutics a category of hermeneutics experience has also broader meaning than in scientific learning. We can experience the truth being in the work of art, which overcomes the sphere of science and which does not submit to scientific verification. Though death is not treated here as a mystery giving a chance to the Other being, still its fundamental part in the constitution of the real human world is unquestionable for Gadamer. In the hermeneutic considerations there is the consciousness of death, which is the consequence of temporality-finiteness of the human being. Humanity’s longing for immortality follows from the will to fight with finiteness and this stimulates human beings to create some kind of works to constitute the real human level of time, where the human being will be able to meet the Other, who was and will be. Also in hermeneutics death as finiteness provokes a man to search the authentic communication with other people. However this contact is not based on the sacrificing of one’s own life in being responsible for the Other, but on sacrificing of one’s own creative possibilities – time and life – not biological, but the real human creative life. The question is to crystallize that most magnificent part of the human being, and to give it to another human being. In this meaning death also clarifies the authentic human life. However in the hermeneutic approach death is not grasped as a suffering, a crying and sobbing expressing human’s fight with the resistance of the material (corporal) side of being. LIFE AS A DEMON OF SLEEPLESSNESS: ENTITY WITHOUT NONENTITY

No matter which objection one directs towards Levinas, it does not shatter the ravishing power of expression of human suffering that marks this philosophy. Human weakness which is expressed by crying and sobbing, this weakness in the face of material existence, shows that in every man’s life reigns a burden of responsibility that no-one is able to get rid of it. About the tragedy of the deaths decides impossibility of nonentity, a decline to get rid of life. Levinas recognizes in life a demon of sleeplessness, that keeps us without our agreement and does not give us any chance of a piece of non-existence. In this way Levinas unmasks the nonsense of suicides, because they do not interrupt being in general. It seems that existence without an existing (man), il y a has by an anonymous and impersonal character, the chance to show an enormous weakness of an individual man in front of il y a. The result of an intellectual experiment when one thinks about destruction of everything,

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which causes pure is as a verb, should describe the uncontrollable power of existence, which crushes us. When we are present in our time on the scene of existence it turns out that our time is without the past and the future, so that it is a kind of eternity. Thus, existence as the constant presence in respect of time results as changes. Only with the circle of the presence of the present and with the way in which the present reveals an existing ‘I’ can there be composed time in the common sense.8 However, the question of time is, for Levinas, not ending on that sense. As we noticed, the tragedy of death and the pain of non-transferable existence cannot be overcome by any human activity, except responsibility for the Other. This responsibility, carried to expiation, can break the loneliness of an existing. Constituted in that way the authentic future in the result of breaking an entity – its plurality, which makes that absolute difference possible; we can experience it only when the helpless face of the Other will speak to us the moral obligation: do not kill. So, for Levinas, time is a kind of ontological scheme, which expresses what was absent in philosophy hitherto: the tragedy of the existence inevitability, which makes human longing for, not to be impossible. Levinas promotes being without the nonentity notion. This impossibility of nonentity takes from suicides the function to dominate over existence. No-one is a lord of anything – we are dealing with the absurd. Because of this situation Hamlet is out of tragedy: he understands that not to be is impossible and even by a suicide he is not able to dominate over an absurdity.9 Levinas notices in temporality and he expresses by temporality the situation of a man in the world; he regards the tragic dimension of our existence when we try to satisfy demands following from a material (corporal) side of existence. The French philosopher emphasizes entity without nonentity grasped as a lack of entity, which we are afraid of.10 ILLUSION THAT WE DOMINATE OVER EXISTENCE: THE FREEDOM OF BEING

The interpersonal face-to-face relation has to, in Levinas’ opinion, control other relations between people. The institutional character of our social life rules by justice needs to be controlled by the face-to-face relation with the Other. According to Levinas, in revealing in the Other face our anxiety about his death, the crux of the subject is reached. But one can ask here: is this anxiety based on the anxiety about our death? Does it not derive secondary in front of the primary experience of the anxiety about our own death? In other words, does the source of society follow

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from the previous situation of setting up the authentic possibility of giving.11 If one wants to offer something he should have this something, but, for Levinas, our control over our existence is illusory. Ethics as the first philosophy has to be, in his opinion, the basics for human social behavior, which constitute human subjectivity. Its character of the first rank should indicate that the human’s world is different than nature’s; and rules specific to human principles differ from natural laws. This attitude of the mind is also not strange for Gadamer, according to whom, the consciousness of freedom rules human’s activity.12 The loneliness of existence is, for Levinas, not only tragic but also aristocratic, proudspirited, splendid and dominates over existence by this simple fact that an existing (man) is. The freedom of beginning is connected with loneliness. Without that freedom the responsibility will not have been able. On that score Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not opposite to Levinas’ philosophy. Also for Gadamer it is clear that the consciousness of freedom is the ethical resort which rules the human social world, that testifies to the difference of that world from the natural one. From that it follows that every scientific theory is useless in explaining the human social world activities. They are based on responsibility, but not for the Other though for the human’s own acts. It does not include of course Levinas’ emphasis on motive, namely: the responsibility for the Other, who could be threatened with our acts. However Gadamer also notices in the responsibility following from freedom that it is conditioned by e.g. hereditary inclinations. The line of the human lot shows as if two faces, when we see it from the inside as the result of our acts and decisions, and when we see it from the outside as the simple result of given elements (or providence rules everything).13 This doubleness of view of the human lot, does not have to mean a break to incomprehensible human worlds. THE UNITY OF REASON IN FRONT OF THE BEING SPLIT

Gadamer does not talk about any ontological difference or strangeness of the worlds we meet in our life. The strangeness grasped as a kind of something unreasonable is very important from the world point of view, as an initial and necessary condition of the world relies on showing indirectly where we ought to tend: to understand the world. The strangeness of something incomprehensible does not mean here ontological pluralism. While according to Levinas the difference breaks entity at its foundations. According to him, tragedy and terror of life and death, are the elements of the human world. Science teaches us about something,

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but life experience teaches us about something else. Every theory, even the most witty scientific theory, is not able to help the man oscillating on the edge of life and death. This is why Levinas says that the mystery of death cannot be broken by any human activity. For Levinas the passive inertia of death in front of human cognitive possibilities rock the entity fundamentally. In the second world war, the extermination camps revealed in full something of human nature, which until then was sleeping. Levinas does not write about situations from his imagination, but from his real life. These pathological situations consist of his life experience and perhaps he noticed something essential for human beings which in a normal life is invisible. We can suppose that this essential principle, which rules our existence, was revealed during this experience of monstrous fear. So, perhaps one need not confront hermeneutics with Levinas’ philosophy without the assumption that they follow from different conditions and different needs of people creating these philosophies. It seems that Levinas’ effort is like ‘‘the cry of a wounded bird’’ when it revealed to him the need of life and the need of death at once. What is the whole of human knowledge in face of the mystery of death? Is it possible that in the situation when our life is in danger, we do not think that the whole being break-up is under our feet? UNDERSTANDING AS THE EXPRESSION OF THE WORLD UNITY

However, Levinas creates philosophy, and tries by language to express what he experienced. So, in spite of his skepticism about theoretical attempts to grasp what is out of any theory, he tries to contact other people – he admits the language unit of the human world. Gadamer in his hermeneutics emphasises many times that there are a lot of different forms of expression of human communication, but they are connected by the human need to communicate via language. As we noticed earlier, Gadamer treats science in the same way as Levinas, so hermeneutics calls into question scientific totalitarianism in human thinking. Admittedly sometimes hermeneutics is treated as a kind of learning theory, but it does not correspond to Gadamer’s idea, because in the third part of T ruth and Method he makes the ontological turn of his hermeneutics on the ground of language. The understanding is, in his philosophy a way of being human14 (after Heidegger), which temporary character manifests itself by a circular course. According to Gadamer the general outline of every human experience is important, even that is life experience, but it must be expressed by a kind of meeting in language – conversation. From

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this point of view we can treat Levinas’ suggestion as the voice in the conversation with other people and at the same time as the confirmation of a human linguistic link, which means that we belong to the one world. From this position Levinas’ word is the very opposite to what he is doing. Because he proclaims the conviction that entity is plural, he says about something unknowable and at the same time he introduces it into his ontological scheme. The death mystery is the sign for human existence, so it means something, it ‘says’ something about this existence. When we stay in front of something unknowable we know that it is refractory on our activity. But we also reveal that passivity is the most important feature of being human, causing the most human pain.15 This situation also reveals that weakness following from passivity is the essential characteristic of human existence. WE ARE GRASPED INTO THE GOSSAMER OF EXISTENCE

The existing man gets into the gossamer of existence and feels that he is not able to extricate from it; so he can only be the unit of temporary ecstasies. Creativity seems to be a reaction to a decline into nonentity. The human world appears to be a game with inertia, a dance with death, an attempt to delude the difference of death by means of works of art. On the border between life and death it reveals that our being will end somewhere, that the world of the existing human will disappear although existence in general will still be there. We consider here only the biological side of our existence. Levinas’ analysis is not referred to the world of spirit (Gadamer). The responsibility for the Other seems to be a feature of the biological aspect of being and it does not apply to the world of human creativity. It is striking that ethics as the first philosophy should be the expression of spiritual perfection, but Levinas does not consider the world of spirit in his ontological scheme. The contract between existence and the existing (man) is here out of language, tradition, history, where spiritual aspects of being human have their sources. In this starting point the spiritual element of being is eliminated, so it is hard to find this element in every man’s lonely existence, unless the world of the Other breaks-up the loneliness of the existing (man). That way ethical aspects are introduced into ontology. THE SHARPNESS OF LEVINAS’ VIEW: WE ARE DAZZLED BY LIFE

Perhaps the radical character of Levinas’ assumptions is unjustified, but also perhaps by this way is it possible to express the essential contents

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of human pain which follows from his weakness. Conviction about ethics primordially seems to follow from the situation when a person must agree on their being in order to participate in the existence described by hermeneutics. The authentic human relation to existence needs an agreement on the passiveness tragedy for the sake of the Other. Levinas is very particular about the society of responsible people, people who are able to brace their own existence. The authentic time of existence occurs when is reveals being and end – the future death. The certitude of our death is the phenomenon of real time and the cause of ontological pluralism.16 For Levinas the human being in face of life’s end is not able to live. Levinas’ considerations provoke us to be concerned with this mysterious beginning, which reveals the absurdity of existence as that existence’s essence.

RICHES OF THE PAINFUL EXPRESSION OF EXISTENCE

Terrified by the absurdity of what is meeting us, we want to go back to a situation where there was no responsibility, to the situation free of being, not restricted by the material side of existence. But we have come to know that this situation is unattainable; so even after that we pick up the challenge of life and we try to give it some sense (by the Other) causing time, history, tradition, culture and wars, extermination camps, diseases. For Levinas the moral level of a relation face to the Other face is necessary in eliminating these pathological situations, but is it effective? Is it rather understanding and its lack, concealment and unconcealment, the most essential level of our human world? So, the ontological way of meaning ‘understanding’ takes in also the relation of responsibility for the Other. We can single out this relation as the most important, but is it right? Is it right to mark off human death while the circle of human existence is in the interdependence system? In the context of other entities of the world, human existence is the most painful expression of being. But on the other hand this existence is the richest form of being. Human existence is able to create the specific level of time situated beyond natural time, where one can contact the spiritual world of human community. However this hermeneutic sphere of time is based on the fact of biological existence. When for Levinas this fact is the problem of death; he tries to add to our way of grasping the mystery of life and death the tragic level of pain – no one can get rid of it.

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The connection of being with time is developed in this dimension of time, which follows from weakness; and human suffering is overcome by the real human activity – the responsibility for the Other. The solution suggested by Levinas is in some sense derivative in face of the problem noticed by him. The issue of the solution of the sleepless presence of present being can be the attitude Levinas talks about, but it refers to the whole world. Is it however possible to be equal to this task? Is it rather that every fruit of human activity could turn against being human? So, perhaps it is more consistent if we include the terror of being in the ontological characteristics of the human situation in the world. Going into the impersonal ‘hiss’ of entity, into constant change, forces the human to fight; this is what is inevitable. This fight needs effort but also involves pain. To oppose the force of habit in order to reach real existence, while the authentic being is not for ever, so everybody must still take care of it – this is the effort characteristic to every consciousness human being. The whole tragedy relies on the fact that the fall, the loss of authentic existence, is inscribed in the ground of being. Our participation in the spiritual level beyond the limits of time, where we can contact everyone in a spiritual way, requires surrendering the world of everyday life. So, this beautiful vision of the holiday time should be complemented by the truth about suffering and utterance connected with our participation in this time level. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology University of Gdan´sk, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Sopot Faculty NOTES 1 E. Levinas, T ime and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). 2 E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). 3 H.-G. Gadamer, T ruth and Method (New York, Seabury Press, 1975), Part I. 4 H.-G. Gadamer, ‘‘Asthetik und Hermeneutik’’, in Kleine Schriften, II, Interpretationen (Tu¨bingen, 1967). 5 H.-G. Gadamer, ‘‘Mensch und Sprache’’, in: Kleine Schriften I, Munich 1966. 6 Ibid. 7 E. Levinas, T ime and the Other ... 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

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11 E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity ... 12 H.-G. Gadamer, ‘‘Kausalita¨t in der Geschichte?’’ in: Ideen und Formen. Festschrift fu¨r Hugo Friedrich, Frankfurt am Main 1964. 13 Ibid. 14 Let us remember that for Levinas this understanding is still philosophy of the Same, but not the Other. See E. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient a l’ide´e, Paris 1986. 15 Levinas writes about the idea of Infinity where he voices the most passive passiveness connected with sensitiveness to the Other. See De Dieu ... 16 In Levinas’ opinion, what Heidegger says about death does not embrace its full dimension. The German philosopher omits Levinas’ emphasis on the aspect that death is connected with the impossibility to take anything with us (see De Dieu ... ). But Levinas’ analysis also places death in the center of his interest. Furthermore, perhaps this one-sidedness of the view of death noticed by Heidegger does not include, as it would seem, his own considerations.

SECTION III VARIOUS AESTHETIC RAYS IN LITERATURE

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenzi and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI

ARTICULATE SPONTANEITY AND THE AESTHETIC IMAGINATION

Spontaneity underlies the aesthetic momentum of ecstasis – of steppingoutside-oneself and outside the ethos of one’s habits in order to see things otherwise than in everydayness or Allta¨glichkeit as Heidegger analyzed it categorically in Sein und Zeit. The link between spontaneity and ecstasis is what I want to establish here in its specific articulation in the work of the aesthetic imagination. Ecstasis, I shall argue, is essential to understanding the work of art which is effected in and exploits a suspension of our ordinary ‘metaphysics’. Moreover, the freedom from everydayness implied by an altered perception and expression should be discernible not merely in experiences of angst, or exile, as later Heidegger argues in his readings of Sophocles and Ho¨lderlin, but in the spontaneity of the aesthetic imagination. In Sein und Zeit principally death, or the confrontation with finitude, makes possible the understanding of being as temporality that leads to the ecstasis of authenticity, for it seems to Heidegger that anxiety alone breaks the hold of everydayness on the horizonal constitution of a world. Because his model, as has been well noted, was grounded in the near-exclusive practicality of the equipmental relation to things, Heidegger could not extend to aesthetic-poetic experience the source of ecstasis and recognize art as a repository of its spontaneous expression. Although he gestures toward this in Grundprobleme der Pha¨nomenologie in 1927 (in the passages on Rilke), Heidegger, in his early phase, had identified life’s intrinsic tendency to objectify itself, and had argued that this objectification can lead either to authentic ecstatic selfreflection upon experience or the inauthentic, what he called ‘fallen,’ projection of life into a complex of objects (Heidegger 2004, 6); but Heidegger did not see this possibility for life’s turning-itself-around in the aesthetic, but principally in religious, experience and specifically in the temporality of primal Christian experience. This view, secularized in Being and T ime, sets up the concept of conscience and then anxiety as the sources of existential self-reflection – the antidote for fallenness – but because it follows, first the eschatology of Christian temporality and later the logic of the ontological difference (the ‘not’ between Being and beings) in a thorough critique of subjectivity, the imagination is overlooked and so too is lacking any account of spontaneity. And though we can find 199 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 199–220. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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some assistance in his examination of the figurative image, Sartre’s treatment of spontaneity in his phenomenological psychology of the imagination turns only very briefly to the work of art, refusing to ‘‘take on the problem of the work of art as a whole.’’ (Sartre, 188). In contrast, I want to work out here a theory of spontaneity specifically in its virtual articulation, to justify the notion of what I will call an ‘‘articulate spontaneity’’ as able to be formally indicated in some modern works of art where, I also think, ecstasis is explicitly invoked and expressed. Thus in this essay I will aim, in two sections, the following: 1) to define articulate spontaneity specifically in light of aesthetic-poetical experience and give an account of its relation to ecstasis; this will require an examination of both pre-articulate and aesthetically expressive experiences of spontaneity in a divergence from ordinary practical habituality; and 2) a phenomenological analysis of spontaneity as preserved at several strata in specific aesthetic and poetic experiences. In this latter section, I propose less a systematic treatment than a seeking formal indication of articulate spontaneity at several levels of the aesthetic-poetic work. My principal subjects of analysis will be Frost’s poem ‘‘Directive,’’ and, wanting to indicate that this sort of analysis would be applicable to other modern works and to the visual medium. I will also analyze an abstract expressionist painting by Jackson Pollock. For there we will find spontaneity, I argue, as preserved via its virtual pictoral articulation. I. A THEORY OF ARTICULATE SPONTANEITY

Spontaneity and Ecstasis I would like to begin with a scenario about virtuality in order to introduce a proto-aesthetic spontaneity in its initial momentum and in the context of the departure from the ordinary I have referred to in terms of ecstasis. By way of perception outside the practicality of everydayness, the child’s relation to things can suggest, as we know from the literary treatments at least of Proust and Rilke of childhood perceptions, a not-yet-articulate transfer from ordinary reality to a virtual aesthetically-charged imaginary dimension akin to what Sartre called ‘‘irreality’’ (l’irre´el) (Sartre, 188/361). Such a dimension is analogous to that of aesthetic experience, though not yet articulate in the manner of aesthetic expression. Let us say that a very young but verbal child, we’ll call him Arthur, who is ‘reading’ a picture book, sees a small plate of cookies on the counter in the picturekitchen. Arthur reaches his fingers as if into the picture whilst ‘grasping’

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and brings his fingers to his mouth in an attempt to ‘taste’ the (virtually) grasped cookie. Such an act does not signify pretending, because the child then insists to his mother, with delight, that he wants the cookie, an insistence which is followed by frustration at not having it. While for an adult the suspension of the legislation of ordinary determinations of reality, what Bergson would call our practically-oriented metaphysics, can be effected in the aesthetic imagination (or, alternatively, according to a psychological disorder the reverse of that suffered by MerleauPonty’s Schneider in the Phenomenology of Perception, who cannot make the transfer from the virtual to the concrete, such as in following a map) in the context of early childhood such a slippage from the representational order to the virtual presence and from that to the everyday reality is, it seems, quite natural. As one phenomenologist has noted, ‘‘it is the child’s conflation of fantasy and everyday reality that makes the child’s world an enchanted world’’ (Backhaus, 28). In Arthur’s case clearly we are dealing with an imaginative constitution (of the picture-cookie), however, not yet of the strictly aesthetic sort: following Kant’s terms, there is no ‘free play’ (Freies Spiel) felt in the liberation from the legislative understanding’s usual role, because the projection is motivated not by the beautiful but by desire; moreover, in terms I will defend in this essay, such a constitution is not yet generative. To indicate its structure, we must say that the picture-cookie is not merely, in Husserl’s terms, an ‘‘image-subject,’’ for Arthur is not interested in the cookie-as-referent (there are real cookies available nearby) but in that one only, in the singular one evoked by the picture-book and which is not replaceable by the real thing. We know that Arthur is not unable to make the distinction between a present perceptual object and its pictoral representation, and we can reasonably conclude that it is not the inked paper that he wants to eat (the substrate of the ‘‘physical image,’’ in Husserlian terms). Rather, it seems that Arthur does not accept the distinction between the virtual and the actual, a non-acceptance which evokes the kind of epoche´ which artists, poets and writers take great pains to effect: to regard the phenomena without respect to their ontological status as having or not having being. Similarly can Arthur reject severe incongruities of scale: he demands ‘‘Arthur sit tractor!’’ of a new toy the size of his own small hand. This Alice-in-Wonderland projection – we’ll call it, together with that of the above example, the ‘‘Arthurian position’’ – effects a breaking through of ordinary reality, the practical orientation toward which, the ‘everydayness’ (Allta¨glichkeit) in Heidegger’s sense, has not yet exerted over the child’s perceptions the influence that diminishes to the point of near-extinction

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merely fantastical possibilities. Arthur’s hermeneutical horizons are fluid enough to yield easily when an incongruent, and yet more pressing, desire is evoked and posited; this fluidity is what allows fairy tales, for example, to ‘‘offer patterns of existential meaning by which the child makes sense of her [or his] world.’’ If, as Backhaus argues, ‘‘for the child enchantment is easily managed,’’ so too is projection of real-worldly relations onto the virtual image (Backhaus, 28–29). While the projection is no doubt motivated by a desire-complex (relating not only to appetite but to object manipulation, power-over, etcetera), it is in the suspension and yielding of the ordinary horizon of understanding, and its replacement by another, where spontaneity must be located. To put it in Husserlian terms, there is a certain spontaneity corresponding to the collapsing of the physical image, the image-object, and the image-subject (das physische Bild, das Bildobjekt, das Bildsujet/-subjekt), a deviation from an ordinary structure, one which affords the privileging of the virtual over the real, as occurs in the aesthetic experience per se wherein this deviation becomes generative (Husserl, 18–19). It is just this spontaneity, effortless and even involuntary for the child, which Rilke and Proust, in their memorializations of child` la recherche hood in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte L aurids Brigge and A du temps perdu, respectively, attempt to effect in their writings in order to command a specifically aesthetic, rather than equipmental, relation to everyday objects, a topic I have discussed elsewhere (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2002). In Rilke and Proust, as in works of art in general, this spontaneity, in contrast to that of the only pre-aesthetic Arthurian position, will emerge as articulate. In his study of the imagination, Edward S. Casey schematizes what Sartre identified as a categorical feature of the imagination, its spontaneity, defining the latter in terms of an effortlessness (which we have seen in the child’s relation to the virtual), instantaneousness, and surprise (Casey, 34; 68–72). Spontaneity, like controlledness, accompanies every act of imagining, but in different degrees of emphasis, and is more conspicuous, and most typical, ‘‘when an imaginative presentation emerges suddenly and in unsolicited fashion’’ (Casey, 59–60). Our study here concerns specifically the productive aspect of spontaneity in aesthetic-poetic experience, a generativity which exceeds the unsolicited and momentary thought which Casey, following Sartre, analyzes. Spontaneity is already thought as productive in Sartre’s model of the imagination when imagining consciousness is defined as a spontaneity ‘‘that produces and conserves the object as imagined.’’ This spontaneity for Sartre ‘‘is a kind of indefinable counterpart to the fact that the object [in this case the image] gives itself

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as a nothingness (comme un ne´ant).’’ It is, Sartre argues, ‘‘thanks to this vague and fugitive quality that the image-consciousness is not given as a piece of wood but that floats on the sea, but as a wave among waves.’’ (Sartre, 14/35). But in the realm of aesthetic creativity, when we say that something is spontaneous we indicate a something sui generis that does not just occur but becomes articulate in prompting its own expression and realization, in Ce´zanne’s sense of a re´alisation of a motif. To paraphrase Kant, a spontaneous process cannot be given a determinate ground (Kant, AK 356); as specifically aesthetic it must motivate a followingthrough in the realm of form-giving organization or expression; unlike the Arthurian position, which remains at the level of the posited virtuality in an unqualified acceptance of the virtual as real, it must be generative of something new that will become formally expressed. According to the traditional reproductive model of the imagination, it might be objected at the outset that art and poetry, unlike, for instance, a priori categories, do not arise of themselves, preceding any phenomenal exemplification, but bring together mimetically and arrange formally diverse aspects of given phenomenal experience in their perceptual, visual, phonic, aural, spatial, temporal, etc. determinations. If not direct perception, the Freudian notion of the unconscious as prefiguring associative images and motifs, a view promoted in different ways by feminist theorists such as Kristeva and Irigaray, would provide the substrate or at least material motive out of which art and poetry are made. In this respect aesthetic experience would not be something arising ex nihilo, but bespeaks, even if non-mimetic, a formal organization of various aspects of some or other motivating given, biological and social in origin. According to Dewey, art unifies diverse aspects of experience such as doing and undergoing, receiving and making, means and ends, and so on; but in Dewey it is the perfection or ‘‘consummation’’ of ordinary experience that is expressed rather than its ecstatic transformation. We can follow Dewey in claiming that this bringing-together follows a logos that is in each case, in its function and effect, unique to the specific work of art, but argue further that it is conditioned by a transport from ordinary ways of seeing and experiencing: that is to say, the gathering that belongs to creative production is charged with ecstasis. Even in Dewey’s notion of the consummatory phase of experience in art he admits that it is generative, for it ‘‘always presents something new,’’ an ‘‘unexpected turn, something which the artist himself does not definitely foresee,’’ and this is a condition of what he called the ‘‘felicitous quality of a work of art’’ (Dewey, 139). Jackson Pollock spoke unromantically about his method,

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the famous notion of ‘action painting,’ in terms that recall this unforeseeability: it keeps the work from being merely mechanical. ‘Action painting’ is not just a means to the automatism of the Surrealists, despite their influence but – as I interpret Pollock’s descriptions – it is a means to enter the painting’s spontaneous emergence, to enter and maintain the spontaneity of painting. Pollock claimed he must keep ‘‘contact’’ with the painting or else ‘‘the result is a mess’’; but when ‘‘the painting comes out well,’’ he would say, it takes on ‘‘a life of its own.’’ (Read, 267). The work of art indeed begets something new from out of the elements of which it is composed, a something new which is irreducible to those elements or to their representation; thus in Pollock, as Herbert Read long ago pointed out, following Clement Greenberg, vitality itself, not a channeling of unconscious images, becomes the criterion of success or failure. When Pollock, like other members of the New York School, was interested in the pre-conscious universal substrate of the psyche, it was not to the interpretable unconscious image (the associative image) that he was drawn, as had been the Surrealists, but the preconscious ‘‘sensational image, an image of an indeterminate shape and imprecise colours, which perhaps comes from a deeper layer ...’’ (Read, 266). Pollock, in other words, rejects not only figuration but any positively identifiable imagesubject. His work remains a ‘‘formal indication’’ which emphasizes relational meaning rather than content of gesture and visuality, and it is the refraining from positive content which in this case maintains the free play of the imagination. That Pollock aims to contact a preconscious stratum of existence resonates with some of Paul Klee’s paintings, which do not so much borrow from the unconscious as pierce through it to the spontaneity in life’s initial substrate. In Klee’s case, the painter reaches to a stratum older than vision, a virtual musicality effected in the play of light and intermediating colors. Like Klee, Pollock was drawn to the transformative power of the ‘‘primordial image’’ (see Danto 1999, 76) for his work specifically emerged out of a ‘‘seemingly infinite labyrinth of pattern and movement’’ (Feldman, 29) which, as I will argue below, preserves spontaneity in manifold ways. What renders the bringing-into-being here explicitly aesthetic – unlike either the spontaneity of the child or, at the other end of the spectrum, creativity in theoretical physics – is the preservation of its articulate spontaneity as experienceable within the work itself, and that the work is organized toward such experience. Whereas the imagination of the physicist is subscripted to a telos of scientific understanding and eventual verification, and Arthur is motivated by some desire-complex, spontaneity in the work of art, to quote Ge´rard Genette, ‘‘does not

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itself serve any purpose other than its own perpetuation or renewal’’ (Genette, 114). To understand articulate spontaneity in bringing-together by way of analogy, I refer to Durkheim’s sociological employment of spontaneity in his rendering of the ‘sui generis’ of the ‘social fact’. Here Durkheim does not grapple with the ancient Greek problem of something arising from out of nothing, and thus with the Parmenidean and then Platonic separation of being from non-being, but rather of something new arising from elements to which, however, it cannot be reduced. Durkheim defends the logos of sociology as a distinct discipline by reference to the social fact arising sui generis, irreducible to a dialectic of individual forces. Durkheim writes: ‘‘it is true ... that society has no other active forces than individuals; but individuals by combining form a psychical existence of a new species, which consequently has its own manner of thinking and feeling.’’ Durkheim, in accounting for collective tendencies in various cultures to suicide, initiates the distinctly sociological method by shifting from the individual consciousness to a new and wholly social phenomenon. Noting after exhaustive comparative study that suicide rates correspond to social rather than individual factors, he identifies the social fact as sui generis: the social is itself a genetic source. He writes: When the consciousness of individuals, instead of remaining isolated, becomes grouped and combined, something in the world has been altered ... In itself it is something new, [for] ... naturally this change produces others, this novelty engenders other novelties, phenomena appear whose characteristic qualities are not found in the elements composing them (Durkheim, 275).

To deny this would make all social change, in contrast to biological evolution, ‘‘inexplicable.’’ Like the social fact sui generis, aesthetic spontaneity involves an unforeseeable, virtual and emotive productivity beyond the elements out of which a work of art is composed. This virtuality might be identified provisionally as a ‘‘third stratum’’ of reality beyond two given interrelated features of an aesthetic experience. Obviously we mean not a numerical ‘third’ here-for any number of features might be involved. We simply mean, following Hans Hofman’s discussion of even two mere lines on a page, that a ‘‘phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order’’ is initiated, created out of the ‘‘relative meaning of two physical facts in an emotionally controlled relation’’ (Hofman, 41). This third virtual stratum in the aesthetic-visual and poetic image, is reducible neither to the real nor to its representation, but might be referred to Husserl’s notion of intuitive re-presentation (anschauliche

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Vergegenwa¨rtigung) and the tripartite image-schema referred to earlier. Here I will highlight spontaneity as articulate with respect to this third stratum identifiable in other features of the aesthetic-poetic work. In poetic art, for instance Frost’s poem to be discussed below, this reality emerges in what I would call the generative interstice of metaphor as it draws identification between disparate referents; in the variations of metric rhythm and their production of significant form; and in shifts of the poetic voice out of the lived spatio-temporality of everydayness. In Pollock I will point to the deliberate rejection of figuration; the registration of unforeseeability; and the notion of vitality; but in this case the Husserlian distinctions will again be of use, as will those of Sartre, despite his disinclination to address the aesthetic experience in its own right, at least in his formal study of the imagination. Following up on the connection I wish to draw between spontaneity and ecstasis, we note that the aesthetic sui generis is articulate within the context of turning away from or shifting out of ordinary modes of perception and linguistic or visual expression. This entails the categorical character of spontaneity Casey identified as surprise, the subjective correlate of the unforeseeable manifesting itself in articulate creation. Thus articulate spontaneity exceeds the generation of evolutionary organic life, as Bergson discussed it in terms of creative evolution. Spontaneity in organic life is, after all, manifested by ‘‘a continual creation of new forms succeeding others’’ (Bergson 1944, 96), but this creation in nature is largely determined by function. In contrast, the wonder which can be evoked in viewing works of modern art yields an experience, as Fischer recently argued, ‘‘for which even the widest knowledge of earlier painting ... is no preparation’’ (Fischer, 22). Concordant to the fact that the painting can evoke ‘‘in its essence an experience of wonder’’ (ibid.), attempts to trace this back logically or functionally to its predecessors, as in a retrospective dialectic of art history, have certainly not been convincing, even though they are almost unavoidable in art-historical narrative. My notion here of an articulate spontaneity as sui generis in Durkheim’s sense might be instructive in assessing the achievement of Pollock’s work which, despite his immense popularity among theorists, seems to evade formulation. Of the diversely effected splashes of paint in his ‘action paintings,’ sometimes the sum total, as he hoped, yields a sense of ‘‘pure harmony’’ (Read, 267); but what is essential beyond the notion of harmony, for which, after all, nearly every artist through modernism has aimed to achieve, is that each work that does seem to take on a life of its own harbors its own concrete vitality in excess of its ‘elements.’ Here spontaneity, in contrast to the

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desire-complex of Arthur’s relation to objects which, though harboring spontaneity, might not yet be said to be ‘free,’ provokes the free play of the imagination in its relation to the understanding usually dominated by its practical or scientific, e.g., everyday, modes. In viewing Pollock’s work, the understanding is not eliminated in its function of legislating objects, but is suspended in a vital and generative repose. This repose is generative within the emotive and even cognitive registers of the viewer’s experience, though it is of course bound to the painting in its endowment by the causa materialis and causa formalis and resists linguistic formulation. At the noematic level, however, this repose might be correlate to the state of wonder as described by Philip Fischer in his treatment (Fischer, 1998). While Heidegger attends to fascination and curiosity, wonder does not figure as an ontological state of ecstasis in Sein und Zeit. Anxiety (about Dasein’s ontological nature) marks the space where Dasein generates motives for turning away from and seeing otherwise life’s inauthentic habitualities, its ordinary, quotidian ‘look.’ Anxiety is Heidegger’s explanation of the motive for what he had earlier called life’s ‘‘turning around’’ and he had identified as a religious experience of breaking with habitual fallenness. I maintain on the contrary that the motive for the shift from ordinary seeing need not be exclusively tethered to angst, nor, in contrast to Philip Fischer’s contention, to a forced estrangement from a world with which one is essentially bored, as he reads of Romanticism, but can be found in the wonder associated with aesthetic and poetic experience. In his theories both of Angst and the shift to religious temporality, Heidegger does not address the distinctly aesthetic momentum involved. Even an atmospherically religious experience, for instance a shared ecstatic reception of music, can provoke a radical and not temporary transformation that seems, at the existential level alone, generative of a new and unforeseen, but also very precious, ‘irreality’ which is also therefore aesthetic in nature. If we take modern art and literature (Rilke, Kafka, Sartre, Frost, Ce´zanne, Klee, Ponge, Robbe-Grillet, Morandi, Pollock, etc.) as guide, it seems natural to our experience of everydayness that it is vulnerable to spontaneous-imaginative alteration we sometimes designate as ‘wonder.’ This vulnerability perhaps echoes and preserves the still-inarticulate spontaneity of Arthurian position or what Backhaus identifies as enchantment. Here I am countering Fischer’s argument that wonder arises only in experiences of the rare and the new but decidedly not in the everyday

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(Fischer, 18–21). Wonder (which Heidegger demoted to inauthentic curiosity in Sein und Zeit) has been articulated poetically on both the ‘object’ and ‘subject’ poles of aesthetic experience, for instance, in Rilke’s notion of the mysterious ‘other side’ of things to which the poet is attuned. Both poles of wonder shift out of the natural attitude in the subject’s noticing of the quotidian aspect of reality as aspect and thus not the definitive quality of reality. While Wittgenstein has argued that the everyday quality of life, its familiarity, cannot be ‘‘felt’’ (Wittgenstein, 127), it can be retained as a hermeneutical-aesthetic category for consciousness when the natural attitude is broken through and a new modality of perception or imagining arises in contrast to it. This productive taking-notice is absent in the Arthurian position precisely in the sheer effortlessness of its spontaneity; in contrast, aesthetic spontaneity, in becoming articulate, is not necessarily effortless, nor is it, as Casey and Sartre have argued of imagining in general, necessarily instantaneous. My view concords with recent theories that musical inspiration does not usually occur as a thunder-bolt of instantaneous reception, but requires graduated labor of attunement. Jonathan Harvey writes that, while composers (such as Mozart) have reported such moments of isolated heightened awareness, ‘‘the experience of musical inspiration, however, is generally more complex and varied than the ‘thunderbolt’ image would lead us to believe’’ (Harvey, 25). As Tchaikovsky attests, inspiration evolves as ideas develop and generate further ideas, and this process as it unfolds can be thought of as ecstatic. Tchaikovsky writes: I would vainly try to express in words that unbounded sense of bliss that comes over me when a new idea opens up within me and starts to take on definite form. Then I forget everything and behave like one demented. Everything inside me begins to pulse and quiver: I hardly begin the sketch before one thought begins tumbling over another. There is something somnambulistic about this condition. ‘On ne s’entend pas vivre.’ It is impossible to describe such moments (Letter to Mme. von Meck, 24 June 1878).

Clearly something new emerges from this blissful emergence, and according to Tchaikovsky’s description it is a graduated state with discernable moments where ‘‘one thought begins tumbling over another.’’ Here spontaneity that occurs and is preserved in art is, according to my thesis here, resonant with the ecstasis of stepping-outside-oneself, with the breakdown of the natural attitude as it occurs in the initiation of aesthetic-poetical seeing, poetical attention to language, or other aesthetic experiences wherein the means of life (perception, habit, identification,

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language, reception, and so on) become its wondrous subject-matter. Even erotic ecstasis, such as we denote sometimes by the term ‘ecstasy,’ can be regarded as one means of life, namely embodiment, becoming wonderfully thematic to itself by way of mutual intimacy and its intense contact. Just as ecstatic reflection upon the quotidian emerges in the difference of a given experience from one’s habituated expectations, from the means of living, it must be argued that spontaneity emerges in the context of regularity and the logos of life, not in opposition to it. Despite Tchaikovsky’s reference to dementia, spontaneity when it becomes articulate cannot indicate sheer disorder, a total breakdown of lawful experience, but indicates rather like what Kant referred to as a freie Gesetzma¨ßigkeit; this affords the emergence of possibilities that differ, in the context of wonder or ecstasis, from the expected and the traceable, but which also allow the aesthetic to be carried forward in unanticipated manifestations of logos. These are possibilities to which I have argued Rilke’s poems, under the motif of the mysterious, are almost unanimously devoted. With these examples from music and poetry I am countering Fischer who claims that wonder occurs aesthetically only in the visual arts such as painting which can be instantaneously received, and that ‘‘only in occasional cases does a temporal art even court the possibilities of the unexpected and the sudden that open up the aesthetics of wonder’’ (Fischer, 21). That Lessing’s strict division between the spatial and temporal arts is problematic from a phenomenological point of view I have established elsewhere (Gosetti-Ferencei 2003). That spontaneity in the aesthetic context is articulate must still be concretely established. In the Frost poem to which I will turn below, we can see various points of emergence of the ‘‘third stratum’’ as correlate to deliberate executions of craft or techne¯. Spontaneity in art, unlike the child’s relation to the virtual, seems not to be divorced from effort as Casey and Sartre seem to claim. Here we can refer to Dufrenne’s suggestion that artistic labor and spontaneity are not at odds: ‘‘we want the mark of the worker to be on his work and to be seen as his most spontaneous and hence most necessary act.’’ For, as Merleau-Ponty will claim of style, the ‘‘technical schemata are means not just for creating the work but for expressing a world’’ (Dufrenne, 106). In other words, spontaneity itself finds no origins in effort or motivation, but it is itself motivating, generative of the new in a manner that requires artistic labor. It is in this articulate expression, and the feelings it conjures, that the ‘‘original relationship of a human being with the world is elaborated and the ungraspable spontaneity of the for-itself is manifested’’ (Dufrenne, 130).

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II. ARTICULATE SPONTANEITY IN ROBERT FROST’S ‘‘DIRECTIVE’’ AND JACKSON POLLOCK’S ‘‘NUMBER FIVE’’

Let us now engage some works with the aim of discerning formal indications of spontaneity within its various manifestations at the ‘third statum’ discussed above. In choosing a poem by Robert Frost and a painting by Jackson Pollock, I am restricting my analysis to modern works in accordance with my view that modernism harbors a special attention to an ecstasis analogous to the suspension of the natural attitude in phenomenology. Much of this analysis will be devoted to Frost’s 1947 poem ‘‘Directive’’ in which I will indicate three modes of articulate spontaneity. These three modes emerge with: firstly, the temporal self-reflexivity of the poetic voice and its explicit ecstasis in the poem; secondly, the poem’s meter and specifically in variations thereupon; and thirdly, the work of metaphor and similar phrasing. A brief general description of the poem will help to situate my arguments. In ‘‘Directive,’’ published shortly after the end of the Second World War, Frost’s speaker emerges in the wake of a present crisis, visible by juxtaposition to a remembered past, projected perhaps by virtue of childlike naivete´, to have been characterized by a moral, spiritual, or quasi-intellectual clarity. The speaker returns in poetical memory to a small-town rural landscape, which no longer exists, and describes the return to this now-inner place as a journey through all of the decay, injury, and erasure to which that reality has been subjected. The journey is not a certain one, for the guide to which the speaker refers – is it memory? or consciousness? or the imagination itself ? – ‘‘only has at heart your getting lost.’’ The goal to which the speaker seems to project is a restoration of self, a wholeness that the present is painfully lacking. (Frost, 377–379). We first locate spontaneity in the form of the temporal ecstasis eVected by the poetic voice. ‘‘Back out of all this now too much for us,’’ is how the poem begins, the speaker explicitly stepping-outside the present moment which has become unbearably confounding; this suspension, whatever the speaker might feel, is made possible by not by existential alienation but implicit projection of another, poetic virtuality against which that present could be measured and perhaps understood. Ecstasis here might be clarified by contrast to an initial line in a Shakespeare sonnet (number 43), which also effects a ‘transfer’: in a poem about dreaming up the (irre´el) presence of the beloved, Shakespeare writes: ‘‘When I most wink, then do mine eyes best see.’’ The speaker can hover

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grammatically between the effected subjective dream-state, wherein the speaker can gaze upon the beloved’s image, and the indicative real which, in a reversal of day and night, is made ‘‘dark’’ by the absence of ‘‘thee,’’ the beloved. This transfer, however, is not yet ecstatic, since the thetic position remains stable: the speaker can return to the ordinary world, as when Descartes toys with dreams and phantasms in order to reject them as illusory. Here the speaker seems to indulge the longing as longing: Shakespeare’s speaker is decidedly not confounded, but exposes the delight of the virtual in contrast to the real. Frost’s speaker, on the contrary, is closer to the Arthurian position, the slippage in the child’s relation to things between manifold ontological strata which are refused their determination of reality; but here it is more severe, since, unlike the child’s relation to objects, it arises from genuine existential confusion. By the second line of Frost’s poem transport to that elsewhere has already been effected, as Frost chooses the preposition ‘in’ rather than ‘to’ to describe a transformation: ‘‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/ Of detail.’’ The first present, then, has been replaced by an unfolding poetical duration wherein thoughts, as in Tchaikovsky’s experience of composing, begin tumbling over one another. The loss of detail that pertains to this duration is not a product of the ironic-romanticizing minimalism of, for instance, Edward Hopper’s paintings. Rather, the loss is effect of the injuries of time, inflicted perhaps by what have become habitual, adult perceptions of reality: the details are ‘‘burned, dissolved, and broken off/ Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’’ The metaphor asserted here is that of art – not necessarily great art, but sculpture nonetheless – is, like time, injured by the repetitious nature of the mundane which, seemingly innocuous, ultimately destroys specificity (for what detail is erased on graveyard marble more injuriously than the name of the dead?). Yet undoubtedly that burning and breaking off has a second, historical resonance: the recent destructions of war have made the past inaccessible and the transport to a more innocent time both impossible and painful. Frost’s poem fosters ‘‘directive’’ to the imagination to regain a sense of self and of a meaningful life in a time of crisis. Halfway through the poem, having described the meanderings of imagined return to a place that no longer exists, the speaker again uses the imperative voice, introducing it with an explicit marking of poetic temporality: ‘‘By now, pull in your ladder road behind you/ And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.’’ The journey that had been drawn imaginatively through reference both to real geography and imagined landscape turns out to be a mere ‘‘ladder road’’ – an induction to an articulated inner

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poetical place – where the details and their loss no longer hold sway over the personal understanding. That we are directed to reach out and pull in the ‘‘ladder road’’ behind us, the ladder that has only virtual existence, recalls Arthur’s position with regard to the image-object in the picture. The imagination is not reproductive, merely retracing or rearranging elements of the memory, but, sui generis, productive of a virtual stratum (a poetic duration) in contrast to both the present which is ‘‘too much for us’’ and the past which could not be recaptured. In a graduallyunfolding duration of ecstasis, not an instantaneity like Heidegger’s ‘‘moment of vision’’ (der Augenblick), the ‘‘third’’ stratum is generatively discovered. This generative discovery is symbolized by the goblet – productively ‘found’ by the imagination – out of which the speaker can ‘‘drink and be whole again beyond confusion.’’ The Holy Grail of this poem is the virtual poetic reality it generates, and thus we can explain the invocation of the (royal) first person plural in the initial line-too much for ‘‘us.’’ Beyond the fairy-tale symbol and its literalization, and thus beyond enchantment, in Frost it is the metaphor of ‘‘waters and the watering place’’ that suggests, via something like hypotyposis (Hypotypose an Versinnlichung) as Kant employs this notion, the Ursprung itself of spontaneity, a source for an imagination no longer subordinated to reproduction of an inaccessible past, of a generalized image-subject, but productive (Kant, AK 255). That we are implicitly directed to ‘take’ the grail the speaker says he ‘stole’ from the children’s playhouse admits endowment by the Arthurian position intrinsic to childhood, an endowment which, as we shall see shortly, is affirmed through other formal means. Looking more closely at some prosodic aspects of Frost’s poem, we can attend, secondly, to meter and metric variation to indicate articulate spontaneity. Contrary to Kristeva, who sees rhythms in language as refactions of the unconscious drives, the semiotic ‘chora’ underlying and prefiguring symbolic speech, we regard poetic meter as both intentional in the noetic acts of aesthetic creation – the ‘‘work’’ of the poet – and, in its significance-generating variations, evocative of pre-intentional phases of experience. The poet, contrary to theories of effortless and instantaneous inspiration, neither solely receives metrical rhythm nor calculatively imposes it upon ordinary speech. Moreover, poetic reception should not be reduced to a contest between semiotic drives and symbolic positions within language, a characterization, for example, found in Kristeva’s reading of revolutionary poets who are said to rupture the thetic in a return to semiotic currents underlying language. As I read it Kristeva’s

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theory leaves no room for genuine spontaneity, since the semiotic is thoroughly motivated by sexual-social drives. Just as Pollock, with his famous method of ‘dripping’ paint from sticks, rags, brushes, and so forth whilst walking around and around the painting, engages the contingency that emerges from his continued ‘‘contact’’ with the concrete image, the poem achieves its aesthetic value not by breaking with the symbolic in revolutionary return to an unconscious, but by nurturing and exploiting the semantic and syntactic deviations of poetical language from ordinary linguistic identification. Rhythm and its variations afford generative deviations in ways which both complement and compete with other functions of language, deviations which I maintain admit the quality of sui generis as Durkheim specifically employed it. Frost’s poem is written in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, the variations then of which are productive of supra-metrical resonance that enriches the poem’s meaning. The classical meter, by virtue of its traditional nature, itself effects a passage to the past that cannot be directly accessed (does not exist) but must be poetically projected; and the metric variations articulate spontaneity by engendering meaning in excess of rhythmic allusion which could be said to be logically motivated. While variations are carefully attended by the formal poet, their productivity is not to be reduced to constitutive intentionality. The poet himself could not wholly foresee them; rather, they issue from what Dewey called the unification of doing and undergoing that renders an experience vitally aesthetic, a dialectic between expression and reception of speech, the latter of which was emphasized to near-exclusivity in Heidegger’s later theory of poetic language. Frost’s rhythms, like the pictoral rhythms in Pollock, are both controlled and surprising, thus maintaining vitality for the reader. The regularity of the iambic rhythm and its natural affinity to the English language in which Frost writes performs brilliantly in this poem, providing in one stroke both a stepping-outside-of ordinary speech, which is not metered, and, as it is maintained about the iamb in English, a reiteration of the regularities of ordinary talking, ordinary doing, ordinary habit through the rhythms of which the details of the simple poetic time have been erased, evoking the ‘‘weather’’ of erasure and forgetfulness that, as we know from Heidegger’s analysis, can be said to pertain to the ontical situation of everydayness. Too, the refusal of rhyme (not a given for Frost who was a master of rhyme) reinforces both the everydayness out of which the speaker escapes and the unforeseeable poetical alternative he is seeking. A rhyme scheme, no matter how inventive, would restrict the specifically new form of

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imagining this poem seeks, a form which will turn out to join the method and the sought-for subject-matter of the poem at hand. Interestingly, the closest Frost approaches rhyme occurs at a heightening contraction near the poem’s end when the speaker’s voice acts out a projected-recaptured childhood position in which he does not have to accept the ordinary division between the virtual and the real, the desired and the factual. For a moment here the weary-adult but adventurous poetic voice assumes a childlike view of good and evil in its native clarity. Fascinatingly the child-logic is effected in something like the Arthurian position, in reference to a non-actual object, an object merely evoked by the speaker’s anschauliche Vergegenwa¨rtigung. There the speaker conjures a broken drinking goblet (‘‘like the Grail’’) he says is both stolen, as aforementioned, and hidden by him in the in-step arch. Here’s the off-rhyme: ‘‘Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,/ So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.’’ The ringing tension between ‘it’ and ‘musn’t’ is underlined by the nursery-rhyme-like clip phrasing of the meter, a formal affirmation of what we might (playfully) designate as the childish form of this intuitive presentation. While in general the unrhymed meter evokes an interstice between the ordinary-habitual-quotidian and the ecstatic-poetical memory, the contracted moment of near-rhyme is a generative variation that, paradoxically, broadens the poem’s ‘‘logical space,’’ to abuse a phrase from Wittgenstein’s T ractatus. In Pollock it is the avoidance of recognizable figuration which supports the ongoing ‘vitality’ of the concrete image; the variation is effected by the dispersion of ‘events’ of coagulated color throughout the painting which maintain generative tension. We linger in the virtual space of the painting without ‘concluding’ or settling, as we do everydayness, upon identifiable objects which would then be ‘readable’ in terms of other signs. In Pollock we have a physical image and a concrete image-object without the diversion of referent: the image-object and the image-subject are collapsed, or, as Danto writes of Pollock, the paint is ‘‘its own subject’’ (Danto 2003, 85). In the absence of representation, we cannot settle upon an instantaneous ‘recognition’, such as discussed by Wittgenstein in reference to familiar objects (Wittgenstein, 127.8). We are speaking, then, of spontaneity within an interstice, a notion we will employ shortly in reference to Frost’s use of metaphor. In both Frost and Pollock, variation (of the meter or of the rhythmic ‘events’ of the paint drippings in their various directions and diverse coagulations) provides, in the context of regularity or harmony, the element of surprise that Casey argues is intrinsic to spontaneity, a surprise

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that can only be formally indicated rather than exhaustively described. Contrary to the accounts of both Casey and Fischer, this surprise is characteristic of an extended and complex temporal duration, a ‘lingering’ such as felt in the ecstatic experience of music or in compositional inspiration, rather than instantaneousness. Pollack’s ‘‘Number Five,’’ executed in 1951, five years after Frost’s poem, shows an analogous structure of harmonizing rhythm and punctuating event: the gradual harmonization of layers of paint drippings which invoke rhythmic courses of labyrinthine interweavings. The cohesion of the picture is at first grounded by major vectors and arteries of color which seem to present a vivisection of the artistic process, of painting itself ‘in action.’ Yet it is the minute events of isolated, straying streaks and dribbles of paint which escape, continually emerging from and complicating the flow that prevents the eye from settling into an unchallenged, mechanical harmony, or in other words, prevents equilibrium. Vision is both transported by the sensation of movement and continually punctuated by its interruption, giving one the sense that the interruption and the transport are magically one. This interrupted transport, most significantly, is effected as articulation over and above the elements that together add up to the pictoral sensation as a whole, and the viewer is compelled to accept its necessity beyond the realm of the figurable. Looking for figures in these paintings would already suggest their failure, for the contingency itself is what is to be rendered, as Aristotle says, ‘‘with necessity.’’ As Sartre suggests, in reflection upon contemplating the ‘spot on the wall’ or the arabesque wallpaper, the more knowledge settles in, the less spontaneity is felt (Sartre, 36/77–8). Again this recalls Kant’s ‘‘free play’’ and its suspension of understanding’s legislation. In the absence of direct figuration this play is invigorating, as if spontaneity itself were contacted and touched. As we have drawn parallels between Pollock and Frost, we will see further, in the case of Frost’s poem, an analogous power of the imagination as felt not in the explicated idea, but in the acceptance of metaphoric transfer and its vital interstices which, I think, gives phenomenal stratification to the ‘free play.’ To return to Frost’s meter, the first line of Frost’s poem already departs from the iambic pentameter, with a trochee followed by four iambs. The trochee sets the poem off immediately from ordinary descriptive speech, and breaking in after the (only implied) verb leaves it undecidable whether an imperative or indicative mood, whether passive or active voice, and which tense is suggested. This undecidability initiates from the beginning an awareness that the poem is about the imagining itself and demands complementary participation or generation on the part of the reader; and

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what is to be generated is not yet ascertained. In contrast to Shakespeare’s meter from the sonnet cited above, Frost’s is destablizing. One cannot, as in Shakespeare, suspend tranquilly two alternative options of dream and reality, day and night (though this duality will be upset by their final reversal), alternatives which seem to be affirmed by the iamb-spondee or pyrrhic-spondee initiation (two double sets of almost equal syllables, the first set weak in relation to the second strong set). ‘‘When I most wink’’ offers rhythmic balance, like walking two stepstones into the poem which offers the reader two alternative realities to consider, at least until the final couplet, in repose; but in Frost, the initial meter lets the reader tumble as if from a precipice. The second and third of the iambs in Frost’s first line exhibit weak and strong stresses (‘‘this now too much’’) almost undifferentiated enough to be spondaic, a staccato which forces a dramatic slowing down of the line in which confusion and clarity compete. The second line is also initiated by a trochee, reinforcing the ecstasis demanded by the transport back ‘‘out of all this’’ – this being perhaps the postWorld War II adulthood of humanity – and ‘‘in[to] a time made simple’’; whereas lines 3 and 4 are highly regular, as if enacting the workings of weather, like rain, which gradually dissolves the details of the past. The 62 lines of the poem weave in and out of regularity and irregularity, issuing particularly trochaic and spondaic variations which effect both disorientation and a demand for production of meaning – to fill the gaps that have been left by the irretrievability of the past and the incomprehensibility of the present – on the part of the poetic-aesthetic imagination. The penultimate and ultimate lines reproduce the trochaic initiation of the first two lines of the poem, now no longer, however, suggesting undecidability in a yet-to-be-determined space of ecstatic awakening but an interior, poetically articulated, ‘‘logical space.’’ Perhaps the objective correlative of spontaneity, the freedom from the imagination’s merely reproductive role, and thus also from mere reproduction of a deadened past, is found in the final image-complex: ‘‘Here are your waters and your watering place./ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.’’ At the end of Frost’s poem a transformation can be said to have been effected. The directives do not, as at the poem’s beginning, commence in interruption; the verbs are clearly indicative and imperative; the person is second (you-both the speaker to himself and the reader); and the tense is present. But this present is different from the space of confusion that the rhythms of ordinary life and habit and forgetfulness, its ‘‘fallenness,’’ along with the severe breakdowns of recent history, had effected for the speaker. This present is a poetical production from the elements of the

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speaker’s imagination and from nowhere, from spontaneity itself. If the dissolution of the past is troublesome, it is the unforeseeability of the future which provides a liberation both from the burdened initial present and the elusiveness of childhood, of a more innocent time. This possible liberation is an invitation to ecstasis, brought about not by being-towardsdeath but by a striving of the poetic imagination to transform the given ‘look’ of the present world and its dominant temporality. The unforeseeable, the untraceable and cognitively unknowable, is what makes liberation from the present possible. This might be what Frost has in mind in the poem ‘‘Too Anxious for Rivers’’ when he declares: ‘‘It may be a mercy the dark closes round us’’ (Frost, 379). Finally, we might point to the work of metaphor and other phrasing in terms of articulate spontaneity. Metaphor works by identification of nonidentical entities or the application of something to that which it literallyordinarily does not apply. Metaphor suggests (in its original Greek ‘metapherein’) a transfer, a transport which follows no strictly logical justification. The poem capitalizes on the interstice of non-identification between the linked elements, for this is the space where spontaneity is felt by the imagination: the identification is accepted without cause, and, in the best metaphors, without the power of association. Likewise, in Pollock there is no logical or figurative identification among the various ‘events’ in the painting, their only link being that of the emergent action which transfers vision among them. In both cases a leap of surprise is made that traces the logic of wonder. We are surprised at the end of Rilke’s poem ‘‘Die Gazelle’’ that the animal is identified with an interrupted bather, and yet our surprise pertains not to the image of the bather itself, but to the feeling of uncaused projection and acceptance of that image-complex, or participation in its intuitive constitution, which then imbues the entire poem, and the meditation upon the animal, with another, vastly enriching, layer of meaning. Not merely arranging the known in new ways, as would be described in an account of the imagination as reproductive, metaphor works at the poetic-virtual third stratum by a projective articulation of what it discovers, namely, linkages between disparate things that create a vital interstice. The projective production of that virtual stratum in Pollock also no doubt emerges in relation to art history: within the difference between the concrete vitality of his images and the expectations engendered by the history of aesthetic seeing up to modernism. To be effective in metaphor as in visual art, the productive projection must generate a feeling of invention as discovery, like the Grail ‘found’ by Frost’s speaker; it must feel fortuitous in order to feel necessary. As such this

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production of a vital interstice is not foreseen by logic, mechanistic purpose, empirical similarity, the power of association, or linguistic resonance; yet when it works the acceptance of difference as identification endows the imagination with a feeling of legitimate power. This is why metaphor, epistemologically troublesome to philosophers, as de Man has shown, nurtures spontaneity. Perhaps this is why Kant was prepared, when equating beauty symbolically with a feeling of freedom, to settle upon the notion similar to metaphor of hypotyposis which sensuously presences that which evades the senses by its very nature. It is the unpresentability of the noumenal that engenders the feeling of freedom in accepting, without proper ground, its ‘appearance’ in the phenomenal work of art. To adapt this here to the identifications of metaphor: the acceptance of metaphor opens out a vital interstice between reality and representation where the imagination’s spontaneous productivity is felt. Like freedom, spontaneity cannot be presented directly; this might provide a satisfying access to the notion, too, of ‘action’ as both Pollock’s method and subject-matter in painting. Almost exactly half-way through his poem Frost employs one of his most intriguing and complex metaphors: ‘‘The height of adventure is the height/ Of country where two village cultures faded/ Into each other. Both of them are lost.’’ Adventure, suggestive of freedom of the spirit and more specifically, of childhood enchantment and fairy-tales, is resonant of spontaneity. This abstract noun is identified with a perhaps both physical and spiritual ‘‘height of country’’ recalling Shakespeare’s identification of death as an ‘‘undiscovered country.’’ Bringing it closer to Shakespeare, Frost’s adventure-country is then further modified by dissolution and loss. For like childhood and adventure, as well as the religion the speaker adopts later in echo of a childhood morality, the country and its village cultures have ‘faded,’ are no longer reflective of the current state of the world and its crises. Related to metaphor are other moments in transferal phrasing on which the poem turns. In Line 49 destination is carried over to ‘destiny,’ the latter then identified with a ‘‘brook that was the water of the house’’ the speaker is trying to projectively find in recollection. This identification turns metaphorical by extension when the brook, by the poem’s end, will become the source for a cure for the confusion with which the poem begins (and enacts deliberately by not naming directly ‘this’ out of which we must ‘back out’) and explicitly ends in its negation. The source of the brook is not, however, directly named; and it escapes exclusively Christian association of baptism and communion by the speaker’s insistence that it is (unlike Saint Mark) ‘‘too lofty

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and original to rage.’’ Finally, the metaphoric transfer from the drinking goblet the speaker variously refers to as hidden, (implicitly) found, and also stolen from the children’s playhouse is metaphorically identified, as we have seen, with the Grail, with its various mythical and mystical significance – symbolizing, as it does, not only the relic from the Last Supper but the lost object per se, the seeking (and therefore absence) of which seems to be demanded by the general mythology of civilization. This is analogous of the aesthetic imagination as such, for which the absence of ‘proper’ identification is required by the structure of metaphor itself in its generation of the vital interstice that harbors spontaneity, and just as Arthurian positionality requires the absence by non-acceptance of the distinction between virtual and real. The waters and the watering place out of which the speaker is to regain his clarity do not issue from the cup itself, which is ‘‘broken,’’ but in those more ‘‘original’’ sources, in the ‘‘fluidity’’ where, though through a painful journey of the imagination, spontaneity emerges as that possibility of ecstasis, stepping-outside a habitual understanding of the world and seeing things in a radically different light. Here I have been able only to gesture toward the ways spontaneity can be explored in the case of the specifically visual aesthetic imagination. Jackson Pollock’s later paintings could be described in terms of regularity and chaos, according to a phenomenology of the accidental. It is not the undetermined per se, but a specifically articulate spontaneity, which yields the sense of wondrous freedom so many have seen in Pollack’s work. The genius of Pollock, when it ‘works’ and so strikes us as genius, arises from the necessity to accept and harbor spontaneity, the latter being given, as it were, a virtual infinitization in the concrete pictoral image. In more traditional terms, Pollock’s spontaneity is experienced as necessity – this jointure being a ‘quasi-metaphorical’ identification in itself, a vital interstice resonant with the autogenous ecstasies in Frost. Such articulate spontaneities invite re-examination of the relation between art and the experience of seeing the everyday otherwise, such as I have aimed to initiate here. Fordham University, New York City, New York BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED Backhaus, Gary, ‘‘The Phenomenology of the Experience of Enchantment,’’ Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, LXV, 23–48 (2000).

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Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Modern Library, 1944. Casey, Edward S., Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, second edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Danto, Arthur, Philosophizing Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. __. T he Abuse of Beauty, Chicago: Open Court, 2003. De Man, Paul, ‘‘The Epistemology of Metaphor,’’ in L anguage and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro, 1984. Dewey, John, Art as Experience, New York: Capricorn Books, 1934. Dufrenne, Mikel, T he Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Casey et al., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Durkheim, Emile, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson, London: Routledge, 1951. Feldman, Edmund Burke, Art as Image and Idea, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Fischer, Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Frost, Robert, T he Poetry of Robert Frost, New York: Owl Books/ Henry Holt, 1969. Genette, Ge´rard, T he Aesthetic Relation, trans. G.M. Gogoshian, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, ‘‘The Aesthetic and the Poetic Image: Beyond the Ekphrastic Divide,’’ Philosophy T oday, 47:5 (Summer 2003), pp. 107–117. __. ‘‘The Ecstatic Quotidian: Literary Phenomenology in Sartre and Rilke,’’ Journal for the Association of the Interdisciplinary Study of the Arts, vol. 7, nos. 1–2, Autumn 2001–Spring 2002. Harvey, Jonathan, Music and Inspiration, London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Heidegger, Martin, Phenomenology of Religious L ife, trans. Fritsch and Gosetti-Ferencei, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Hofmann, Hans, Search for the Real, ed. Weeks and Hayes, Jr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Husserl, Edmund, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Ermnerung, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorla¨nder, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993. Read, Herbert, A Concise History of Modern Painting, London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Sartre, Jean-Paul, T he Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber, London: Routledge, 2004. L’imaginaire (Paris: E´ditions Gallimard, 1986). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, T he Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations,’ New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

CALLEY A. HORNBUCKLE

EXPLORING AESTHETIC PERCEPTION OF THE REAL IN IRIS MURDOCH’S T HE BL ACK PRINCE

In a postmodern world, the idea that people and things are real is an assumption, not a fact, an assumption that Iris Murdoch defends with utmost conviction, especially since our very technologies threaten to render age-old questions separating Hegel and Kant obsolete. Moving beyond the confines of the self and discerning the reality of the existence of others lie at the heart of Murdoch’s philosophical and artistic projects. For Murdoch, the most essential kind of knowledge is the knowledge that other people exist. While she is a moral philosopher and a Platonist, Murdoch is also a novelist, and she uses literature as her primary and most effective tool for exploring the solipsistic and truth-seeking elements of individual acts of consciousness. Like other philosophers, such as Husserl, Ingarden, and Gadamer, who were trained in classical philosophy, but who also explore an interest in the literary text as an intentional object, Murdoch employs the literary text as a locus for investigating the idea of intersubjective truth. Her interest in using literature to explore the relationship between aesthetic value and ontology is phenomenological and has many parallels with the Ingardenian tradition which was later made pedestrian by reader response. As with Ingarden’s project, where the significance of the literary work depends on the ‘‘aesthetic object’’ created by the reader, Murdoch’s project invites the reader to seek a cultivated understanding of the artistic object – an understanding that points beyond itself. ‘‘Truth,’’ Murdoch argues in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ‘‘is something we recognize in good art when we are led to a juster, clearer, more detailed, more refined understanding’’ (321). At the same time, however, the art object does not simply give itself to the perceiver; rather the perceiver also has a responsibility to determine the appropriate aesthetic qualities. As Murdoch points out in ‘‘The Fire and the Sun’’: The true logos falls silent in the presence of the highest (ineffable) truth, but the art object cherishes its volubility, it cherishes itself, not the truth, and wishes to be indestructible and eternal. Art makes us connect with appearances, and by playing magically with particular images it steals the educational wonder of the world away from philosophy and confuses our sense of direction toward reality and our motives for discerning it. (443)

221 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 221–233. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Left to its own devices art is a dangerous tool that can misconstrue reality and illusion, but it is also the vehicle for discerning the real par excellence. For art not only entertains fantasy; it also provokes the imagination. Good art in Murdoch’s view, exposes egoistic fantasy and inspires a truth-seeking element of consciousness belonging not simply to the artist but also to the perceiver. Good art, provides its perceiver with ways to discern the true reality to which it points, however complex or obscure that transcendence may be. As Murdoch also points out in ‘‘The Sovereignty of Good,’’ the perceiver of art ‘‘has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic’ ’’.1 Nowhere is this phenomenon better explored by Murdoch than in T he Black Prince (1973), one her most complex, self-conscious fictions. T he Black Prince concerns the knowledge an artist gains in pursuing truth in art. Written in the first-person, T he Black Prince involves the story of a writer, Bradley Pearson, who discovers that his art suffers in his attempt to divorce himself from the world. His contempt for people who interfere with his designs for art and his disdain for contingency prevent him from pursuing his writing. Ironically, these are the very things that he tries to escape from while awaiting creative inspiration. In effect, T he Black Prince reflects upon Bradley’s desire to keep his art pure: to maintain its truth in the face of its artifice. This project is doomed to fail, not simply because of its theoretical impossibility, but also because Bradley’s apprehension of art caricatures elements of bad art: he attempts in vain to possess its magic. However, the failure becomes the starting point for the fiction, and on that basis the reader is encouraged to patiently delay the judgment and attend to the details of Bradley’s pursuit of the real. With this novel, Murdoch invites the reader to consider Bradley’s quest for truth a pilgrimage from appearance to reality. In doing so, Murdoch, on the one hand, enables the reader to trace the development of the construction of reality as its exists in the mind of the writer, Bradley, and, on the other hand, she provokes the reader to attend to his or her own ideas concerning the nature of reality. As Elizabeth Dipple has pointed out in her brilliant study Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (1983), in T he Black Prince, Bradley’s character ‘‘shows through his experience the subtle linking of art and ethics when they perform their proper truth-telling function.’’2 Dipple is correct to underscore the synthesis of artistic and ethical ideas at work in this novel. The reader not only discerns what Bradley must ascertain as artist – the constituents of good art – but he or she also perceives best what Bradley repeatedly misapprehends.

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Bradley’s artistic persona is inextricably linked to his real persona. By observing how Bradley learns to look past false notions about art and its connection to the real, the reader discovers that, as Bradley attempts to write his story, the story, in effect, writes him. My purpose is to analyze how Bradley’s quest embodies the pursuit of the real as an artistic process that is on-going and never ceases; for it reigns in the particular, a detail that, in Murdoch’s aestheticism and Platonism, is cast in an irresolvable tension with the quest for that knowledge. Put in other terms, by treating Bradley’s narrative as an intentional object, Murdoch enables the reader to consider Bradley’s experience as reflective of the way in which the artistic process and the writing of literature not only can entertain but can also provide a greater awareness of that which cannot be known but must be sought, namely the reality of other persons. T he Black Prince is both retrospective and reflective. At the outset, the novel is delivered to us by the editor, P.A. Loxias, whom we later deem as Bradley’s alter ego as well as Apollo, the god of light, among many other noms de guerre. The editor’s foreword is proceeded by the artist’s foreword. From Bradley’s foreword, we learn that Bradley’s narrative consists of detailing the events through which he attempts to maintain purity at the cost of production. His experience is as much an education in what constitutes good art as a contemplation on the possibility of whether he could actually form a work that may be true: ‘‘Good art,’’ Bradley writes, ‘‘speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth’’ (11).3 Bradley claims that he has ‘‘never tried to please at the expense of truth’’ (11). He thus begins by defending the pretense of the text. Although this may be read as a vain attempt to ensure the sincerity of his tale, it is also a clue by which Murdoch uses irony to suggest the possibility of the transcendence of art while acknowledging its very impossibility. Nonetheless, the fundamental irony remains, however sincere Bradley is in his effort to remain virtuous. He then proceeds to search for the best opening, the best starting point, the best way to begin his ‘‘fable’’ (11). Dipple observes how Bradley’s search for the best point of entry ‘‘forces the reader into a world of multiple points of view.’’4 Peter Conradi argues that Bradley’s openings display an ‘‘artfully distracted narrative technique.’’5 While I agree with both critics, I would add that multiplicity and distraction as devices also reflect upon Bradley’s desire for perfection. Even though he writes from the perspective of having acquired wisdom, he often looks back nostalgically. Searching for the best angle is a form of delaying and questioning, which suggests that Bradley’s art continues to inculcate him.

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On the one hand, Murdoch playfully exploits this paradox through the forewords and postscripts that envelope Bradley’s narrative. On the other hand, the additional texts that frame Bradley’s narrative signal the reader to consider the layers of the fiction and to consider the effect of formlessness within a closed text. There is, at the center, the narrative of Bradley’s primary story, his meta-narrative that interrupts and reflects upon the details of that story, plus the extra-narratives of the characters that people his story. Dipple maintains that this complicated Chinese box structure is chosen by the artist-narrator so that ‘‘structure can enlarge rather than reduce the subject matter.’’6 It is significant, too, that Bradley’s narrative is entombed, for he is embraced by the multiplicity of the fiction. Each of the narratives purports its own truthfulness, but the extent to which it holds its own weight depends largely upon the reader’s engagement with the text. Most critics agree with the editor’s comment that the postscripts by the Dramatis Personae compete with each other and prove flawed in the face of the aesthetic theories outlined throughout the novel. Nonetheless, these postscripts serve to tease Bradley’s final stance. Heidegger has argued that the self comes into being after death, but I think T he Black Prince challenges this notion. As I mentioned previously, at the core of Murdoch’s fiction is the idea that people exist independent of subjectivism. Bradley’s story does, in effect, write him, but not in the sense that he is a mere product of language. Rather, Bradley’s character is such that he becomes the object of serious contemplation, for himself and for readers. Bradley is a neurotic writer with an exacting personality and severe writer’s block, and he unsuccessfully avoids the people in his life. While attempting to get away in order to write, he finds himself caught in the muddles of everyone else’s affairs: he is asked to mediate between Rachel and Arnold Baffin, a married couple who are obsessive with and abusive to each other; Francis Marloe, his brother-in-law, shows up looking for money and alcohol and warns him about his ex-wife’s arrival in town; and, his psychotic sister, Priscilla, appears on his doorstep, destitute and depressed after having left her husband. To make matters worse, the Baffins’ daughter, Julian, seduces him. Bradley is fifty-eight, Julian twenty. Self-conscious and guilt-ridden, Bradley is not only unable to escape the misery and suffering of the others, he is also incapable of warding off Julian. As she wins her way with him, he discovers that Julian is his gateway to Eros, the creative force he has been awaiting. However, Eros is not the end; rather he is the medium through which Apollo is working. Love is the gateway to inspire Bradley’s pen, but it is

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not a toy of thought, and Bradley’s short- but nonetheless intensely-lived relationship with Julian discloses the idea that, unless one is a god, people are not instruments. On several accounts, Bradley is thus a perpetrator, and this hubris constitutes the source of his guilt. It is not until we find Bradley in jail for the murder of Arnold that we discover that Bradley’s fable reflects a descent into realism. By the same token, we come to understand how the central image of the novel – the Apollo-Marysas myth – functions; for through his actual and literal journeys, Bradley apprehends the nature of the artistic truth that he represents. As the Loxias/Apollo figure decrees in his postscript: ‘‘The creator of form must suffer formlessness’’ (414). Written in jail, Bradley’s story discloses the metamorphosis of the artist, who comes into being by yielding to the immanent suffering and unknowable reality of others. Bradley is figuratively and textually torn apart by the people whose realities he fails to see. This fact and metaphor are at the core of not only this novel but also of Murdoch’s ethical theories. We, as readers, are meant, on one level, to perceive the playful treatment of form, while, on another level, realize the severity of succumbing to subjectivism, a falsifying notion of reality. This process in Murdoch’s fiction, which David Gordon calls the ‘‘comedy of unselfing,’’ entails the mind’s relentless egoism that ‘‘habitually mistakes false images of the good for good itself, so that even the most spiritually advanced human beings, the aspiring saints, cannot escape the dense nets of illusion created by personal desire.’’7 Looking back upon the events that lead Bradley to begin his narrative, we discover that Bradley’s pilgrimage involves the awareness of the reality of other people and a regard for contingency. The possibility of Bradley’s ‘‘unselfing’’ would not have been possible had he not ‘‘been given the privilege of an ordeal,’’ of having been guided by the creative passion of Eros only to be defeated by the power of the ‘‘greater and more terrible godhead’’ (389, 390). Furthermore, since, by design, his art entails the very reflection upon the intention and possibility of art, we, too, as readers, are, in some sense given the ‘‘privilege’’ of attending to Bradley’s testimony. In effect, T he Black Prince experiments with Murdoch’s theories about art and serves as a testing ground for exploring aesthetic value. Like most of her first-person narrators, Bradley searches for ideas that crystallize and consecrate meaning. With best intention, he quests after unity and perfection. He has convictions about art, ideas which, even before his ordeal, point, for the most part, in the direction of good art. However, he too often fails on the most critical factors. He reveals these errors primarily through his conversations with Arnold and Apollo, fellow art-

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ists, and, I would argue, the reader as well. With Arnold, he continually refutes the significance of quotidian life. Arnold writes regularly but, according to Bradley, Arnold is a professional, prolific writer, who exercises no restraint and lacks courage, ‘‘the courage to destroy, the courage to wait’’ (146). In Bradley’s eyes, Arnold is a caricature of a bad artist, whose confidence is worthless. His work points to a truth no other than to get the job done; even Arnold agrees that each book is the ‘‘wreck of a perfect idea’’ (172). But at least Arnold writes something while Bradley nothing. By the same token, with no understatement of irony does Arnold reveal to Bradley the element of truth that Bradley lacks and around which his ordeal is framed. Arnold warns Bradley that a censorious attitude prevents a writer from knowing the details, but Bradley refuses to accept that his art is contingent upon the embrace of both crude and fine elements. Bradley insists: ‘‘I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don’t want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people’s lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody’’ (49). Bradley, intent on escaping so he may attain the solitude that he desires, disapproves of those agents who suddenly pop back into his life without warning or apparent reason. However, his refusal to accept the idea that he, too, is enmeshed in the lives of others is part and parcel of Bradley’s inability to see people, including himself, as real entities. In her aesthetic theory, Murdoch has emphasized that bad art nourishes the ego and exposes our baseness, while good art ‘‘is not just delight, it is refinement and revelation.’’8 Good art encompasses selfish musing as it overrides the fantasy and exposes us to the difficulty of achieving objective vision.9 It exercises imagination, not fantasy. In ‘‘The Fire and the Sun,’’ Murdoch maintains that: ‘‘ ‘[a]rt,’ especially literature, is a great hall of reflection where we can all meet and where everything under the sun can be examined and considered.’’10 Literature is, thus, a prime site for exploring the effects of good and bad art, and, moreover, for investigating the role of contingency and the details of reality. Literature also provides a method for realizing how the particulars of existence furnish the essence of what it means to be human, in spite of the fact that we depend largely on images and language for that understanding. In its embrace of the contingent, good art points to a higher reality. Murdoch writes: Good art, thought of as symbolic force rather than statement, provides a stirring image of a pure transcendent value, a steady visible higher good, and perhaps provides for many

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people, in an unreligious age without prayer or sacraments, their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly and unpossessively in the attention.11

While this idea is inextricably tied with the Platonic Good, I am more interested in the ‘‘stirring image’’ that excites the perceiver of art to pursue and reflect. That image serves as the instrumental impetus, whatever it may be for an individual, that stirs one out of the self by taking, perhaps for a split second, perhaps for what may comprise the work of a lifetime, one’s attention away from subjectivity and projects it onto the truth that the image embodies, not for consolation or fulfillment but for its own sake. For the perceiver, this activity, at its conception, is essentially Kantian: the experience is ‘‘purposiveness without purpose.’’ Murdoch’s interest in a ‘‘stirring image of pure transcendent value,’’ like Ingarden’s interest in an ‘‘original emotion’’ of a work of art, emphasizes the importance of forgetting the self so that some other may be acknowledged. While an individual may attach, at some point, a moral, political, or social agenda to the metaphorical significance of this ‘‘stirring image,’’ the essence of the provocation is unconditional. This essential element concerns Murdoch’s interest in Simone Weil’s notion that pure perception ‘‘without any admixture of reverie’’ gives access to the Real.12 And it is important to note that in Murdoch, as in Weil, perception constitutes the quest for a clearer, detailed knowledge. Yet, at the same time, perception demands a ‘‘just and loving gaze’’ that seeks not to interpret but, rather, to grasp the sum of the particulars, in other words, what the object has to give in and of itself. Furthermore, the image held ‘‘unpossessively in the attention’’ proceeds to do its work upon the perceiver. In other words, the higher good reflected by the image engages the reader’s cognizance. For example, if we apply Murdoch’s aesthetic theory to the image of Marsyas being flayed by Apollo, considering it as a prevailing image that ‘‘stirs’’ a reader, we may assume that this metaphor frequently visits the mind of the reader.13 As a reader beholds that image and works through the details of Bradley’s retrospective and reflective voices, the reader gains access to the truth pointed at by the fiction. It is essential to note that the image is not itself truth; in good art it points toward a higher truth.14 At the same time, that truth affects the reader’s perception, and perception, according to Murdoch, ‘‘itself is a mode of evaluation.’’15 Very often we witness how Bradley’s preconceived notions about himself and about art not only prevent him from appreciating contingency, but they also chain

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him to a romantic view of art that consoles his egoistic fantasy. During one of Bradley’s reflective moments, Bradley muses upon his training in art. He tells his ‘‘dear friend,’’ presumably Loxias/Apollo, life is unlike art: ‘‘characters in art can have unassailable dignity, whereas characters in life have none’’ (124). He goes on to argue that a ‘‘sheer concern for one’s dignity, a sense of form, a sense of style, inspires more of our baser actions than any conventional analysis of possible sins is likely to bring to light’’ (124). The active reader, glimpsing the irony at work here, will delay judgment, if he or she discerns the layers of meaning voiced by Bradley. At one time, Bradley held dear the dignity he so admires and even embodies, for he, in fact, is the effect of the text as much as he is the cause. He presents himself to his ‘‘dear friend’’ looking back nostalgically upon his view of art, a view which fell from grace. Bradley’s former drive to divorce art from life is presented so that a reader may perceive Bradley’s error. In the beginning, Bradley is, first, the artist and, second, the person. Yet his edifying ordeal dictates the reverse. Until he can appreciate that he, too, is vulnerable, unpure, subject to ‘‘real developments,’’ he cannot appreciate the fine thresholds of aesthetic value that separate good and bad art.16 And, at every stage in his narrative, he visits his new awareness in light of the former, in other words, what is real and true and not simply satisfaction or consolation of his self-controlled needs. In this regard, Bradley becomes the object of the reader’s attention, an object of serious contemplation, not one to be brashly mocked. Put in other terms, the formlessness that Bradley must suffer in order to apprehend what constitutes good art prompts the reader, not to suffer with Bradley, but to make sense of his suffering in light of this understanding. Murdoch has created in Bradley’s ordeal the embodiment of good art, even though he, as learner, often misses the mark and, thus, represents bad art. We find this portrayed frequently in his attention to objects, to china, to furniture, to people. He maintains a disdain for things that pull him away from perfection and into the world. He ‘‘abhors accident’’ (206). He detests trains; they are ‘‘dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveler, the possibility of children’’ (66). He loathes contingency. He is frequently horrified by furniture: ‘‘A dressing-table can be a terrible thing’’ (38). His perception of objects is determined by his possession of them, but he cannot see them for what they are – as separate and as independent. He gives Julian Priscilla’s water buffalo, one of his favorite Chinese bronze pieces, without taking into consideration whether Priscilla herself would miss it. When it comes to attending to objects and to people, Bradley is

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negligent. He fails to see that his own connection to art is threaded by people. Furthermore, Bradley’s perception embraces a false notion of art that attends to his own egoism. As Murdoch points out in her aesthetic and moral theory: The details of our world deserve our respectful and loving attention, as artists have always known. There is an attentive patient delay of judgment, a kind of humble agnosticism, which lets the object be. With this goes a perception of the reality and real nature of suffering and a horror of cruelty.17

Before his privileged ordeal, Bradley, however, only attends to what he finds useful, that is what he deigns instrumental to his art. If it does not serve his criteria for art, for truth, for perfection, it does not exist. Of course, this changes when Bradley falls in love with Julian. When he finds himself in love, suddenly the world becomes real to him. People are seen; things have presence. He tells us that he had an ‘‘overwhelming sense of reality, of being at last real and seeing the real. The tables, the chairs the sherry glasses, the curls on the rug: the dust: real’’ (209). He, too, acknowledges himself as being. Nevertheless, he maintains a false sense of reality. As a pilgrim seeking truth in art, he remains shadowed by the idea that his passion for Julian, his embrace by Eros, gives him power to continue to use others as instruments of his art. Julian brings him outside of himself, but not entirely. Touched by his new love, he tells us: I wanted to go around touching people, blessing them, communicating my great happiness, the good news, the secret of how the whole universe was a place of joy and freedom filled and running over with selfless rapture. I did not even want to see Julian on that day. I did not even need her. It was enough to know that she existed. I could almost have forgotten her, as perhaps the mystic forgets God, when he becomes God. (244)

However, even at the pinnacle of his passion, he fails to see Julian in her own right. He claims that he ‘‘did not even need her,’’ but he still desires to possess the idea of her in order to maintain his creative passion. Julian is, thus, not only a tool for his art; his art, if he were to produce, would be tainted by the egoistic fantasy that binds him. He has been waiting for this inspiration. He wanted to get away so that that he could find it. Now that it has found him, he entertains a false sense of truth, for just prior to his outburst of romantic mysticism, the learned voice reveals: ‘‘A common though not invariable early phase of this madness, the one in fact through which I had just been passing, is a false loss of self ’’ (244).

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In other words, while he, in fact, makes his way to a greater apprehension of reality, he is, nonetheless, deceived by his progress. Bradley’s progress is not simply artistic, however. It has ethical implications for himself and for the reader. As mentioned earlier, as readers we not only attend to changes in Bradley’s consciousness, but we also witness how he crafts and fine-tunes his testimony. We believe Bradley that the world became real to him when he fell in love with Julian, but after Priscilla’s death and his subsequent loss of Julian, we find Bradley in his flat, in London, kneeling beside Francis Marloe decreeing: ‘‘I felt, for the first time since my return to London, that I was in a real place and in the presence of a real person’’ (365). This re-cognition of what is real obviously interrogates his previous realization. What I am suggesting here is not a postmodern play on what is real, however. In fact, if we pursued this line of interpretation, I think we would find that Murdoch offers a red herring to the structuralists. Bradley does, indeed, make ‘‘the crisis of his own identity into the very central stuff of his art,’’ satiating his fantasy of being the ‘‘god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation,’’ and writing his own Hamlet, as his criticism of Shakespeare and the title of Murdoch’s novel suggest (201, 199). However, to see Bradley as product of language is to fail to see that he, too, is, in some sense, real. After Priscilla’s suicide, the veil is lifted once more. And this glaring reconstituting of what is real clues a reader in to Bradley’s moral development. In other words, Murdoch is resisting here the notion that Bradley is simply the linguistic effect of the novel. Rather, Bradley’s experience intimates the idea that there exists an intersubjective reality. Here the connection between Murdoch’s aestheticism and Platonism sheds light on the complexity of the fiction. Bradley’s ordeal is both an aesthetic and moral pilgrimage, for, in Murdoch’s view, aesthetics and morals are analogous. Bradley’s development elicits his knowledge that he is connected to people, and that good art depends on transcending the ego and seeing other people as real – in their own light. Marloe was once nothing to him, a detail to be discarded. When Bradley realizes just how connected he is to Marloe, however, he finally comes to see Marloe as a real person. As Murdoch frequently mentions in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, consciousness is essentially moral: ‘‘Aesthetic insight connects with moral insight, respect for things, connects with respect for persons’’ (495). By the same token, Bradley’s journey is hierarchal. He does not come to realize to what extent his ordeal is contingent upon Marloe’s existence until he has been convicted of Arnold’s murder and finally receives the occasion to write. In his last hour, having found

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realism, Bradley creates. Having become a player and having been played, Bradley obtains clarity. In his cell, Bradley tells us that he ‘‘had never felt more alert and more alive’’ (383). Yet, this moment is just the beginning of his reflection, the commencement of his art, and the knowledge of what differentiates good art from bad art. As he looks back in retrospect, he makes his way out of the cave, nearer to reality; but he is, nonetheless, still in the cave; for he is in prison, and he will die in his ‘‘monastery’’ (391). Moreover, Bradley sanctifies his prison, for he sees himself as disciple and martyr. Having caught momentary glimpses into the real, Bradley imagines himself returning to enlighten his fellow prisoners. The postscripts, however, playfully interrogate Bradley’s testimony of truth. Readers may entertain Marloe’s psychoanalytic slant or Julian’s aesthetic slant, but to make these readings ends in themselves would be to succumb to egoism. Furthermore, the editor’s postscript trumps prior assessments of Bradley’s testimony. As Dipple has pointed out, the double persona of Bradley reflects both the naı¨ve and wiser artist, but this authorial voice requires the Apollonian voice to discern the nature of Bradley’s artifice.18 She notes how the Apollonian voice presents the art in ‘‘its truest form – a realistic description of human pain and transformation’’ (113). Bradley’s quest ends with real suffering and a new consciousness. One can never truly know the suffering that another individual endures, but one can attempt to understand the nature of another’s pain. The reader is, thus, left to see Bradley’s transformation as genuine and to view it in light of the reality that chains him – his conviction. Herein lies one of the central paradoxes of the novel. Other voices get their final say, and, as Bradley is woven into the nebulousness of the fiction, becoming thus subject and object of his art, the reader, too, is invited to perceive Bradley as real, despite the irony that frames him. In her comprehensive analysis of Murdoch’s moral thought, Maria Antonaccio argues that Murdoch defends the irreducibility of the human individual in the face of discursive effects of the systems of language that threaten to usurp the notion of consciousness.19 In virtually all of her fiction and philosophy, Murdoch consistently maintains that the most important idea of our time is that people exist, and this idea suggests that there is a reality apart from subjectivism. Antonaccio claims that Murdoch’s aesthetic view of morality does not assume an objective world of facts apart from the activity of individual thinking consciousness. Rather, it assumes that the moral

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world is always already constituted by an individual mind that is internally structured in relation to a background of value and an implicit idea of perfection.20

As Antonaccio mentions, the background of value is the product of the conscious mind’s desire for good. Antonaccio proceeds to prove how Murdoch’s theory of the individual connects to her theory of the ontology of Good, but for the purposes of this reading, what I find most interesting is how Murdoch’s aesthetic view locates the transcendent in the reality of the human as separate and independent. This notion lies at the heart of T he Black Prince, for this novel is, in effect, a structuring and subsequent musing upon Bradley’s consciousness as well as how his persona is perceived by others. Murdoch therefore creates a protagonist who symbolizes the essence of what it means to be a person. Of course, the play on ‘‘person’’ and ‘‘Pearson’’ is blatant, but, more significantly, Bradley embodies the idea that the reader must attend to in order to discern the meaning of Murdoch’s fiction.21 Furthermore, the image of ascesis, with which the reader is presented at the end, is not without irony. Bradley’s attempt to keep his art pure and to reveal the truth to which it points is always questioned by its ruse. However, if Dipple is right to read the Apollonian voice as a voice of authority, and I think she is, then Bradley’s pursuit is not in vain. In the final postscript, the Apollo/Loxius figure reveals, ‘‘Bradley’s synthesis may seem naı¨ve; perhaps it is. Behind his unity there may be distinctions, but behind the distinctions there is unity and how far into that vista can a human being see and how far does an artist need to see?’’ (414). The events of Bradley’s ordeal are clear, and yet we know that we can never know the extent to which he suffered. As Murdoch’s realism shows, full knowledge of the individual always eludes understanding. But, we are nonetheless left to ascertain the seriousness of Bradley’s quest for perfection. Furthermore, Bradley is given as an emblem of art, and we may continue to discern the details of his ordeal, to perceive the changes of his consciousness, and to articulate the reality of his fiction. Thus, Bradley’s ascesis reflects the reader’s own hermeneutical task. That task is to attend to the details, ‘‘without admixture or reverie,’’ and to refine one’s understanding of the aesthetic object. In doing so, one glimpses an intersubjectivity that transcends egoism, even if only for a moment. As Murdoch writes in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ‘‘The World Soul as Logos can also represent ordinary human activity sunk in contingency and confusion, yet also vitally connected to the power of spirit’’ (145).

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Ironically, however, such refined understanding necessarily recedes as it appears, thus leaving the reader seeking knowledge of the real. University of South Carolina NOTES 1 Murdoch, Iris, T he Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, 1970 (London: Routledge, 1989), 64. 2 Dipple, Elizabeth, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 115. 3 All citations from the novel refer to: Murdoch, Iris, T he Black Prince (New York: Penguin, 1975). 4 Dipple, p. 110. 5 Conradi, Peter, J., T he Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 240. 6 Dipple, p. 114. 7 Gordon, David, ‘‘Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing,’’ T wentieth Century L iterature. 36.2 (1990): 115–37. 8 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1982 (London: Penguin, 1992), 179. 9 T he Sovereignty of Good OverOther Concepts, p. 86. 10 Murdoch, Iris, ‘‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,’’ 1976, Existentialists and Mystics: W ritings on Philosophy and L iterature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1999), 386–463; 461. 11 Ibid., p. 453. 12 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 247. 13 I am interested in the active reader, who revisits Murdoch’s novel for the purpose of understanding its truth, not simply the reader who reads just for cursory knowledge. As Roman Ingarden mentions, the serious consumer of art or scholar’s ‘‘whole effort is aimed at pressing forward to the characteristic form of the work, foregoing his own recreation of a new reconstruction of it.’’ See T he Cognition of the L iterary Work of Art, trans. R. Crowley and K. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973), 349. 14 ‘‘Images should not be resting places, but pointers toward higher truth,’’ Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 318. 15 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 315. 16 Compare to his brief affair with Rachel: ‘‘I now had more than enough to brood upon and I wanted to brood without the intrusive interference of any real developments’’ (126). 17 See Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 377. 18 Dipple, p 113. 19 Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: T he Moral T hought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 20 Antonaccio, p. 94. 21 For additional allusions of Bradley’s name, see Dipple, p. 110.

REBECCA M. PAINTER

FICTION AND THE GROWTH OF MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS: ATTENTION AND EVIL

Because phenomenology places ultimate value on human experience in determining what is humanly real, true and of moral value, it cannot function without acknowledging the role of the Logos, broadly interpreted. Besides language and communication itself, the Logos can stand for what people perceive to be inspired wisdom, the accumulated insights of preceding generations, and the power of language to embody meaning in the form of moral substance and ethical guidance. This is especially true of the distilled perceptions emerging from human culture that identify the attributes and effects of good and evil. For many, sacred Scripture, the divine Logos, still captures best the essence of moral truths; others may use or bypass these texts and explore works of philosophy and literature for inspiration. More than one thinker has remarked that all of philosophy is a reflection on the works of Shakespeare. Emmanuel Levinas attributed the essence of his ethics to a statement uttered by one of Dostoevsky’s characters.1 More than to other forms of literature, we turn to realistic fiction to explore the human imagination’s discovery and representation of moral truths. Those who study the moral implications of literature are akin to moral philosophers and share a symbiotic existence. Yet those who study both literature and philosophy, believe that literature alone can elucidate the subtleties of human interaction that transcend the boundaries of philosophical reasoning, where new directions of thought and understanding beckon. In this paper I will discuss the development of moral consciousness through the lens of one utterly basic but little-studied element of literary analysis: the play of attention as it exposes the modalities of goodness and evil. Questions will be posed that are too seldom asked in contemporary literary criticism, moral philosophy and psychology: How do literary characters go about perceiving or failing to perceive evil in their narrative lives? How do works of fiction cultivate and elicit ethical perceptions, particularly those of evil, on the part of readers? These questions will be illustrated by reference to works of realistic fiction by two distinctive authors who explore the nature of evil: Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker. Discussion of these narratives will be developed by mentioning 235 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 235–257. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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insights from philosophical, cultural, theological and psychological perspectives. The goal is to stimulate awareness of the narrative play of attention in the development of moral consciousness – among both characters and readers. In particular, I will examine how narratives reveal the movement and focus of consciousness itself: where and how we place our attention, and how the quality and placement of attention exposes the roots of good and evil. Why should we look at such a basic aspect of human consciousness as the placement of attention in terms of the problem of evil? We cannot deny that a yawning gap exists between the current reality of evil and efforts of thinking people to deal with it. Evil looms ever more menacingly amidst our present existence, threatening us with horrors that we hoped might have been eradicated with vows of ‘‘Never again.’’ As Lance Morrow reflects in Evil: An Investigation, we may not still fear a sudden nuclear annihilation, but given the events of September 11, 2001, and other terrorist episodes, we might have to endure ‘‘regional apocalypses’’ such as dirty radiation bombs and epidemics of smallpox. So-called developed nations still stand by while less developed ones conduct genocidal campaigns under conditions of information black-out. And of course, less violent forms of evil, old and newly invented (e.g. computer viruses, spyware, identity theft, and the use of cell-phones to provide fraudulent alibis), still abound. Only recently have journalists and public intellectuals such as Morrow shown much interest in the problem of evil; far less has it drawn the attention of literary theorists. Terry Eagleton, the influential Marxist literary critic, has recently proclaimed that cultural theory, among other oversights, ‘‘has been shame-faced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, ... largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness.’’2 This paper is a small attempt to rectify some of the intellectual neglect of evil and its origins, by focusing on what can be learned from a close study of narrative fiction. The problem of evil has not gone unnoticed by contemporary philosophers. In Evil in Modern T hought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman completely restructures the history of modern philosophy by tracking how some of our most renowned thinkers have grappled with the problem of evil, largely negating the capacity of human reason to understand, let alone overcome it. In her last chapter, entitled ‘‘Homeless,’’ she asserts that twentieth century wars and atrocities have shattered our confidence in how we can apply moral categories at all. Contemporary

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evil stuns us not so much by quantity or cruelty, Neiman claims, but by the fact that civilization itself has produced new forms of evil.3 ‘‘The gas chambers,’’ she notes, ‘‘were invented to spare victims more agonizing forms of dying – and the murderers sights that might trouble their consciences’’ (256). To Neiman and no doubt other Western minds, the World Trade Center attackers were shockingly old-fashioned in their intentionality, their patient planning and foresight, and how ‘‘the clearest use of instrumental rationality was matched by the clearest flaunting of moral reasoning’’ (283). Other contemporary forms of evil are more remarkable for widespread indifference to them and ineptitude. In War, Evil, and the End of History, Bernard-Henri Levy describes ‘‘a new world that is appearing.’’ Here ‘‘Job has the face, not of one suffering Just Man, but of entire peoples, continents, abandoned to this radical desolation – the same useless suffering,’’ only now the ‘‘professors of distress ... like the ‘friends of Job’ in the Bible,’’ have ‘‘a background in ethnic studies or neo-third-worldism,’’ and are trying to decode ‘‘an adversity that has become illegible’’ (5). Over Levy’s frustration we hear a cry, voiced by many, for thinking people to search for what is legible in the phenomenon of evil. Only this would make ethical action possible. Among phenomenologists, the focus on evil is not so new. In his 1983 essay ‘‘Transcendence and Evil,’’ Levinas asserts that philosophy’s first question should not be ‘‘Why is there something rather than nothing? but rather, ‘‘Why is there evil rather than good?’’ (160). In Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation, Richard J. Bernstein claims that ethics takes priority over ontology in philosophy because the problem of evil defies human reason and understanding (176). Bernstein notes that Levinas rejected Heidegger’s emphasis on being – and that of Western philosophy in general – as the great unifier of human experience, because it reduces human otherness to ontological sameness, colonizing individual difference and foreignness under an assumed similarity of shared existence (177). To Levinas, the presumed sameness of being has disabled philosophy from dealing strongly with the problem of evil, which arises from the human possibility of not awakening to the other.4 This seems indisputable. Yet fine phenomenological minds have apparently clashed on this matter, as when Paul Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, challenges Levinas by asking what we are to do if we esteem the Other as more important than our own self, even as our ethical master who teaches us, and a particular Other turns out to be a master who requires a slave, or sets about being our executioner (339). Ricoeur thus argues for a more inter-

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active form of ethics, one based on reciprocity rather than self-sacrifice for the well-being of others at the cost of our own survival. Yet if we look closely at both ethical positions, we might see that Levinas and Ricoeur are each concerned with promoting a fully caring consciousness, open eyed and engaged with the needs, suffering, and difference – including the destructive intentions – of others. A more elemental, less philosophically proscribed approach, I suggest, would place their opposing views in a more adaptable perspective. As Levinas claims, attention to the suffering of others can be seen as the ‘‘very nexus of human subjectivity,’’ the supreme ethical principle, the only one impossible to question.5 But within that statement lies a nexus more basic than suffering as the object of human attention: it is attention itself. On this Levinas and Ricoeur might agree, whether the self ’s attention be directed entirely outward beyond the self, or more concerned with a reciprocal ethical relationship with the Other. On the bewildering subject of evil, it is hard to disagree with Neiman that a childlike longing to understand the world may be our only source of strength: ‘‘In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew’’ (320). One thing children experience wordlessly and mortally is the life-giving necessity of attention. Wordlessly, because the awareness of this need is pre-verbal. Mortally, because attention has proven to be a life-or-death matter. It has been observed that healthy babies left in hospitals – fed, clothed, kept clean and warm but not given regular human attention – die.6 For this reason hospitals have enlisted cadres of volunteers to visit such babies, holding and talking to them, giving them life-sustaining attention. This naked, unconditional fact reveals the moral and ethical dimensions of attention itself, and calls us to explore how, inexorably, the play of attention exposes the roots of good and evil. There may be no better source of illustration than literature, in particular the realistic novel, to explore the moral dimensions and ethical implications of the play of attention. Iris Murdoch has opined that novels ‘‘exhibit the ubiquity of moral quality inherent in consciousness. ... [T]he novelist’s problem ... is precisely a unification of fact and value, the exhibiting of personal morality in a non-abstract manner as the stuff of consciousness.’’7 By stepping outside our personal circumstances and into the artistic and imaginative space of fiction, readers participate in a form of asceticism that ‘‘diminishes our egoism and enlarges our conception of truth,’’ where we can acquire ‘‘deeper, subtler and wiser visions of the world,’’ where we can ‘‘attend and get things right. Creative power requires

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these abilities.’’ Reading as well as writing fiction involves such creative powers. As Murdoch explains, ‘‘Intellectual and craft studies initiate new qualities of consciousness, minutiae of perception, ability to observe[;] they alter our desires, our instinctive movements of desire and aversion. To attend is to care, to learn to desire to learn. One may of course learn bad habits as well as good, and that too is a matter of quality of consciousness.’’8 Critical to our estimation of the role of attention in the study of fiction, or in daily life for that matter, is an appreciation of the scope of attention per se. Murdoch’s reflections were openly influenced by Simone Weil’s insights on attention, as reflected in the following passage: Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. ... Above all, our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it. All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style and all faulty connection of ideas ... all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily and being prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active, we have wanted to carry out a search.9

One must take issue, however, with Weil’s last sentence, since failures of attention do not always result from overactive thinking. They can, of course, be caused by sheer inattention, fatigue, willful disregard or prejudice. Thus it is important to balance Weil’s observations by acknowledging one of the central points of Bernard Lonergan’s masterwork, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding: Just as insight can be desired, so too it can be unwanted. Besides the love of light, there can be a love of darkness. If prepossessions and prejudices notoriously vitiate theoretical investigations, much more easily can elementary passions bias understanding in practical and personal matters. To exclude an insight is also to exclude the further questions that would arise from it and the complementary insights that would carry it towards a rounded and balanced viewpoint. To lack that fuller view results in behaviour that generates misunderstanding both in ourselves and in others. ... Finally, the incomprehension, isolation, and duality rob the development of one’s common sense of ... the corrections and the assurance that result from learning accurately the tested insights of others and from submitting one’s own insights to the criticism based on others’ experience and development. (191)

Awareness of the possible denial of insight of course does not contradict the wisdom of Weil’s description of true attention as an act of fully alert, spacious and patient consciousness, making room for genuine insight. This is exactly the kind of awareness it takes to appreciate serious fiction!

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Consider the matter of attention as it affects the growth of moral consciousness as depicted in novels by Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker. Atwood’s T he Robber Bride tells the tale of three Toronto women – Tony, Roz and Charis – whose lives have been traumatized by the appearance of a mysterious femme fatale named Zenia. She first appears in their dormitory at university, where they are acquaintances but hardly friends. Zenia first singles out brainy, bookish Tony for companionship, then hits on her for rent money and the ghost-writing of a term paper. Tony falls in love with Zenia’s boyfriend, who was the only classmate of Tony who became a friend. Zenia soon deserts him, taking his money and hawking his valuables; this gives the secretly lovelorn Tony the chance to nurse her beloved’s broken heart, and he eventually marries her. After they are married Zenia reclaims him for a spell, than dumps him again taking his money, and Tony quietly allows him back into their marriage. A few years later a moribund looking Zenia arrives in the yoga class of Charis, a New Age herbal healer type who believes Zenia’s claim to be dying of cancer, and takes her home for a holistic cure. In time a healthier Zenia decamps with Charis’s freeloading American boyfriend, whom she turns in for a bounty from U.S. authorities seeking draft dodgers. Alone and pregnant, Charis turns for help to Tony, who contacts Roz, who had consoled Tony when she had temporarily lost her husband to Zenia. Tony and Roz help Charis claim her family inheritance and become godmothers to her baby daughter. Still later Zenia reappears, convincing Roz she can turn around her failing women’s magazine. She does so, while carrying on an affair with Roz’s husband Mitch. Mitch moves out of the family home to share a luxury penthouse lovenest with Zenia, but she soon vanishes, fleecing him of fifty thousand dollars. When he frantically fails to find Zenia, and when Roz refuses to take him back, Mitch drowns in an apparent suicide. A report comes in that Zenia has been killed in a war zone somewhere, and the three friends attend her funeral. All this is background. The narrative actually begins when Tony, Charis and Roz are having one of their longstanding luncheons, and notice Zenia a few tables away in a trendy place fittingly named the Toxique. By this point the lonely, traumatic childhoods of all three protagonists have been revealed, how their friendship – developed in reaction to the shock and heartache caused by Zenia’s various betrayals – has become the most solid ground of trust and selfless caring in their lives. They are united because of an adversary they are convinced is evil, and they stay

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united in a fortress mentality as they prepare for total war. As Atwood has remarked in an interview, Zenia is perceived by them like the largerthan-life movie stars and models in women’s magazines, who acquire greater dimensions in the imaginations of those who make them the objects of envy and fantasy.10 Zenia is not so much a doppelganger or alter ego as an empowered, idealized construct of three needy female imaginations. Readers become keenly sympathetic to these three struggling characters. Still, the narrative keeps making space for other perspectives, asking us to delay judgment. Rather than destroying the protagonists’ fixed ideas about themselves, Zenia’s presence makes known – mostly to readers, but a modest amount to the protagonists – the delusion of their states of consciousness and the inhibitions of their compassion. These female victims of a female enemy manage, by force of misdirected attention, to deny their full relationship to her. They also fail to perceive their mutual victimization by, or responsibility for, larger evils. Not only does Zenia uncover the secrets of each woman’s suffering heart. She also indicates, if only they were more attentive, her own precarious existence on a thin ridge between survival and despair. Reentering their now middle-aged lives looking younger, wrinklefree and more bosomy than ever (surgically enhanced), Zenia, we eventually discover, is actually seeking asylum. The three women mobilize to repel their enemy, unaware that Zenia has only a few months to live and is prepared to kill herself if they do not take her in. They don’t. She does. Her tough talking but not entirely candid pleas for help strike them as one more slick story to fleece them yet again. After she dies, her need for help proves to have been true, if not her particulars. She was a bitter soul who manipulated and injured the only friends who could have helped her. Zenia’s treatment of women and the men they care for as means rather than ends exhibits the evil first formulated by Kant but further defined by Nel Noddings. In Women and Evil, Noddings posits a phenomenology of evil based on women’s experience, offering a basic definition of evil as ‘‘that which harms or threatens harm.’’ Within this formulation, however, Noddings identifies a key determinant of harm in the denial or neglect of relationship (91, 101, 103). The denial of relationship demonstrated by Zenia is that effected by the confidence artist, in which pain and cruelty result not as much from loss of money or property as from the rupture of psychological bonds, the feeling of emotional abandonment, and the loss of dignity upon finding that one has been used. Zenia, in turn, fails to perceive or care about the pain of the loss of relationship she inflicts by stealing other women’s men. Zenia’s confidence game is cruel to each

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of these characters, but we are never completely blind to her one motive: to survive in a postwar period of vast social evils. Though Zenia’s account of her circumstances changes, she is evidently struggling to escape a past that includes illegitimate birth during wartime, forced prostitution as a child, the illness and death of her mother, and solitary exile in which she has to survive with no resources other than good looks and wits. She combines her storytelling licence with a keen listening ability. Zenia attends well – the better to discern others’ vulnerabilities, which she uses to take advantage of them, but not without sharing her own hawk-eyed perceptions. Even as we accept that Zenia’s half-lies are mere instruments, our awareness is enlarged by the knowledge that such behavior could only result from a life that has been sordidly real. Sissela Bok’s important study, L ying: Moral Choice in Public and Private L ife, clarifies the type of lying practiced by Zenia. It results from longterm extreme hardship and moral compromise, such as many individuals experience during wartime, under oppressive political regimes, or in abject poverty. ‘‘In extreme and prolonged threats to survival,’’ Bok states, ‘‘human choice is intolerably restricted. Survival alone counts; moral considerations are nearly obliterated. ... And for many the moral personality is itself crushed; the ability to choose is destroyed’’ (111). Zenia’s choices have been limited to tactics in which women more comfortably situated would not wish to engage. Other than the occasional waitress job or freelance gig, survival consisted in the sale of her body or the use of her beauty to attract male providers, intermittently forming tactical friendships with women. This is not far afield from the lives of many disadvantaged women. More than a few readers can relate to Zenia, especially when she bucks up a companion before the latter capitulates to self-pity, or when her caustic candor exposes the delusions of her three quasi-friends. For example, Zenia’s unsentimental realism helps Tony overcome perhaps her toughest psychological hurdle: forgiving her mother. When Tony insists that her mother abandoned her as a child by running off with a lover, Zenia counters by saying that her own mother sold her, or rented her out, to men for money. But, she explains, she and her mother were refugees from Poland in wartime Paris. ‘‘People were eating garbage then, they were eating cats! What could she do? She couldn’t get a job, ... she didn’t have any skills! She had to have money somehow’’ (162). Tony listens in horror, but Zenia’s remarks immediately broaden her perspective on parental dereliction. Later, Zenia offers Tony a further reflection: Tony’s mother must have been a romantic at heart, who left her family

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to pursue an ideal mate, to escape the desperate marriage she entered into during wartime, when everyone was randomly coupling thinking they would soon die anyway. This villainess displays a no-nonsense version of compassion here. Her message translates for Tony’s benefit as ‘Hey, we’ve all had our pains, but let’s get a grip on the circumstances, make some allowances, and move on.’ Zenia’s three female victims are also victims of their own dark tendencies. Roz, for one, is warmhearted, quick of caustic wit, generous, an accomplished businesswoman, but stricken with self-loathing. Daughter of an absentee Jewish father of ill-gotten wartime wealth, Roz was raised during the war by a strict Catholic mother. Big-boned, large of appetite, ever defeated in her battle to be slim, not ugly but not a beauty either, Roz was never blessed with a sense of belonging. Through Roz, Atwood’s narrative illustrates how not only reason but, more importantly, compassion is obliterated by intense feelings such as envy, rage, resentment, and misery due to loneliness and rejection. Readers are introduced to Roz through the history of her long-suffering marriage to handsome, philandering Mitch, a lawyer hired by her father, who probably saw the boss’s daughter as his ticket out of genteel poverty. After they are married, Mitch keeps up a series of infidelities that Roz becomes adept at turning into manipulative guilt games. At first she feels ‘‘scooped out, disjointed, scorned and betrayed, crushed by bulldozers ... worthless, useless, sexless ... [that] she would die.’’ Later, however, she develops ‘‘a knack, and therefore a taste’’ for colluding with her husband’s ruses (298). Wishing she could have been selfless like the nuns who had taught her in school, to suffer passively for love, she instead becomes skilful at ‘‘lying and concealing and smiling and playing Mitch like an oversized carp.’’ Rather than drowning in love, Roz chooses not to ‘‘thrash around a lot, and scream, and wear [her]self out’’ (299). She prefers to let Mitch be the thrashing carp. Even as we identify Roz’s veiled ennabling of her husband’s infidelity, the narrative stretches our awareness into a broader and less judgmental purview. We are informed that Roz has never experienced any compassion from others, neither from her mother nor anyone else. Before bonding with Tony and Charis, Roz had no real friends; her wealth made others envious and unsympathetic. Readers are therefore allowed to understand why Roz may not have been capable of unbiased attention to Zenia, nor of responding to the man she loved with enough insight and compassion to save him from terminal despair. Whereas Tony quietly takes her husband back after he has been discarded by Zenia, Roz rebuffs Mitch

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vindictively. Ashamed and bereft of confidence, he begs her to let him return, offering to stay downstairs in the family room so as not to bother her. Blind to his humiliation, Roz incongruously takes this to mean that Mitch doesn’t want to sleep with her anymore, imagining that he is ‘‘rejecting her big, eager, clumsy, ardent, and solid body; it’s no longer good enough him, not even ... as a fallback.’’ She requires, but fails to articulate, that Mitch come back only on full terms. ‘‘You can’t treat me like a rest stop,’’ she says. ‘‘Not anymore.’’ (376). Readers’ empathy for Roz’s pain is thus colored by our reaction to the emotional violence of her rejection of Mitch, based on the wrongheaded perception that he rejects her passion for him. Her attention, we see, was fatally misplaced on herself as a spurned wife, rather than on her husband’s shame-filled plea for one last chance. Only after Mitch’s suicide does Roz feel remorse, recalling that her own mother had put up with an unfaithful husband, Roz’s much-adored father. The narrator, perhaps reflecting Roz’s consciousness, ponders that her many successes do not include standing by her man. ‘‘Because if Mitch drowned himself – if there wasn’t enough left to live for – whose fault was it? Zenia’s, yes, but also her own. She should have remembered about his own father, who took the same dark road. She should have let him back in’’ (381). Unwilling to forgive herself, Roz exacts a near-fatal self-punishment, an overdose of sleeping pills. Oddly enough, it is Charis, who Roz considers dithery and insubstantial, who exercises miraculous healing power, bringing Roz back to consciousness with a newfound will to live. No one, through to the end, shows this kind of compassion for Zenia. But the novel does set us up for the perception that a higher degree of difficulty in the Olympics of compassion may not exceed human grasp. The growth of the reader’s moral consciousness may allow us to deduce something from all this suffering: Simone Weil would call it facing the Void, choosing to substitute active or passive kindness – if not to the aggressor then at least to oneself as the injured party – rather than passing along the injury one receives to others. Absorption of pain without retaliation or transferral to others has the capacity to overcome multiple evils. But, as Atwood’s novel demonstrates, this saving function of compassion is blocked by inattention to the suffering of self and others, inattention which then leads to or permits vindictive and abusive behavior. The quality of attention that Tony, Charis and Roz are capable of giving Zenia is diminished and distorted by their past pains and fears,

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and by her threatening position regarding their love interests. Each overlooks the one consideration that would connect them with Zenia other than as an adversary: the fact that she so much resembles them. Each of them grew up isolated, abused and almost totally deprived of compassion and nurturing. However, they were fortunate enough not to have been quite as isolated and desperate as Zenia. Unlike Zenia, each of them benefitted from the inheritance of family assets. And, largely because of Zenia’s impact on their lives, they have one another as true friends, formed of shared heartache and moral support far more than utility. Readers of T he Robber Bride gradually acquire an apperception of evil in the form of an awareness of the damage done by various forms of lack of attention. By learning of the childhood deprivations and abuses suffered by the three protagonists, not to mention Zenia, we become aware of the damage done to their potential for attending compassionately to others, in particular to the ones who cause them pain, vitiating their compassionate treatment of those individuals. The novel’s denouement depicts three women who, not without reason, cannot believe their adversary’s pleas for help. By now we can sense the blockage in their pathways of compassion, clogged with rage, pain and fear for which they inattentively blame Zenia totally. We also observe Zenia’s rage at not being believed, how she cannot resist throwing cruel – though not wholly inaccurate – accusations at each of them for refusing to help her. Readers, along with the three protagonists, accumulate enough evidence to deduce that Zenia’s story was essentially true. An autopsy shows that she died of a drug overdose; medical records reveal that she had ovarian cancer and about six months to live. She had a fake Canadian health card and several false passports with an extensive record of travel to various countries – indicating her statelessness and the plausibility of her freelance career in espionage. Poignantly, she had no estate, but left a small bequest to a Belgian orphanage near Waterloo which no longer existed. Perhaps this orphanage had once taken her in, and she had not known of its closing. Mysteries remain, but as the narrative closes we sense a lingering regret, a sense of missed opportunity to attend to this troubled soul. There is deep sadness in this failure to transcend the barriers to compassion that lessens the self and diminishes our relationship to others. The reader sees these evils more clearly because Atwood’s characters do not see them clearly enough. Zenia cared enough about these women she used to tell them truths about themselves that they were unwilling to face. She finally confronts Charis for clinging to the besotted memory of her boyfriend Billy. In

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their last encounter, Zenia accuses Charis of ‘‘mooning around after Billy’’ all the intervening years, using him as an excuse to avoid having a life. ‘‘Read my lips, he wasn’t worth it.’’ Zenia carefully stipulates that she is telling Charis this for her own good. It was so easy, she elaborates, to persuade Billy to turn in all of his draft-dodging pals for cash, in return for a new identity and a ‘‘sordid little job as a third-rate spy.’’ She offers to give Charis his current address, where she would find him to be a ‘‘broken-down acid-head and whining drunk, and bald as well’’ (423). Charis wisely passes up the offer. If she is finally disabused of pining for a man who never existed as a worthy partner for her, we have to credit Zenia for puncturing that futile balloon. Though rage-based cruelty colors some of Zenia’s final remarks to Tony, Charis and Roz, her hard-edged attention to the suppressed facticity of their own lives eventually strengthens them, when they allow themselves to accept the truth of it. At the close of Atwood’s narrative, evil is perceived as primarily a deprivation of nurturing attention in all four women’s lives, but ultimately a loss for them of potential friendship, of healing and growth that would have been possible in the presence of deeper insight. In any case, the play of attention in this novel gives us imaginative space for the growth of our own moral consciousness. Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy presents us with the peculiar challenge of interpreting the role of attention in a narrative whose ethical focus on an evil practice is decidedly overt. The enemy is female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision, which now affects over 130 million in Africa, with at least two million girls in 28 countries subjected to the practice each year.11 This number is even greater than when Walker’s novel was first published in 1992. Although a wide assortment of health professionals, legal experts, social activists and feminists have taken up the cause of its treatment, prevention and eradication, the effect is still limited. The hardest nut to crack has been the ancient tribal tradition that keeps the practice alive, ignoring whatever laws have been passed against it. It is to this adversary that Walker addresses her fictional artistry in lieu of polemics. On an obvious level, genital cutting causes extensive physical and psychological damage to girls and women, and figures greatly in the spread of AIDS. Walker’s novel also explores the practice as a radical evil, a kind of blasphemy. Theologian Ted Peters aptly describes blasphemy as an activity in which ‘‘prostituted symbols of life become the means for inflicting spiritual death as well as physical suffering,’’ and in which ‘‘we hear the request to shed innocent blood.’’12 By spiritual death,

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Peters refers to the destruction of hope that occurs among the victims of cruelty and injustice when perpetrators conceal their wrongdoing under a cloak of divine intention. When victims of FGM and other oppressive acts feel there is nowhere to turn because they believe that Allah or tribal gods are causing their suffering, the ultimate evil becomes a corruption of truth that produces blinding despair. Hatred of that evil, perhaps moreso than the creative imagination, drives the narrative in Possessing the Secret of Joy. Rather than through righteous indignation, Walker’s narrative achieves its power through a fiercely attentive process of caring observation. There may be no better recent example of the ethics of literature merging with those of real life than Walker’s artistic and personal activism against female genital mutilation. Her novel, numerous interviews, the documentary film ‘‘Warrior Marks’’ she co-produced, and her coauthored book Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993) attest to her determination to eradicate FGM, significantly heightening public awareness of the practice. Criticized for imposing European/American cultural standards on former colonial states, Walker has held her ground. In her collected essays, T he Same River T wice (1996), she states, ‘‘Hatred of women and of women’s autonomy is the most intimate of the psychic diseases that brings us down’’ (45). Insisting that we are all responsible for each other’s suffering, she slices through accusations of cultural imperialism by appealing to humanitarian basics: I want to grab and imprison these women who are abusing this child; I don’t care how black they are, whose ‘‘culture’’ it is, or what anyone else thinks about it whatsoever. I also want to hold them, collectively and individually, and weep with them over the little hurt child within themselves. The betrayed child in all of us. How much of ourselves we forget, when we forget our pain. (160)

By using the novel to draw public attention to something evoking deep moral revulsion, to confront what she described in Anything We L ove Can Be Saved as ‘‘one of the most physically and psychologically destructive practices of our time (and of thousands of years before our time), a practice that ... is rapidly finding a toehold in the Western world’’ (126), Walker takes up an enormous challenge. Such moral protests have honorable literary precedents, placing her among the likes of Swift, Zola, Dickens and Steinbeck. Walker’s approach is singular. Reading Possessing, one is reminded of Wayne Booth’s emphasis upon the ethical influence of the fictional com-

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pany a reader keeps.13 This novel gives readers the impression of having unfiltered access to the minds and hearts of characters who bring radically different perspectives to the same events and situations. Nowhere does an omniscient narrator intrude with political rhetoric, psychobabble, or moralizing transitions. Unlike T he Color Purple, Walker’s earlier epistolary novel which mentions several of these characters, Possessing eschews chapter titles or numbers. Sections are denoted simply by the name of the character whose voice is heard therein. Readers hear what becomes a family of caring voices surrounding that of the victim of genital mutilation: Tashi, or Evelyn Johnson, her married name as the wife of an American minister, the son of African missionaries. Each voice is fully formed. Equally compelling are Tashi’s husband Adam; his sister Olivia, her best friend; Tashi’s two consecutive psychoanalysts; her brain-damaged son Benny; Adam’s French feminist mistress Lisette and their perspicacious son Pierre. Most tellingly, we hear from the shrewd old circumciser M’Lissa, whom Tashi finally kills. Our attention is kept on Tashi and her life’s torment, but her story is artfully framed in a chorus of voices that envelop her with tenderness, respect and tireless interest. The charm of these surrounding voices may divert most readers from perceiving them as idealized, considering the hostility and instability of the object of their concern. Remarkably, every one of Tashi’s extended family suffers her rage and rejection without a trace of vengeful sentiment or conduct. Tashi, for example, boxes her simple-minded son’s ears for ‘‘no cause,’’ and states that she fancied feeling relieved if she made him ‘‘squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension’’ (144). When Tashi learns, by jealously reading her husband’s mail, that his mistress Lisette is dying of stomach cancer and that Adam has agreed to let Pierre live with them, she refuses to let her husband discuss the matter with her. When the orphaned Pierre arrives from France, expecting to be accepted into his father’s home, Tashi pelts him with stones that she has been piling up for just that purpose since he was born! Never – plausibly or not – do we find a trace of anger, lasting hurt, or vengeance on the part of Benny, Pierre, or Adam. The narrative does not inform us where Pierre goes to live after Tashi denies him entrance to his father’s house. We see only that he remains devotedly sympathetic to Tashi and her recurring nightmares. He has heard about them from his equally sympathetic mother Lisette, who was more of a comforter and confidante than a passionate love interest for Adam, who visited her annually to recuperate from the stress of living with an unstable and

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hostile wife. Pierre decides to become an anthropologist to decode Tashi’s nightmares and help her to overcome her mental illness. It is Lisette who recommends her uncle Carl as Tashi’s first psychoanalyst, whom Tashi learns to trust and love. Before Carl’s death he refers Tashi to the African American analyst Raye, and she too becomes a devoted therapist, following Tashi to Africa to comfort her, along with the rest of her family, as she awaits execution. These relationships display an amazing degree of supportive solidarity which the wounded protagonist never seems to appreciate. It may strike some as implausible that Adam gives up his ministry, but not his love for his wife, because he cannot bring himself to preach to his congregation about Tashi’s genital mutilation and to compare the suffering of women with that of Christ. Tashi cannot forgive him or understand how he might feel ‘‘ashamed to discuss something so private’’ (276). Therefore, she refuses more than his affection: her ‘‘soul removed itself from Adam’s reach’’ (275). Some readers might surmise that it is Adam’s longsuffering – verging upon Christlike – love and forgiveness that keeps him devoted to a psychologically disturbed and physically unresponsive wife, and keeps their extended family caring and together. Tashi’s victimhood generates considerable suffering, but the characters who attend to her are depicted in ways that reflect the ideals of Weil and Lonergan. They block the spread of evil by absorbing it, not retaliating against one whose violence, rage and coldness inevitably hurts them.14 This novel acquaints us with the mystery of radical evil through its opposite: unfettered joy, reciprocal erotic love, all the wonderful things Adam and Tashi experienced together before she got herself circumcised. They often asked themselves whether others had experienced their degree of pleasure, because the faces of the village elders ‘‘bore no hint of it’’ (32). The description of Adam and Tashi’s youthful passion haunts the rest of the novel. While Adam’s lovemaking had consisted in the enjoyment of Tashi’s unmutilated body and psyche, all the women known by the tribal men had been traumatized as prepubescent girls by having their external genitalia cut off, crudely sewn shut with only a tiny opening left for urination and menstruation. Nor were these men’s consciences greatly troubled by knowledge of the girls’ terrifying initiation or by the adult women’s chronic pain, recurring infections, difficulty walking, fatal or near-fatal complications in childbirth, and so on. All these sufferings, and the expression of others’ concern for their misery, were suppressed by taboo.

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Contrasting Adam and Tashi’s innocent, voluptuous joy with what they saw on the faces of the village elders, the narrative cuts open an ancient, ever present evil. Besides the more obvious evil of violence and permanent physical harm, the evil of FGM is exposed as permeated with denial: as in destruction of the potential of relationship. Why these tribesmen would come to deny themselves the joy that Adam and Tashi experienced, however, is unexplored. Nevertheless, we see clearly that the elders are separated from such passion by a chasm of assumed superiority, brutality, secrecy and the unexamined force of tradition. Their avoidance of responsibility for continuing this tradition is facilitated by assigning the procedure itself to a sub-tradition of female circumcisers. Further denial of relationship is ensured by having the ceremony performed on unsuspecting girls, held down by their own mothers and other women, in initiation huts far from the village, their screams comfortably outside male earshot. All this goes off the chart in terms of the avoidance of understanding, compassion and insight. The tradition of taboo is a glaring example of what Lonergan would identify as the deliberate exclusion of insight, the love of darkness. Regarding tribal tradition, it is helpful to note Lonergan’s view on the avoidance of insight as it occurs in communities and societies. ‘‘The sins of group bias may be secret and almost unconscious,’’ he writes, ‘‘but what originally was a neglected possibility [in Possessing’s case, the possibility of shared erotic joy] becomes a grotesquely distorted reality’’ (Insight 224). In the following passage, Walker illustrates Lonergan’s perception that a society can form a negative bias against common sense, avoiding and resisting the very insight that would enable people to rid themselves of a fundamental injustice and barrier to their full enjoyment of one another. As Adam takes the stand in the African courtroom where Tashi is on trial for murder, he tries unsuccessfully to explain how she has suffered and should not be punished. Shouted down with epithets of taboo, he muses inwardly: They do not want to hear what their children suffer. They’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo. Like the visible signs of menstruation. Signs of woman’s mental power. Signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men. ... Are they simply saying that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever? (165)

Through Adam’s reflections, we develop a visceral awareness of the cultural resistance to insight as a subtle, insidious and potently causative evil. He recalls an old man in the village whose wives had all died or

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killed themselves to avoid being cut open to have sex. The old man’s eyes would light up with remembered lechery and violence, telling Adam on more than one occasion that women ‘‘are indestructible down there. ... They are like leather: the more you chew it, the softer it gets.’’ But Adam had seen a crying child in the old man’s eyes before he died, and ponders: ‘‘He had not loved the majority of his wives; ... he thought of them as servants in the most disposable sense. ... But the ... wife who drowned herself, he at least thought he loved. Unfortunately, for him, ‘love’ and frequent, forceful sex were one. And so he lay, finally, wounded and wet with his own tears, lamenting his life but knowing no other’’ (166). In Adam’s voice we hear how the traditional concealment of women’s suffering by taboo contributes to man’s suffering. It takes the form of lost potential, blocked access to unmutilated Eros between equals, and denial of personal responsibility in terms of compassion and initiative to prevent further suffering. The narrative also exposes the constriction of a man’s erotic consciousness into the squalor of lechery and sadism. The tradition of genital cutting egregiously fulfills Nel Noddings’s formulation of evil from the perspective of women’s experience, or feminist phenomenology. The practice, of course, harms or threatens harm, is felt by women as pain and separation from human relationship, and results in helplessness – a specifically female experience of evil within Noddings’ definition.15 The patriarchal domination of women and the attempt to control their sexuality denies relationship by limiting women’s autonomy and freedom of expression, damaging their potential relation to others and to themselves. Besides causing physical harm, pain and lasting trauma, FGM leaves women susceptible to recurring infections and at least one fatal disease. As Tashi’s son Benny demonstrates, FGM can permanently injure children who are born through thickly scarred birth canals. The practice induces overwhelming degrees of helplessness. It is imposed by a male hierarchy to limit women’s autonomy, enforced by the mothers and other women to whom the girls would normally turn to protect them, it is reputedly willed by Allah or by tribal gods. Ostracism and ineligibility for marriage are severe penalties for females who dare oppose it. Walker’s fiction reflects actual conditions so starkly that her novel dramatizes the inadequacy of ideological stands regarding multi-cultural intolerance, cultural relativism, respect for native mythology, or sentimental anthropology. Perhaps the only approach basic enough to bypass the maze of intellectual agendas is that of attending to the play of attention. In contrast to the loving concern of Tashi’s husband Adam, her best friend Olivia, her two psychoanalysts, her son Benny, Adam’s mistress

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Lisette, and Lisette and Adam’s son Pierre, Tashi’s sudden trip back to Africa to kill the old woman who circumcised her is basically a story of willful and irresponsible inattention. It is odd, since Tashi is under the watchful care of a psychoanalyst, that this therapist would not have warned her against trying to carry out a revenge fantasy. Not a peep of protest arises from Raye when Tashi sees a photograph of her old circumciser in a news magazine in the sanatorium where she is under treatment, and decides to go to Africa and kill her. The narrative takes us immediately to the scene of Tashi’s revenge. Fancying she might find relief by murdering the old woman who had disfigured her, Tashi appears in the fictional country where the old crone has become a national treasure. What Tashi never realizes is that she has come to kill another trauma victim. When readers finally hear the circumciser M’Lissa’s voice, it offers a perspective on Tashi’s accountability that no one else can, and in a tone not heard before in this narrative. Pretending she has returned to care for the old woman, Tashi bathes her, observing the thick scar of her genital excision and a deep scar down the main tendon of her left leg. M’Lissa tells Tashi how her own mother, also a circumciser who was forced into the tradition against her will, tried to save a tiny nub of her daughter’s genital tissue, but was caught by the eagle-eyed women holding down her hands and feet. They called in the tribal witchdoctor who cruelly finished the procedure with a stroke that severed the tendon in her left leg, laming her for life. Here is an equally compelling tale of trauma leading to a woman’s separation from self. M’Lissa tells Tashi that the child who arose from the mat and left the initiation hut three months later was not the same child, and that she ‘‘was never to see that child again’’ (222). Tashi, bent on her murderous agenda, half-listens to this story, failing to recognize the old woman as a victim like herself, but one not so fortunate as to have experienced erotic love as an adolescent nor to have a loyal sweetheart return to marry her and take her to America to live a better life. Tashi is moved merely to modify her method of killing M’Lissa. Instead of cutting her up with knives and razors as planned, she suffocates her under a pillow. Having learned about the extreme suffering of both characters, readers can see that Tashi and M’Lissa are both badly damaged victims of a practice that has left them with distinct symptoms of post-traumatic stress. What M’Lissa wants to do with Tashi is what Tashi has been trying to do in psychoanalysis for many years: grief work. This might have been cathartic, even healing, were Tashi a sympathetic listener. Tragically, she is not. When M’Lissa tries to share her most agonizing

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memory, she strikes one of the dominant moral chords in the novel: ‘‘I knew in the moment when the pain was greatest ... that there is no God known to man who cares about children or about women. And that the God of woman is autonomy’’ (223). Unfortunately, the God of autonomy is not clearly shown to be ill-served by Tashi’s wrongful assertion of her own autonomy, her decision to kill. Speaking of autonomy, we might ask whether M’Lissa’s character bears some resemblance to another witchy, shrewd, sick-unto-death survivor: Zenia. Is it coincidental that M’Lissa’s auditor, like Zenia’s three traumatized auditors, has very little sympathy for her because of her past wrongs? Similarly to Zenia’s erstwhile friends – who, as Charis realizes after her death, did not once focus their attention on the Zenia-ness of Zenia – Tashi pays no heed to the Lissa-ness of Mother Lissa (her full name). She does not register the significance of M’Lissa’s attempts, described to Tashi before she was killed, to prevent Tashi’s beloved sister Dura from being circumcised. Dura’s death, M’Lissa recalls, was Tashi’s ‘‘stupid mother Nafa’s fault’’ (256). There is a harsh maternal truthfulness in M’Lissa’s account of Nafa’s spineless negligence in causing Dura’s death. ‘‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself ’’ she tells Tashi. ‘‘You are like your mother. If Dura is not bathed [circumcised], she said no one will marry her. ... As soon as she heard the new missionaries were black, she felt certain the village would be returned to all its former ways.’’ The previous missionaries had managed to convince the chief to stop the practice of FGM. M’Lissa advised Tashi’s mother to wait. ‘‘But no,’’ the old circumciser said. ‘‘She was the kind of woman who jumps even before the man says boo. Your mother helped me hold your sister down.’’ Tashi tells M’Lissa to stop, but she refuses, telling Tashi, ‘‘You are mad, but you are not mad enough. Don’t you think your mother might have told you how Dura died? She didn’t, did she? That she was that one in a hundred girls so constructed that the slightest scratch made her bleed like a stuck cow’’ (256–257). Through this dialogue we begin to experience Tashi’s relentless selfpity, to feel how blinkered is her determination to wreak revenge. Tashi seeks only to condemn the circumciser who pleaded with her mother not to have Tashi’s beloved sister cut, urging her mother to wait until they knew for sure that the practice would be reinstated. Herein lie several grave failures of attention, denials or refusals of insight. Tashi does not recognize M’Lissa’s honesty and willingness to take responsibility for her actions. M’Lissa admits that when Tashi asked to be circumcised, she wondered whether she too might be a bleeder. M’Lissa does not force

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Tashi to see her mother’s greater culpability in Dura’s death, but she does take responsibility for agreeing to circumcise Tashi. ‘‘You’d come so far, and were so foolish. ... Besides, by then I did not care’’ (258). Walker’s narrative allows readers to perceive how Tashi could make M’Lissa her sworn enemy for having circumcised her, M’Lissa could rail against the stupidity of other traumatized, mutilated women for wanting their daughters to be eligible for marriage, and both would be in a state of denial. They each choose more manageable outlets for their rage because they could not undertake something far too daunting: confronting an entire culture dominated by men who have no qualms about violating girls and women. Readers moved by M’Lissa’s plight may not share Tashi’s soul’s final ‘‘satisfaction’’ at having murdered the old woman. We might even feel that Tashi squandered the remainder of a life she might have put to far better use as an activist! Nevertheless, Tashi’s rage, full blown into madness, gives us cause to ponder the swath of evil involved with female genital mutilation. Can we not also hear echoes of childhood injustice in the fury voiced by Zenia as all three of her would-be dupe/friends reject her when she is seeking safe harbor in which to die? The extraordinarily caring atmosphere Walker creates in the group of characters surrounding Tashi, who manage to listen with compassion and attentiveness to one who has been deeply traumatized, renders more tragic the novel’s most intense moments. In the face-off between Tashi and M’Lissa, the protagonist is so obsessed with revenge and rage that she cannot listen to another’s pain. The results of trauma are the more subtle evils of denial and avoidance of relationship, which can be reduced to the blocking of open-minded and open-hearted attention. Walker’s novel gives us an example of unfettered attention, however, in the career choice of Pierre, who becomes an anthropologist studying African tribal customs. Son of Adam and his mistress Lisette, whose role of caring listener allowed Adam some measure of healing from the ongoing trauma of absorbing the emotional abuse and refusal of intimacy he received from his wife, it seems oddly fitting that Pierre be the one who unlocks the mystery of Tashi’s recurring nightmares. While Tashi is in prison Pierre shows her a film of African termite hills. This triggers memories of herself as a young child bringing a tray of food and water to the village elders, and overhearing a dialogue that decodes the imagery of her nightmares. The tribal myth the old men recount reveals the source of their women’s oppression and genital mutilation. The elders give thanks to their god for giving them women, but say, ‘‘If left to herself the Queen

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would fly. ... And then where would we be? ... But God is merciful. ... He clips her wings. She is inert’’ (237). As a child Tashi did not understand that these words implied the inertness of a woman’s absence of sexual response, having been genitally excised. The myth tells of how, when sexually aroused, primeval woman’s genitalia rose up like a termite hill and had to be cut off so ‘‘God’’ could have intercourse with her. The old men banter about how God created the woman circumciser with her sharpened stone, her needle and thread, ‘‘Because He liked it tight!’’ Who ‘‘God’’ is is clinched when they exult, ‘‘God likes to feel big. ... What man does not? ... Let us eat this food, and drink to the Queen who is beautiful, and whose body has been given us to be our sustenance forever’’ (238). Man’s will is attributed to God’s will, concealing the evils of man’s selfishness, arrogance, lust for power and willingness to inflict physical and spiritual suffering. As Lonergan might put it, the use of God’s will to justify acts of domination and subjugation of women in a patriarchal society is a fundamental evil made possible by the refusal to acknowledge that such ruses are lies. A comment made by Tashi’s analyst Raye seems apt in this context: ‘‘Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth’’ (235). The myth Tashi recalls unveils depths of evil the rest of the novel does not explore. Tashi realizes that these old men ‘‘were discussing her, determining her life. ... [I]n her unconscious mind had remained the termite hill, and herself trapped deep inside it, heavy, wingless, inert, the Queen of the dark tower’’ (239). Perhaps the darkness of that imprisoning tower was composed not only of women’s enforced ignorance and subjugation, but also benighted male envy, and the suppressed shame of men who assume the right to destroy women’s experience of their own passions and the right to pursue their own desires. Where would men get that envy? Walker’s narrative suggests that their envy arose from the fear, inherent in patriarchy, that the matriarchal self-sufficiency of women as sexual beings may have threatened to exclude them from their own relationship with and access to women. Is this not, ultimately, a male fear of the loss of female attention? As Paul Ricoeur observed in T he Symbolism of Evil, primitive man used myth to bridge the gap between experience and intention. If he did create myths as an antidote to distress, it was ‘‘because the man of myths is already an unhappy consciousness. For him, unity, conciliation and reconciliation are things to be spoken of and acted out, precisely because they are not given’’ (167–168). The trouble with the myth in Possessing the Secret of Joy, as the novel makes luridly clear, is that it tries to justify

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a happiness for men built upon cruelty to women. Clearly, there can be no unity or conciliation in such an environment, yet the fear and distress of man’s original unhappy consciousness remains unexamined. These questioning paths are not taken here, but Walker’s novel leaves their gates open. They lead toward territory involving the development or restriction of consciousness, the origins of fear, envy, violence, and the desire to subjugate the play of attention itself In conclusion, the giving of attention is another kind of transcendent process, as elemental as the alterity of others, the ego’s responsibility to the other, and the malignancy of evil that resists integration, to employ the terms of Levinas.16 The life-giving properties of attention itself – how attention is sought after, denied, partially or completely received – offer a window on the liveliness and growth of moral consciousness, a purchase for the Logos of moral values. Realistic fiction of this high quality provides such a window, something that can be explored in greater detail than experiences of real life. The novels we have discussed here suggest that the roots of evil can be exposed as intimately connected with our thwarted hope and need for caring attention, justice, healing, community, self-love and reciprocal love. In our suffering and urge to overcome evil we find a transcendent focus when we study the life-affirming qualities of attention, and the destructive power of its absence or denial. The play of attention, therefore, is itself a Logos of great fluency and potential. Marymount Manhattan College NOTES 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 105, 107, 168. 2 Terry Eagleton, quoted in David Lodge, ‘‘Goodbye to All That,’’ a review of After T heory (New York: Basic Books, 2004), in T he New York Review of Books, May 27, 2004, p. 41. 3 My review of Neiman’s book appears in Christianity and L iterature, Vol. 53, No. 1, Autumn 2003, pp. 116–120. 4 Levinas, op. cit., p. 114. 5 Levinas, op. cit., p. 94. 6 This phenomenon was first pointed out to me by my mother, the late Rachel G. Madden, a nurse. 7 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 169. 8 Murdoch, op. cit., p. 179. 9 Simone Weil, translated and quoted by Sian Miles in the introduction to Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), pp. 5–6.

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10 Hilde Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse, Transatlantic Perspectives 4 (Tu¨bingen: A. Francke, 1995), p. 209. 11 Tina Rosenberg, ‘‘Mutilating Africa’s Daughters: Laws Unenforced, Practices Unchanged,’’ New York T imes, 7/5/04, Editorial Page. 12 Ted Peters, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), pp. 17–18. 13 Wayne Booth, T he Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 14 As Walker explains in Anything We L ove Can Be Saved (New York: Random House, 1997, p. xxv), she creates characters who ‘‘explore what it would be like not to be imprisoned by the hatred of women, the love of violence, and the destructiveness of greed taught to human beings as the ‘religion’ by which they must guide their lives.’’ 15 Noddings, op. cit., p. 95. 16 Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Evil,’’ trans. A. Lingis, in Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana, XIV (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), p. 163.

Jadwiga Smith and Kathleen Haney

JADWIGA SMITH

PHENOMENOLOGY OF EMOTIONS: AUREL KOLNAI’S ON DISGUST AND JACOBEAN DRAMA

This paper is a continuation of my exploration of English Medieval and Renaissance drama in the context of the aesthetic and ethical implications of the phenomenological investigation of the interplay of philosophical and theatrical issues when dealing with such phenomenological thinkers as Ingarden, Riceour, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Tymieniecka and Kolnai. In the tradition of Max Scheler, Kolnai’s philosophy explores the world of human emotions as significant in the investigation of the concept of values, essential to the understanding of the world of human experience. Intellectualizing, using logic and applying scientific methods are not the ways to grasp these values because such ways imply apprehending them already. Kolnai’s treatment of disgust exemplifies this trust in the role of emotions in revealing some essential characteristics of objects as they are presented to our senses. Such an approach to human emotions makes Kolnai’s philosophy related to cognitivism, a theory that recognizes emotions as aligned with rational modes of cognition. Emotions, then, are not epistemological obstructions but gateways to knowledge that is unavailable by any other ways except through emotions themselves. A feeling of disgust is an example of our immediate apprehension of an object which would otherwise escape a purely rational probing. Thus, Kolnai’s work is essential to the comprehension of ethical beliefs. Kolnai’s interpretation of disgust allows for the sensory formation of this emotion to bridge the area of moral judgments. Such an extension is possible because disgust is a visceral, immediate reaction, not prompted by any pre-existing moral judgment of the object in question. Rather, disgust itself is enough to evoke the negative judgment, identical to those in the area of moral judgments: ‘‘He regards the capacity to feel disgust to be a matter of our human reactiveness not only to decay and foulness in the sensory realm, but also moral decay and foulness of character. Disgust ... is an indispensable foundation of our ethical sensibility’’ (Korsmeyer and Smith 23). It enriches the ethical responsiveness and adds to the moral awareness of personal involvement in moral transgression. Hence, Kolnai’s investigation of disgust can provide a philosophical platform to the discussion of the issues raised in Jacobean history and 259 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 259–274. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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drama. This volatile political period challenged numerous theological dogmas, moral judgments, and social codes. Jacobean drama reflects the disturbing character of the time in the works of Webster, Marston, Tourner, Ford, and Middleton. Their works deal with the extreme confusion of aesthetic and social issues and unclear moral discernment. In the midst of such a reevaluation of normative views, many playwrights of the era are aware that they cannot rely on the ethical and aesthetic paradigms held by the audience. In other words, they cannot trust the audience because of its jaded, confused moral sensibility or lack of normative uniformity. Instead, the playwrights have to reach to other sources of moral and aesthetic grounding for their plays. Thus, the role of disgust, one of the most prominently displayed emotions in Jacobean plays, becomes crucial in clearing the way for moral understanding. Stagnant pools, putrefied bodies, cannibalistic imagery, disease, distorted and ugly bodies, sickly nature – take hold of the audience’s emotions and allow for the feelings of disgust to provide guidance in the area of the moral realm in the absence of clearly felt paradigms. Moreover, the visceral reaction of the audience, filled with disgust when reacting to the scene of feasting on a human body, as in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, is connected with the audience’s general discomfort throughout the play. With little predictability, unclear causality, questionable psychological motivation of characters, and the disturbing mixture of the comic and the tragic, numerous plays of the Jacobean period suggest the distrust in the rational. What the audience is challenged to do is to forego rationality and to turn instead to instinctual responses. Since Kolnai adheres to Scheler’s convictions that the real properties of value can be apprehended only thanks to the insight provided by emotions, it follows that disgust can supply a possible access to the moral evaluation of Jacobean drama. Even though emotions can be misleading, in the preexisting condition of confusion, disgust can provide a certain means of dealing with that confusion. In other words, in the absence of a cohesive moral system, the elaborate system of orchestrated responses to the emotional stimuli of disgust provides an access to a much less relativistic view of morality underlying the plays of the Jacobean era. In his essay, ‘‘Moral Consensus,’’ published in his Ethics, Values, and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, Kolnai defends the notion that morality is always connected to some pre-existing practices, views, traditions, instinctual emotion, which make morality ‘‘hold on (to) the business of life.’’ In opposition to post-modern relativistic claims that the number of moral systems corresponds to the number of cultures or societal entities,

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Kolnai seeks moral consensus. He acknowledges multiplicity of social practices, traditions, and ancestral ways, but, at the same time, he ascertains: ‘‘how much more striking is the discordance between the factual beliefs of man, their religious, their para-or non-religious outlooks, not to speak of their dominant individual and collective interests, than between their moral beliefs all over the world and along its history! To become aware of this contrast in its full proportion should suffice to establish the fact of moral consensus’’ (158). In the introduction to the study of disgust, Kolnai confirms the connection between the physiological and moral sphere in the experience of disgust. He is aware also that his study has some dealings with psychological issues and ‘‘the sphere of descriptive aesthetics and even to metaphysics’’ (29–20). Methodologically, his investigation has ‘‘an exclusively phenomenological aim, that is to say, the aim of seeking to grasp the essence, the significance and the intention of disgust, and also what might be called the law of cohesion of its object-realm [...]’’ (30). He first conceptualizes disgust according to several points of view, and these points are by no means, warns Kolnai, the only ones. He uses these points to narrow down the emotion of disgust and correlate it with other ‘‘defense reactions,’’ or aversions, such as dislike, hate, sorrow, shuddering at something, etc. Thus, the first point of view is according to the range of its object, and it narrows down disgust as always related to organic, biological matter, unlike fear or dislike. As an example of his method of correlating and contrasting these various modes of aversion is Kolnai’s observation that: ‘‘Fatuous thinking may arouse contempt or a feeling of being ill at ease, but not disgust; what is known to be not dangerous, in general, gives rise to fear, but it may still be disgusting’’ (30). The second point of view is according to the mode of intentionality, which matters more in areas of hate and contempt than in cases of disgust, but even less than in cases of anger and it may be absent in cases of displeasure. The third point is according to the condition of the subject, and, consequently, ‘‘hate is certainly more of a state or condition of the subject than is contempt, disgust more than hate, anger more than disgust’’ (31). The fourth point is according to immediacy or primordiality, and it establishes the degree of prior knowledge or values. As a result, disgust is both more intentional than anger or abhorrence and even more primordial because it is more related just to impressions than to the grasping of states of affairs. The fifth point is according to the degree of independence, measuring the degree of independence from other ‘‘concomitant defense reactions.’’ Thus,

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for example, fear is more independent because disgust ‘‘alludes to it somehow,’’ whereas fear does not require disgust. The sixth point is according to the degree of linkage to the body. Hence, disgust has a closer affinity to contempt and nausea in regard to the relation of the body to disgust, unlike hate and anger. Also, some physical violence can accompany anger. Kolnai observes that every kind of disgust is more physiological than anger, though it should not be confused with nausea. At the same time, fear, when related to something physical, becomes more bound to the states of the body because it is ‘‘directed to the body itself and its ‘intactness’ ’’ (32). The final point of view is according to the ‘response-character,’’ which acknowledges the fact that ‘‘the quality of forgetfulness and disgustingness exists objectively as ‘releasers’ ’’ of particular reactions rather than a kind of emotion directly leading to another: ‘‘hate goes directly for what is hostile or evil, for the threat’’ (33). Among these points, the one stressing the immediacy or primordiality of disgust is of essential importance to the present discussion of Jacobean drama. Further the degree of independence and the linkage to the body are also crucial to establishing the role of disgust in combating a relativistic response in the audience. Thus, because disgust has a high degree of immediacy in response to the object, it is not as dependent on the grasping of states of affairs. Even abhorrence requires a certain cognitive grasp, based on some prior state of knowledge, for example, abhorrence of flies as carriers of disease (Kolnai’s example). In the case of Jacobean drama, the audience is exposed to and bombarded by a multitude of images, scenes and characters which, by evoking feelings of disgust prior to intellectualizing and factoring in all the variety of data by the audience, allows the establishment of a certain emotional foundation. This foundation is in place, so to speak, before the audience has much of a chance to employ all the rational devices and logical thinking. For example, in the opening scene of Webster’s T he W hite Devil, before we gather any information about Lodovico and his lost fortune, we hear Gasparo’s comment: Your followers Have swallowed you, like mummia, and being sick With such unnatural and horrid physic, Vomit you up i’ th’ kennel. (I, i,)

Thus, the audience cannot just follow the fate of Lodovico, the revenger, as prescribed by theatrical tradition. Instead, a feeling of disgust planted

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so early in the play, makes the audience experience a sense of reticence and also a delay of viewing the character with any possible sympathy. The point of view concerning the degree of independence is particularly important in a theatrical setting. The potent dramatic effect of disgust is the result of the fact that ‘‘every feeling of disgust, without necessarily including fear, yet alludes to it somehow’’ (32). Hence, Kolnai warns that sometimes, though falsely, disgust is taken as a variant of fear. This association with fear, however, permits an additional emotional effect – that is, it heightens the dramatic sense of uneasiness and distrust on the part of the audience. Finally, the high degree of linkage to the body has a powerful theatrical effect in cases of disgust on stage. The connection with an almost involuntary physical reaction of vomiting creates a ‘‘much more specific and concrete’’ reaction than ‘‘the raging, kicking, and throwing which may arise through anger. Every kind of disgust–even moral disgust – is, even if not more physical, still somehow more physiological than anger’’ (32). In Webster’s T he Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand threatens his sister against her remarrying. He is so angry that his brother, the Cardinal, reprimands him: [...] I can be angry Without this rupture: there is not in nature A thing that makes man so deform’d, so beasty, As doth intemperate anger. (II, v)

Ferdinand does rage, scream, and act violently on stage, but it is the feeling of disgust that actually prevails throughout the scene; its physiological effect makes us understand the character more than through his elaborate eloquence to justify his anger at the thought that the Duchess could remarry or have a lover. It is the disgusting nature of his sexual imagery which exposes the physiological, that is ultimately the incestual nature of his feelings. This ‘‘linkage to the body’’ through disgust is the only kind of bodily connection Ferdinand allows himself, not otherwise daring to break the moral law against incest. This entire scene if filled with the graphic sexual images intended to evoke disgust. It concludes the second act of the play, that is quite early in the play. When Ferdinand’s threat is fulfilled at dark in the last act, it is committed by his henchman, Bosola. We can understand better this inability to murder his sister himself, because for Ferdinand the act of murder would violate the moral taboo concerning incest. In other words, a sexual union would be accom-

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plished in Ferdinand’s mind. He will not need to touch his sister’s body neither in an actual physical act of sexual union nor in murder. Instead, the powerful, intense emotion of disgust lets Ferdinand cope with his sexual longing and commit the murder by proxy. Furthermore, Kolnai, in a section titled ‘‘The Eternal Function of Disgust,’’ comments on the connection between disgust and eroticism: ‘‘the morally putrefied and the disgusting stand in a quite peculiarly close relation with the sphere of eroticism and further also to the habits of speech of the persons in question’’ (86). Ferdinand, then, spends his sexual energy in his aggressively abusive and disgusting speeches. In addition, the very quality of excess can be a source of disgust as well, as observed by Kolnai. Ferdinand’s erotically charged images of disgust emerge from his speech in such a profusion that one gets the impression that he is beyond control of his emotions. Through his abundant collection of sexual images evoking disgust, he, himself, becomes an object of disgust: She hath had most cunning bawds to serve her turn, And more secure conveyances for lust Than towns of garrison for service [...] Rhubarb, oh, for rhubarb, To purge this choler! here’s the cursed day To prompt my memory; and here ’t shall stick Till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge To wipe it out. [...] Apply desperate physic: We must not now use balsamum, but, fire To purge infected blood, such blood as hers. There is a kind of pity in mine eye, – I’ll give it to my handkercher; and now ’tis here, I’ll bequeath this to her bastard. [...] ... to make soft lint for his mother’s wounds, When I have hew’d her to pieces. [...] Methinks I see her laughing Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly Or my imagination will carry me In the shameful act of sin. [...]

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Happily with some strong-thigh’d bargeman Or one o’ the wood-yard that can quoit the sledge Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire That carries coals up to her privy lodgings. [...] I would have their bodies Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp’d. That their curs’d smoke might not ascent to heaven; Or dip the sheets they lie in pitch or sulphur Wrap them in ‘t, and then light them like a match; Or else to-boil their bastard to a cullis, And giv’t his lecherous father to renew The sin of his back. (II, v, passim)

His frantic imagination of corruption, disease and filth is ultimately fused with death. Kolnai comments on the manner in which disgust overwhelms the subject, robs the subject of his will, and leads to death: it involves much more elements of maliciousness, lovelessness, a striving for one’s being, a sneering smirk at the affinity of this disgusting formation from which we find we cannot divert ourselves. Here, it is not a question of unification, of our becoming divinely attached together, but a fusion and confusion without restraint and of which the other side of the coin is decomposition, pulverization, universal indifference. In its full intention it is death and not life that announces itself to us in the phenomenon of disgust. (74)

The earlier extensive quote from T he Duchess of Malfi is also a good illustration of Kolnai’s concern with his comparative study of fear and disgust. Despite ‘‘a turning away from the object, and nausea, either real or intentional,’’ according to Kolnai, ‘‘the tip of the intention penetrates the object, probing and analyzing it ...’’ (39). As a result, ‘‘disgust may have a cognitive note that is lacking in cases of fear; fear may lead to the apprehension of a danger, but disgust has a power to impact directly what may be very clear-sighted partial awareness of its object, which may be quite intuitive in nature’’ (39). In other words, disgust holds some revelatory, often intuitive powers, which in the case of Ferdinand, help the audience understand his actions and motivations and, moreover, help establish a general intuitive reliance on this emotion in approaching the play in general. At this point, let me stress that it is the feeling of disgust which can prompt the audience to figure out the moral tone of Webster’s plays. Webster’s characters draw the audience into a world of confusing moral signals: they may be murderers, but they may also be courageous, and they may awaken to the voice of conscience just before their deaths. Or, they may take social rules of conduct into their own hands and risk

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unleashing dangerous consequences, but often they do it with poise and dignity. Hence, the fascination with the characters such as Brachiano, Vittoria, Flamineo, Bosola, the duchess allows them to escape the quick moral judgment on the part of the audience watching a theatrical performance. The contradictory behavioral traits and actions may or may not be accounted for and explained in a critical effort after a performance, but while being presented in the theatre, Webster’s plays thrive on challenging the moral comfort of the audience because of the immediacy of the theatrical experience. The confusion, though, is not nihilistic or giving in to evil. In the allencompassing atmosphere of corruption permeating the plays, tainting all characters, there is a preserved sense of the ability to identify that corruption, the evils of courtly life, and shortcomings of human nature in general. The outburst of Flamineo in T he W hite Devil at the sight of the doctor hired to prepare poison suggests a certain level of moral sensitivity, essential to understanding his behavior later in the play: ‘‘O thou cursed antipathy to nature! Look, his eye’s bloodshot, like a needle a surgeon stritcheth a wound with. Let me embrace thee toad, and love thee, O thou abominable, loathsome gargarism, that will fetch up lungs, lights, heart, and liver, by scruples!’’ (II, i). Flamineo’s final embrace of death mixed with the contempt for surviving courtiers is prepared in advance, and his last words, though speak of nothingness, have an undertone of wasted potential. We may be fascinated with his defiance and fearless facing of death, but the sense of waste prevails, especially that we remember his words: I have a strange thing in me to th’ which I cannot give a name, without it be Compassion. (V, iv)

Finally, the feeling of disgust as a reaction to Monticelso’s accusation of Vittoria being a whore is also an example of the role disgust can play in evoking the right instinctual moral tone. This speech suggests moral disgust at ‘‘moral vitality or vitality whose unfurling is misplaced’’ (65). Whores, then, according to Monticelso, are: ... Sweetmeats which rot the eater; in man’s nostrils Poisoned perfumes. They are cozening alchemy; Shipwrecks in calmest weather. What are whores! Cold Russian winters, that appear so barren, As if that nature had forgot the spring. [...]

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They are worse, Worse than dead bodies which are begg’d at gallows, And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man Wherein is imperfect. What’s a whore! (III, ii)

His vehement speech not only implies excess and abundant insistence on disturbing vitality which may justly implicate Vittoria as a whore, but it also suggests the soiling of the speaker himself, as is often the case in matters connected to sexuality. Kolnai writes: ‘‘We find completely fused therein the moment of a vitality that surges and smolders in itself the accentuation of the moment of proximity, and the urge towards the transference of this proximity into the sphere of experience of the affected subject’’ (65). It should be stressed that Kolnai was a passionate critic of Freudian psychological interpretation, so his venture into the area of sexuality should be treated as a matter-of-fact approach, as yet another sphere of human behavior without unnecessary overemphasis. Monticelso’s desired effect of implicating Vittoria as a whore backfires, especially when followed by the cool and composed behavior of Vittoria and her response: For your names Of ‘‘whore’’ and ‘‘murderess,’’ they proceed from you, As if a man should spit against the wind, The filth returns in’s face. (III, ii)

Vittoria’s words only accentuate what the audience already feels – a sense of disgust at the excessive vividness of whoredom so that it taints the speaker himself and the entire judicial body of Florence by association. It is the direct association with disgust that gives the audience its clue to consider the characters producing the effect of disgust in their speeches to be soiled by it. By the same token, the duchess acquires an almost saintly stature by refusing all the disquieting taunts of Bosola: Bos.

Duch. Bos.

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms ... Am not I thy duchess? Thou are some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in grey hairs) twenty years sooner than a merry milkmaid’s. (IV, ii)

Similarly, in the proceeding scene, when Ferdinand brings her a dead man’s hand, pretending to be her husband’s, she responds: ‘‘I affectionately

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kiss it.’’ Her refusal to be influenced by death, filth and disgust transforms at last Bosola himself, who admits: ‘‘I would not change my peace of conscience/ For all the wealth of Europe.’’ She refuses to succumb to the terrifying influence of the raving madmen hired by him. Kolnai, when talking of moral putrification, ‘‘which glows with a moldy phosphorescent sheen’’ at ‘‘the innermost core of the person,’’ makes a point to distinguish such a disgusting decay of the soul from the displays of ‘‘certain formations of mental illness’’ (84–85). Kolnai stresses: ‘‘only moral putrefaction is disgusting in bringing to light the, as it were, perverse, hysterical, underlying surrender of the value-elements of the soul to evil, personalitydestroying forces and experiences’’ (85). Hence, the duchess’s calmness when faced with a variety of disgust-evoking speeches or foul experiences underscores her goodness. By the same token, hysterical Ferdinand and his perverse brother, the Cardinal, ‘‘have a pair of hearts ... Rotten, and rotting others,’’ to quote Bosola moments before his death, echoing his opening speech in Act One: He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o’er-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them. Could I be one of their flattering panders, I would hang on their ears like a horseleech, till I were full, and then drop off. (I, i)

To sum up, Webster’s imagery of decay, disease, putrefaction, and deformity is a tool of creating the moral compass. Bosola’s vicious reaction to the physical signs of body corruption, caused by a sinful life, and his subsequent ‘‘meditation’’ on the meaning of human life is full of disgusting elements: Bos. Why, from your scurvy face-physic. To behold thee not painted inclines somewhat near a miracle: these in thy face were deep ruts and foul sloughs the last progress. There was a lady in France that, having had the smallpox, flayed the skin off her face to make it more level; and whereas before she looked like a nutmeg-grater, after she resembled an abortive hedgehog. [...] I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague, than kiss one of you fasting. Here are two of you, whose sin of your youth is the very patrimony of the physician; makes him renew his foot-cloth with the spring, and change his high-priced courtesan with the fall of the leaf. I do wonder you do not loathe yourselves. Observe my meditation now. What thing is in this outward form of man To be belov’d? We account it ominous, If nature do produce a colt, or lamb, A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling

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A man, and fly from ’t as a prodigy: Man stands amaz’d to see his deformity In any other creature but himself. But in our own flesh though we bear diseases Which have their true names only ta’en from beasts, – As the most ulcerous wolf and swinish measle, – Though we are eaten up of lice and worms, And though continually we bear about us A rotten and dead body, we delight To hide it in rich tissue: all our fear, Nay, all our terror, is, lest our physician Should put us in the ground to be made sweet. – (II, i)

Thus, in passages like these, the audience hears some of the clearly formulated rules of moral conduct, though the characters, themselves, defy them and still behave as though the mantle of superiority was theirs. Nonetheless, the audience is able to see that though the rules are broken brazenly, there are no rewards for such acts and no incentives to follow the perpetrators. The instinctual feeling of disgust helps ultimately to orient the moral terrain of Webster’s play. It is almost in Kolnai-like way that Rupert Brooke describes the world of Webster: Life there seems to flow into its forms and shapes with an irregular, abnormal, and horrible volume. This is ultimately the most sickly, distressing feature of Webster’s characters, their foul and indestructible vitality. It fills one with the repulsion one feels at the unending soulless energy that heaves and pulses through the lowest forms of life. They kill, love, torture one another blindly and without ceasing. A play of Webster’s is full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots. (Qtd. in Harrison x)

The quality of disgust captured by Brooke has ultimately a greater role than the atmosphere of darkness and gloom. At the very instinctual core of disgust, there is a sense of recoiling, an ‘‘irrational resolve’’ which ‘‘stands ... in irregular service of the morally good,’’ to quote Kolnai (89). Though ‘‘not a primary experience of evil,’’ it nonetheless ‘‘points toward evil.’’ John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge are not built around his characters. Instead, these plays forego psychological intricacy and probability. The tragic vision of Webster is replaced with the ever unpredictable pattern of juxtaposing the comic and the tragic. On another occasion, in my article titled ‘‘Exploring Aesthetic Discomfort in the Experience of the Comic and the Tragic: John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge,’’ I explored the problem of the disunity

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of tone. I have proposed that the ever unpredictable mixing of the comic and tragic is Marston’s dramatic means to focus on intensely satirical content without running into trouble with the psychological demands for a realistically plausible cause-and-effect development of plot and characters. His satirical exploration of ideas such as stoicism or revenge creates a theatrical challenge of how to preserve a satirical viewpoint of an outsider without the danger of losing the audience’s interest. in other words, the thematic unity of the playwright’s ideological agenda is not enough to create dramatic cohesion in plays lacking psychologically developed characters, realistic settings, and exhibiting a total disregard for the unity of tone. No wonder that some critics have found the plays to be unsuccessful dramatic experimentations. I have proposed, however, that the aesthetic discomfort in the experiences of the comic and the tragic allows the plays their dramatic unity. It is the sustained sense of uneasiness, shock, and unpreparedness which gives Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge their theatrical foundation. As a result, Marston, the satirist, can ‘‘unsettle the audience morally, intellectually, and aesthetically [...] ‘‘The audience can never be at ease with the play, never rest, never for a moment adjust to any element of the play [...]’’ (Smith 130). Let me now specify an additional source of discomfort for the audience, that is, disgust arousing from a variety of stimuli: visual – mutilated corpses in full view, murderers covered in fresh blood, a child’s body cooked and served as a meal; auditory – sentimental music juxtaposed with tragic scenes, ritualistic sound-effects in speeches in conjunction with violence; gustatory – imagery of disgust evoking food. The Renaissance audience was deeply involved in the on-going discussion of revenge and its moral consequences. The later the play, the more elaborate the stage display of violence and less clear the rights to end the outcomes of revenge. Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge does not permit any level of psychological or intellectual accommodation and challenges any easy, though morally, susceptible solutions. Again, like the case of Webster’s plays, disgust evokes an instinctual response which not only does not license any emotional accommodation, but it prepares the audience for moral disgust. The aesthetic discomfort of Marston’s plays, their acute anti-sentimentality, their self-conscious theatricality, not allowing emotional pretense – all these factors make the audience think rather than feel, but its thinking is guided, orchestrated by those theatrical moments which do not accommodate self-deception in the intellectual interpretation. Thus, according to Kolnai:

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moral disgust [...] should not be confused with moral condemnation in general – let alone, with indignation at evil deeds – nor with the condemnatory response to sexual immorality in particular, nor ever with moral contempt. ... What is eminently disgusting in a moral context, then? I would tentatively answer: the shirokava natura of the Russians (prior to Bolshevism, at any rate); inconsistency and irresponsibility; what the French call inconscience, overspontaneity, softness, and sentimentalism; above all, what the Germans call Verlogenheit; that is a character organically wedded to, a mental life diffusely steeped in, lying dissembling, illusion, and self deception. (103)

In other words, disgust in Marston’s plays has a crucial function in evoking aesthetic discomfort but also in essential moral grounding of the plays. The feeling of disgust is enhanced by the fact that Marston’s plays were written for boy actors, the Children of Paul’s, and later for the rival boy company at the Blackfriars. Thus, the opening scene of Antonio’s Revenge has a young boy playing Piero, the remorseful and benevolent father of the preceding play, Antonia and Mellida. But, the boy actor is now covered in blood, leaving two murders behind and planning to dishonor his daughter, Mellida. He is giddy with joy of his bloody accomplishment: Canst thou not honey me with fluent speech And even adore my topless villainy? Will I not blast my own blood for revenge? [...] Oh, let me swoon for joy! By heaven, I think I ha’ said my prayers within this month at least, I am so boundless happy. Doth she come? Look I not now like an inamorate? Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother, ha! (I, i)

Thus, the tragic displays the comic of Antonia and Mellida, but the tragic is imbued with the overtones of grotesque and exaggeration. The reversal, then, is done: not on the principle of a simple reversal because a reversal would mean that the underlying predictability can provide some rationale behind these exchanges. In other words, our ability to guess the outcome of these comic/tragic exchanges would allow us to justify them, to rationalize, to cope with their moral implications. But it is not so in Marston’s plays – they do not allow for the audience’s emotions to be sorted out, attached to moral standards, even if only by via negative. (Smith 132)

That does not mean, however, that the moral impact is relativistic. On the contrary, the instinctual reaction of the audience to disgust helps the moral awareness despite aesthetic and psychological confusion.

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For example, Pandulpho prepares the audience so to speak, to experience the disgust of taste: ... And I do find the citizens grown sick With swallowing the bloody crudities Of black Piero’s acts; they fain would cast And vomit him from off their government. (V, ii)

Earlier in this same scene Balurdo speaks of hunger: ‘‘what a pickle art thou in! O hunger, how thou domineerest in my guts! O for a fat leg of ewe mutton in stewed broth, or drunken song to feed on. I could belch rarely, for I am all wind’’ (V, ii). But it is in the very next scene that the revengers are serving the dish of his own son to Piero, after first having his tongue pulled out: Pandulpho. Antonio.

Out with his tongue! I hav’t, Pandulpho; the veins panting Trickling fresh gore about my fist. Bind fast! So, so. Ghost of Andrugio. Blest be thy hand. I taste the joys of heaven. [...] Antonio.

(indicates the banquet) Fall ti, goo duke. O these are worthless cates; You have no stomach to them. Look, look here; Here lies a dish to feast thy father’s gorge. Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st (He uncovers the dish containing Julio’s limbs.) (V, ii)

The revengers parade, taunting Piero with abuses, while he is cradling his son’s body. Their ritualistic act of stabbing Piero and chanting the reason for revenge is accompanied on the part of the audience with a shudder of disgust. All the supposedly right reasons for their revenge do not culminate in a sense of emotional release but moral disgust: Pandulpho: Antonio: Pandulpho:

Was he thy flesh, thy son, thy dearest son? So was Andrugio my dearest father. So was Feliche my dearest son.

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ENTER Maria Maria: Antonio: Pandulpho: Maria: Antonio:

Pandulpho:

Antonio: Alberto: Maria: Balurdo:

So was Andrugio my dearest husband. My father found no pity in thy blood. Remorse was banish’d when thou slew’st my son. When thou empoisen’st my loving lord, Exil’d was piety. Now, therefore, pity, piety, remorse, Be aliens to our thoughts; grim fire-ey’d rage Possess us wholly. (Piero again seems to condole his son) Thy son? True; and which is my most joy, I hope no bastard, but thy very blood, Thy true-begotten, most legitimate And loved issue. There’s the comfort on’t. Scum of the mud of hell! Slime of all filth! Thou most detested toad! Thou most retort and obtuse rascal! (V, ii)

The tongueless father is ‘‘unable to utter a word of sorrow, facing the most articulate torturers. Suddenly, Piero, the suffering father experiencing a genuine tragedy but denied ‘‘pity, piety, remorse’’ becomes an incongruous counterpart not only to the blood-thirsty revengers but also to his own image as a bloody tyrant intoxicated with death from earlier scenes’’ (Smith 134). But, again, just in case the audience would switch its allegiance too easily to the other side, in the midst of mounting pathos, Maria’s words, ‘‘Thou most detested toad!’’ and Bolundro’s ‘‘Thou most retort and obtuse rascal,’’ spoil the effect. This apparent incongruity, nevertheless, does not lead to the moral apathy of the audience. Instead, it engages it into a tense discussion of stoicism and revenge as well as sentimental views of love with a sense of distrust in any easy solutions and accommodations. A visceral reaction of disgust prompts a conclusion that a variety of possible ethical and aesthetic reactions in the audience is not a reason to cave in to moral relativism To quote Kolnai: ‘‘It is in disgust that intention and condition form the most perfect, interpenetrating and reposeful harmony: we float in a nausea intimately adapted to the object we are intentionally – reluctantly and somehow responsively – immersed in’’ (103). The audience reacts to the violence of Antonio’s Revenge with disgust for both sides – the murderers and the revengers. The audience is able to overcome even the hatred of Piero in the presence of the cooked body of his son. To quote Kolnai again:

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Thus while hate involves a completely spontaneous picking out or choosing of the object, disgust normally arises completely unequivocally as the only possible direct reaction to the object in question. Here it is the object’s behavior that is provocative: it forces itself upon us with greater intensity than an object of hatred (and this is true even though hate directed toward wholly distant objects is rare). Indeed it almost seems as if the object of disgust would itself somehow reach out to the affected subject. (41)

In other words, the feeling of disgust not only circumvents the intellectual, rational, and logical means of deciphering the plays by the audience, but it also succeeds to establish itself as a guiding tool in reaching the audience more directly and powerfully than any other emotion portrayed on stage. Similarly, other Jacobean playwrights, for example, Ford and Middleton, rely on this power of disgust to guide their audiences through the treacherous territories of such plays as T is Pity, She’s a W hore or T he Revenger’s T ragedy. Their characters fail to convert the audience to their elaborate intellectual or emotional appeals because they ultimately betray themselves in the scenes evoking disgust. Bridgewater State College BIBLIOGRAPHY Harrison, G. B., ed. John Webster and John Ford: Selected Plays. London: Dent, 1984. Jackson, Macdonald P. and Michael Neill, eds. T he Selected Plays of John Marston. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. Kolnai, Aurel. On Disgust. Ed. Bany Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. Smith, Jadwiga. ‘‘Exploring Aesthetic Discomfort in the Experience of the Comic and the Tragic: John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge.’’ Analecta Husserliana, ed. A-T Tymieniecka, Vol. LVI, pp. 127–36.

OSVALDO ROSSI

LIGHT/SHADOW L ines for an Aesthetic Reflection

THE QUESTION OF LIGHT

At the beginning of the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes that ‘‘all men, by nature ( physei) lean towards knowledge (eidenai)’’. The fundamental terms of this statement are: physis, nature, eidenai, knowledge, which are correlated. Aristotle’s statement can be thus re-proposed: ‘‘knowledge is man’s nature or essence’’. However what did knowledge mean for an Ancient Greek? The Greek word eidenai is a perfect infinitive of the root id- (lat. vid) that literally means ‘‘to have seen’’: the sense of eidenai could be expressed as ‘‘knowledge after having seen’’. In another passage of the same book Aristotle states that all men ‘‘gain knowledge and art through experience (empeiria)’’. According to Aristotle experience derives from memory (mneme). Let us consider the basic meaning of the terms ‘‘memory’’ and ‘‘experience’’. Mneme or Mnemosine, according to Hesiod’s theogony, is the daughter of Uranus and Gea and she is the mother of the nine Muses, that is of all human knowledge. In ancient archaic thought Mneme is polemically connected with L ethe, oblivion, daughter of Eris, strife, the sister of death and sleep. Therefore, the meaning of ‘‘memory’’ is that of ‘‘non-oblivion’’, which in Greek forms the meaning of the word ‘‘truth’’, a-letheia. Consequently, memory is what comes to mind, what the mind remembers, that is seen again. It is this that is the ancient significance of ‘‘anamnesi’’, a coming to the surface, a re-emerging, a seeing of something once more. The word ‘‘experience’’ (empeiria), is characterized by two lexemes, en (in) and peira (from the root per, from which derives peras, limit). So experience means ‘‘to be within the limit’’ or ‘‘a being that delimits itself ’’, therefore it defines itself. Now because the definition is the basic sense of knowledge, consequently to define means ‘‘to see something’’, and therefore ‘‘something delimited’’. We have therefore acquired the basic terms that through Aristotle have marked the gnoseological supremacy of ‘‘seeing’’ (to oran), of sight over the other senses in the western world. Sight, according to Aristotle, is the 275 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 275–293. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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foundation of knowledge, of memory, of experience and of truth. It also means that knowledge, memory, experience and truth, are the fundamental ways in which sight expresses itself. Sight is, as Plato writes in the sixth book of Republic, closely connected with the enigma of light. Sight, he observes, in order to work, needs a further and fundamental element that allows it to exist and that provokes it: light. Plato reaffirms the cognitive supremacy of sight over light’s original ontological foundation: it legitimates and justifies the functioning of the eye, therefore its exact correspondence with reality. Sight therefore is always that which light makes emerge or brings to light; it is always an attestation, it is a gift of light. With Aristotle we can say that light is what puts into effect the eye’s potentiality of seeing. Plato, at the beginning of this text, combines the ‘‘sight’’ both of physical things as well as idealistic metaphysical ones, because sight has a basic ambiguity, that the philosopher has the task of solving: to see as oran, that is the physical eye’s sight which observes physical things, and to see as idein, to know, or the seeing of the intelligible eye (nous) that contemplates intelligible realities, that are ‘‘ideas’’. The passage from one plane to another takes place by means of illumination that from solar becomes ideal. Light is a sort of a priori of every perception and knowledge. Consequently, we don’t see light, we don’t know it, but this is what lets us see and know. Its enigmatic and paradoxical character derives from this as is confirmed in chapter XIX of the VI book of the Republic. Plato tries to preserve, through the myth, the intuitive, poetical, allusive power of solar and ideal light; the gratuitous ineffability, excess of being, are the essential prerogatives of their ontognoseological supremacy. Both Plato and Aristotle reassert that knowledge and being are the lexicon and the syntax of light and beauty, which is for Plato the splendour of the idea, its happening in the physical universe, the ideal bridge between sensibility and intellect. The well known considerations developed in both Symposium and Phaedrus are a just tribute paid to such an important subject. Greek philosophy has determined the authentic enigma of being and knowledge in light, in the sense that light is on the one hand the cause and condition of thinking and of the realization of being, of truth and of knowledge; on the other hand it is otherness as regards to being, to truth and to knowledge. In this evident aporia and ambiguity reside the strength and the challenge that the Greek ontology of light left behind for the subsequent medieval philosophy.

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Plato, regarding the oriental model (Egyptian and Iranian), initially breaks away from the theogonic vision of Hesiod, which begins with the notion of chaos, taken, with a differentiation, from the Latin vision, as for example Ovid at the beginning of book I of Metamorphosis (v. 3–23). According to Ovid, chaos represented the condition of the world before the order and separation of its constitutive elements and of the three divinities: Titan – who denotes the sun (because he is the son of Hyperion the Titan) – Phoebe (Diana’s name) – who denotes the moon – Amphitrite (sea nymph) – who denotes the sea. Ovid accepts the Greek naturalists’ lesson, which had explained Hesiod’s chaos as ‘‘disorder’’ ‘‘haphazard matter’’, having it derive from the verb cheo, ‘‘to pour in a haphazard way’’; where the term’s original meaning in Hesiod led to the verb chasko, ‘‘to open’’, ‘‘to make space’’, ‘‘to open wide’’. While in Hesiod, the word indicated reality ‘‘the very first’’, original, cause and condition of every other reality, as it was that what made emerge, it gave space to something else, in Ovid, instead, it was a sort of formless, obscure, unintelligible ‘‘substratum’’ that had to be shaped from a formal principle; Titan, the Sun. Ante mare et terras et, quod tegit omnia, caelum unus erat toto naturac vultus in orbe, quem dixere Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum. Nullus adhuc mundo praebebat lumina Titan, nec nova crescendo reparabat cornua Phoebe, nec circumfuso pendebat in ae¨re tellus ponderibus librata suis, nec bracchia longo margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite, utque erat et tellus illic et pontus et ae¨r, sic erat instabilis tellus, innabilis unda, lucis egens ae¨r: nulli sua forma manebat, obstabatque aliis aliud, quia corpore in uno frigida pugnabant calidis, umentia siccis, mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus. Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit; nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas et liquidum spisso secrevit ab ae¨re caelum; quae postquam evolvit caecoque exemit acervo, dissociata locis concordi pace ligavit.

In Plato the light theme is full of meanings that are absent in both Ovid as well as Hesiod. In an early moment, in the Republic, Plato intends

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light as a personification of good, of the divine ‘‘par excellence’’, reaffirming with this its ontological supremacy. Light, according to him, is the authentic good that is ‘‘beyond being, beyond ideas’’ like its determinations, in the sense that it is the cause and condition of everything that exists, in the physical and metaphysical field. Light, illuminating, defines being, but at the same time is unconditioned, it is not perceptible. (Rep.VI, XIX, b-c). However in the last phase of his thought – strongly influenced by Pythagoreanism, consider for example, the cosmologic dialogue Filebo – Plato, more and more influenced by the Pythagorean notions of measure, order and proportion, partly retrieves Hesiod’s vision, of a chaos or space that contains in itself light and darkness, day and night; but he transforms it into the idea that light is the authentic space of things in that it brings them into being and manifests them. Light, by the dimension placed in being from space – chaos, becomes the space that manifests and places everything into being. This is its supremacy that is once more confirmed. Now, the totality of the things that exist in space is, according to the Pythagorean tradition, kosmos, order, measurement, because light, placing things into being, discriminates them, defines them, according to a rigorous original proportion. In the Platonic idea of light, the attempt is evident to reconcile the Pythagorean notion – mathematics of proportion, order, therefore as a cause and condition of an orderly universe, with the aesthetic beauty, as luminescence, irradiation, goodness. This reconciliation happens when Plato recognizes that proportion is an integral part of light’s beauty; in fact, the beauty of light is defined on the idea of proportion, which thus became the authentic way to express its luminescent beauty. In particular, the definition of light, as a luminescent proportion of good, gave Plato an opportunity to explain its element of ‘‘truth’’: as that which appears (a-letheia) and that light defines. Here we find once again, although starting from different assumptions, a convergence of Plato with Aristotle regarding the supremacy of light as an essence of being, ‘‘truth’’, knowledge and of idealistic and physical sight as an essential condition of knowledge, being and ‘‘truth’’. Let’s move on to the Christian thought. We see that God in the Genesis created light – fiat lux – on the first day, because ‘‘light was so good’’ and gave the opportunity to distinguish day from night. In the Genesis there is therefore a strong bond between light and good, therefore God who is good above all others.

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This consideration helps us to understand why the first Christian thought found its greatest point of reference in Plato who had cited the goodness of light. Now it is necessary to adapt Plato and his conception of light to the Creation of the Old Testament. Saint Augustine’s contribution here has been decisive. His comments regarding ‘‘Genesis’’ inaugurated an important tradition of Christian reflection. Regarding this tradition I would like to recall the strong relationship that Augustine underlines between the divine word and light. It is at the moment of light’s creation that God spoke. What is the importance of this biblical recognition? Saint Augustine underlines light’s supremacy over darkness and the word’s supremacy over silence; in that darkness is not something real, ‘‘but darkness is the name given to the absence of light’’.1 ‘‘In the same way silence is not something real, but silence is the name given to the absence of noise (sonus)’’.2 Light and the word affirm themselves therefore in contrast to darkness and silence, they are defined only by referring to the supremacy of verbum and lux. Hans Georg Gadamer, in T ruth and Method, referring to Augustine’s comment on the Genesis observed: ‘‘this is already clear from Augustine’s interpretation of the story of creation. Augustine observes that in this text, light was created before the differentiation between things and before the creation of the bright celestial bodies. However he particularly stresses the fact that the initial divine creation of the sky and of the earth still happened without God’s word. Only during the creation of light does God begin to speak. ... Only through light does the formless matter, deriving from the initial creation of the sky and the earth, become susceptible to be shaped into many forms.’’3 In the De Genesis contra manichaeos (I, 8, 13) Saint Augustine reaffirms, following the Platonic tracks, the strong relationship between light and good (‘‘God saw that light was so good ’’), refusing the objections of the Manicheans. Et dixit Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Hoc non solent reprehendere Manichaei, sed illud quod sequitur: Et vidit Deus lucem quia bona est. Dicunt enim: Ergo non noverat Deus lucem, aut non noverat bonum. Miseri bomines, quibus displicet, quod Deo placuerunt opera sua, cum videant etiam hominem artificem, verbi gratia, lignarium fabrum, quamvis in comparatione sapientiae et potentiae Dei pene nullus sit, tamen tam diu lignum caedere atque tractare dolando, asciando, planando, vel tornando atquae poliendo quousque ad artis regulas perducatur, quantum potest, et placeat artifici suo. Mumquid ergo quia placet ei quod fecit, ideo non noverat bonum? Prorsus noverat intus in animo, ubi ars ipsa pulchrior est, quam illa quae arte fabricantur. Sed quod videt artifex intus in arte, hoc foris probat in opere, et hoc est perfectum quod artifici suo placet: V idit ergo Deus lucem quia

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bona est, quibus verbis non ostenditur eluxisse Deo insolitum bonum, sed placuisse perfectum.

Light therefore, is the reflection of the divine work, the phenomenal manifestation of the creative act. Like an authentic craftsman, God, creating, expressed in and with light the positiveness of his work and consequently His goodness. In this prospective, darkness and silence are synonymous with a lack of light and sound, a nothingness in itself, the ex nihilo of the creation; only light exists, has a positiveness and is a discriminant of day and night, of being and nothingness. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘‘Let there be light’’, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘‘day’’ and the darkness he called ‘‘night’’. And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day. (Gen., I, 1–5)

Here the Platonic meaning of light as ‘‘definition’’ is evident. Light is definition of being; the word is the definition of being: therefore God’s word is the light of being. Verbum and lux belong together, in that they discriminate, they define things. Verbum is the light of things; lux is the word of things, their speaking. Is this position completely identical to the Platonic one? It doesn’t appear to be, because, while, according to Plato, light, being good, is the cause of being and of its knowledge or manifestation: in the bible, light isn’t the cause of being, but it is the cause of its visibility and knowledge, that is of its speaking. In this sphere God is the Being who by means of light confers reality to things. Light, being the divine referent, is however, always created, therefore it is a thing among things, even though in reality it has a primacy. It is physical light; it is the Platonic sun. We could say that light highlights the beauty of creation, as order and proportion; however, differing from the Platonic model, the task of the luminescent beauty is to refer back to its creator, who is invisible, beyond the light. The task of Christian metaphysics according to Genesis is that of recognizing being and its definition, as light and word, to go back to the creative act. Its motto could be: ‘‘by means of light, beyond light’’. To go beyond doesn’t mean falling into darkness, but it means aiming at another way of being, at the divine way, that is distinguished by the physical light and by the darkness of the created world. How do we explain the lack of the ontological supremacy of light, which we find instead, in Plato? Let’s try to find an answer. Having

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identified light with the word, and so with definition, and trying to defend the absolute difference of the Creator, it was necessary to place Him beyond any definition or discrimination, therefore both of the word as well as the light. If we still wanted to try to create a contact, through light, between God creator and creatures, it would no longer be enough to refer to such a model; we would need to place a different kind of illumination, no longer an exterior, physical one, that discriminates and defines, but an interior, spiritual one, that illuminates without defining and discriminating, a mute ideal light, that would be visible when each person listens to himself from within. This was the Augustinian interiority in which God manifested himself as conscience, as something more intimate than the I myself (‘‘intimor intimo meo’’). It is here then that in creationism the Platonic unity between beauty and measure is broken. Physical and ideal light become distinct realities: the first bound to the definition and comprehension of phenomenon, will develop as an optional science, especially in the English school of Oxford, with Roberto Grossatesta as one of its most important protagonists; the second one, in the Augustinian interpretation, will form the reference point for the metaphysics and theology of transcendence, that will develop in an Augustinian and Franciscan sphere. AN APPROACH TO SHADOW

The shadow theme has always been recognized, at least as regards to the practical sense of the measurement of time and the hour. However it is not on these grounds that we must recognize the birth of the shadow, but in the archaic myth. I intend to explain this using three parallel references: the Egyptian cosmology, Hesiod and the biblical story of the creation. With the Egyptian cosmology we deal with the original relationship Chaos-Sun. ‘‘In the beginning there was Chaos, symbolized by the god Nun. The universe, therefore, had not been created, it had always existed in the form of an amorphous and inert mass. At that time there was no sky, no earth, nor human beings: the gods had not yet been born: death did not exist. In this chaos Atum was predominant, the spirit of the world. He bore within himself the generating force of beings and things. Acquiring self-awareness, he called himself exclaiming: ‘Come to me’ and, dividing himself gave rise to the god Ra personified by the sun. Atum and Ra, the spirit of the world and his conscience, are therefore the two

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aspects of a single being, an indivisible world that bears within itself the generating force of its own substance’’.4 Here there is a sort of ontological realism, in which Atum and Ra, in their complementarity seem to anticipate the identity of thought and being of the early Greek philosophy. In the naturalistic vision of the world they gave rise to the primordial elements which then found their divine personification. Another Egyptian cosmology elaborated at Ermopoli, in the predynastic period, deals with primordial Chaos referring to chief Thot. Chaos here is ‘‘made of liquid matter, in which we find the sources of life in an undeveloped state. In the darkness in which the universe is immersed, a slow work is carried out that leads to the rise of the ‘primordial tumulus’ from the water. The elements start to separate from one another. On the base of this tumulus life appears in an egg form, from which abruptly the sun will rise, the creative and regulating force of the world.’’5 Also here the Sun, even though it bursts forth from the Chaos through matter, is, in progressive evolution, the generating and animating force of reality. Now the two cosmologies unite once more in common solar worship. In both stories the rising of the sun leads to the progressive elimination of ‘‘chaos’’. If this is true, we can perceive how the mythic meaning of ‘‘chaos’’ consists in justifying the appearance of the sun in its continuous generative cycle. The seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead in describing the generating action carried out by the god Ra, affirms: ‘‘when he opened both eyes and saw through them, it was the light for all the world’’. Thus the god is the light of the world originating from Chaos after the darkness. It also says: ‘‘man emerged from the eye of the creator like a tear, the gods emerged from his mouth’’. Here, emerging from the eye of the creator means to conceive and therefore to create. The second mythical narration is Hesiod’s T heogony where the theme crops up once again of the Chaos that had generated the Earth and the Underground, from which the ‘‘dark night’’ rose and from this the heavens and the day. The Earth, then generated the sky and Uranus ‘‘sprinkled it with stars’’ that covered it (T heog. v. 116–120; and v. 123–128). The primordial Abyss, Chaos, contained everything, the earth and the sky. It was neither obscurity, nor light, but it was what made them exist, through the embracing of Earth and sky. Inside Chaos, the land, ‘‘of the wide breast’’ and ‘‘the obscure underground’’, were realities that were indistinct and shady but also prolific as they gave birth to the heavens and the day. Here, unlike the Egyptian vision, Chaos is night, obscurity,

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mythically exemplified in the underworld, as the reign of the Titans, of those born from the earth. The distinction between light and darkness, between night and day then became the opportunity to measure the becoming, the time, ‘‘appearance’’, linked to their following one another. It is not a random case that time was a chthonian power, generated by the same celestial embrace of the earth. Only chaos was original, not the time, chronos, that later succeeded the dominion of Uranus, subjugating him to be gradually deposed by Zeus, who then knew how to demonstrate his divine supremacy. The limen between light and darkness, day and night, was individualized by Hesiod when Atlas – the personification of Hercules – held the world, in front of the underworld and the ‘‘dark night’’, in the western place, of the sunset. There was therefore a circumnavigation of the sun, where light and darkness alternated for the entire length of the days. Atlas indicated the west, the place where the day and the night alternated and separated; he conserved the secret of a passage, that only a giant could have known about. Who in fact could have seen the exact point of their separation? In the Greek myth we see the supremacy of the night, that is also the supremacy of a dramatic, devouring time, which finds its redemption in the divinity of Zeus, the personification of light that defeats darkness. Zeus, the father of the gods, exactly translated means, as Karenyi says, ‘‘the shining (Aufleuchten): the shining of the daylight, a shining in the sky. In this way he was a celestial god. He was the most important thing that could happen in the sky’’.6 Hesiod also talks about the fight between Zeus and the Titans that ‘‘under obscure darkness ... are hidden ... in a dark region, at the extremes of the prodigious Earth’’,7 that is to say in the Underground. The victory of Zeus over the Titans is the victory of light over the predominance of darkness, with the will to dethrone the luminous Olympic god par excellence. Towards the end of the T heogony this supremacy is finally sanctioned in such a way that Zeus and the gods are horrified by the Chasm or Abyss from which everything, including they, themselves originated: ‘‘Painful and dark places that even the gods hate,/ huge chasm’’ (v. 739–740). The Olympic character of the god is paradoxally expressed in the attempt to leave the original Chaos, in the bright presence of an orderly universe, and renew himself. The third mythic narration is the Jewish one of the Genesis that talks about the creation of the sky and the Earth: ‘‘In the beginning God

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created the heavens and the earth’’ and ‘‘the darkness was over the surface of the deep’’, the other name indicating Chaos, distinct from the Earth ‘‘formless and empty’’. In the biblical narration, the creation of light is specific and precedes the birth of the stars, and it is God that separates the day and the night, giving rise to time. Both in this myth as well as in the Egyptian one, Chaos is original. But while in the Egyptian narration it is a metaphor of the sun rising from the world, in Hesiod, on the other hand, it has an ontological dimension: it is the opening, the Abyss, the space that allows the existence and the beginning of things, their organising themselves as Kosmos. In this way space has a transcendent dimension regarding things; it is their apeiron. In the biblical perspective, however, Chaos is the sterile and formless dimension, laid down by God, the Creator. It is seen as ‘‘confusion’’, matter ‘‘spilt’’ (from the Greek verb Cheo) in the space whose equivalent is darkness. Matter, here in the Aristotelian sense is a ‘‘substratum’’, a raw material which later will undergo the divine action. Light will be the discriminating moment that gives fertility and form to this substratum. While in the Egyptian and the biblical mystic theme there is a supremacy of light that has a fertile and formal dimension, in the Greek one the perspective is more articulated. Shadow has a fertile character, while light has a formal character, it defines reality. The two moments define each other and they belong to one another; an emblematic case is the relationship that Homer detects regarding the sun, that renders things visible and fertile but at the same time takes away days, the light, from the mortals, from which Hades derives, that renders things invisible and obscure. Also in the Greek mystery religiosity, night and shadow have a fundamental character. Euripides, in the Bacchantes, recognises that in the Dionysian worship, darkness is something sacred; in fact, the cult needs darkness and illustrates the women’s scene that, having left the city, influenced by the impetus of the mysteries, they wander the mountains by night. Dionysus, the god of the obscure deep, is the corresponding earthly aspect of the luminous Apollo. Both different aspects of a single psychagogic (lords of the souls), artistic (of music and poetry), and incubatory (prophecy and divination) reality. This chthonian, vital circularity of the archaic Greek thought was later lost with the birth of philosophy and with the consequent supremacy of a logos that has tried to transform oppositions, as contradictions, from enigmas to logical problems. This has granted light, as a principle of non-

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contradiction, an ontological supremacy. Plato is an exemplary case. The will of contraposition between light and darkness does not really have an early-Mediterranean origin, but a philosophical and then Jewish and Christian one, as with moral and cognitive discrimination between good and bad, true and false and grace and sin. An example, in this sense, is the Platonic myth of the cavern that contributes to imposing on Western culture the supremacy of light as a measure and beauty of being. In the VII book of the Republic Plato introduces the famous tale of the cavern. There are some men inside it that have been chained by their necks and their legs to the far wall of the cavern since they were children, incapable of moving and seeing its wide entrance facing the exterior. High and far behind them shines the light of a fire, while on the slightly risen road outside, men pass with all types of objects. The slaves cannot see these men or the objects, but with difficulty they can only make out the shadows projected on the far wall of the cavern by the light of the fire burning outside. So they finally end up mistaking the shadows for reality. However, a case like the following could also occur: one of the men frees himself, is suddenly forced to stand up, turn around, walk and lift his gaze towards the light; on doing this, pain and the glare make him unable to see the objects of whose shadows he had previously seen. How do you think he would respond if you told him that before he had seen meaningless emptiness, but that now, being closer to what exists and having turned to face the objects, he could see better? And if, on showing him each one of the objects that pass, you asked him and forced him to answer what is it? Don’t you think that he would remain doubtful and that he would judge the things he had seen before as being truer than those that he was being shown now? (515 c-d). The same would happen if the slave, instead of seeing physical objects, turns to the same bright source, the fire, procuring also serious damage to his eyes. He would then immediately turn his gaze towards darker objects. What does this tell us? For a man, who is like a ‘‘slave’’, truth is presented as a shadow, like a semblance of something. It is not that the shadow is the truth, but reality as such is not easy to accept or bear; its dull reflection is better. This is even more so regarding the sight of light. The vision of light and true reality is beyond man’s reach: he can only grasp the distant and false vision of the shadow. Shadows produce degraded second-rate images, which only light allows. ‘‘Meaningless vacu-

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ity’’ as Plato defines them compared to real objects that as such have ‘‘more being’’ and are therefore truer. If the slave wants to see reality ‘‘in the light of the sun’’ or even the same sun, he must undergo a long training, he must get used once more to tolerating his vision. The training takes place by degrees: at first he will observe shadows, then images of men and things, perhaps reflections on the water and finally, true objects. ‘‘From these then, turning his gaze towards the light of the stars and the moon, he will be able to contemplate celestial bodies at night and the sky itself, easier than in the day and the sun and the sunlight’’.8 Only at the end will he be able to see and contemplate what is truly the sun, not its images on the water or on high surfaces, but the sun itself; after which, speaking of the sun, he would already be able to conclude that it is the sun that produces the seasons and the years and that governs all the things in the visible world, and is the cause, in this way of everything that he and his companions had seen ... and remembering his first dwelling and the knowledge he had of them and of his fellow prisoners, don’t you think that he would be happy about the change and feel pity for them? (516 b-c). The answer is certainly positive. However Plato is occupied with other questions. What would happen if the slave, once having finished the training, should have to go back once again to being with his companions in the cavern? Wouldn’t his eyes be ‘‘full of darkness’’? He would have to get used to it once more, for quite a long period and wouldn’t this make his companions laugh? It would have been better not to have tried at all. However let us skip these questions and ask ourselves instead: in what way did Plato break with the archaic tradition of the myth that correlated shadow and light? According to him, supremacy lies with the light and not with the shadow, as light is the operative expression of good. So man has to free himself from darkness to become the master of light. He doesn’t have to be satisfied with appearances that are shadows, therefore with the doxa, but he has to aim at the true light and good. Remaining in the shadow means to remain in the deprivation of being, neglecting his own commitment to morality and truth. The citizen’s education had to safeguard against a similar confusion and blindness. Here we can understand that Plato’s main preoccupations were of an ethical and political nature. The same Platonic idea of art remained conditioned. In fact the artist or the poet was an actor, a ‘‘hypocrite’’, a sophist, that against the quest for knowledge practised the art of appearance. The same notion of mimesis

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was seen by him as reproductive fiction, very far from true reality. The painter himself, according to Plato, painted in an ‘‘apparent’’, vague manner, because he didn’t possess the same knowledge of the subject that the technites, the artisan or the philosopher were able to possess. Even the colour that he used was nothing more than a shadow of things, that confirmed their appearance of being, in other words, deceptive. The artist represented reality in its phenomenal appearance, not in its true being. All in all, he concealed it, in favour of the untruth. Aristotle, in his way, also recognized this, although he attributed a different status to art. The artist had to aim at the probable and come close to the truth, in spite of the difficulties that all this implied. Here is the supremacy of poiesis, of creativity over pure imitation. Art produces the truth, it doesn’t reflect it as the theoretical sciences do; for example, a portrait was paradoxically much more beautiful than it was objective. The kingdom of art was one of probable appearance, not one of scientific necessity.9 ANOTHER PATH

At this point it is perhaps opportune to expose the inquiry to a further interpretative verification: after having focused on aspects relevant to the theme of light and shadow, we must now examine another path. We have seen, in fact, that both with the Egyptian myth as well as the Jewish-Christian one, supremacy always lies with light, in consequence of which the notions of truth and being have been distinguished. Along these lines this supremacy has been confirmed and radicalised by western philosophy and the same history of art has been dominated by the predominance of light. Is it now possible to follow a different course? If so, which one? Shadow has always been traced back to the shadow of light, to a bright phenomenon, to an opacity of the luminous source; thus to an expression of colour. The lesson of Impressionism was a model from this point of view: shadow was always bright shadow. The basis of this was the Platonic assumption of the light–shadow contradiction and of the consequent supremacy of the first over the second. While shadow has been traced back to an aspect of light, light has never been traced back to an aspect of shadow. Both in the Eastern culture as well as in the Christian one, as in Greek and medieval philosophical thought, shadow was considered a pure nothingness and on the phenomenal plane a simple appearance, a deception, a fiction. The only

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reality was its reference to light, thus it had a symbolic, instrumental function. This type of thought, defining being on its luminous, visual presence, has never been able to thematize another way of being in the sphere of human experience. Regarding the supremacy of light and the presence of being, beauty has always been defined as proportion, harmony and manifestation or event of being. The shadow, not having its own way of being a reality, was deprived of beauty; it depended only on the predominance of colour. Even in contemporary art, historical Avant-gardism confirmed the centrality of the pure, tonic, heraldic colour, abandoning the chiaroscuro one that reflected the taste of the 19th century. If we wish to return to the ancient conception of the complementarity of light and shadow, we must use a different cultural mediation that will give the shadow its ontological status. The approach to shadow becomes an approach to another way of being, not of the presence, as the light, but of the otherness, of the difference. The light–shadow relationship is possible on the basis of another aesthetic thought that considers this relationship in new terms. Let us first take a philological approach, that will guide us through the difficulty of the concept, which is always useful from a hermeneutical point of view. The light–shadow contradiction, with the birth of philosophy, starting with Pythagoras and Plato, became popular in Western culture as a commonplace, obvious contradiction. However, we ask ourselves, has it always been this way? Let us go back to examine the beginning through its language. We shall start by defining the terms of contradiction in the original archaic meaning, as they are often found in Homer and in Hesiod. Let us begin with shadow (skia): this is what hides both the thought as well as reality. Therefore it has an ontological valence. In the first case it is lethe, oblivion; in the second case it is night, nyx. Both meanings find their eschatological conclusion in the notion of Hades. In fact, Hades, according to Homer’s interpretation, deriving from aidelos (with its double meaning of ‘‘invisible’’ and ‘‘destructive’’, ‘‘fatal’’), is he who makes invisible, or who destroys the body and its vitality transforming it into the ghost, the shadow of the dead, eidolon. In this culture the dead person is also called ‘‘shadow’’ (skia) because he lives in an eternal night (Ade) that darkens the vital dimension of his own body and his actual history. He is able to remember, but not to act by means of memory, transforming it into an opportunity of renewed commitment and change for himself and reality. This produces a sense of sadness, of nostalgia and sorrow

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that assails the shadows of the dead when they remember their past heroic adventures, as in the case of Agamemnon when Ulysses descends into Hell. The term shadow, in archaic culture, designates the hidden and lacking dimension of the existent, but not of being that, in its entirety, is made of the complementary reciprocity of night and day. The word ‘‘light’’ ( faos), in this culture, is awkwardly identified with ‘‘day’’ (emera), that is the opposite of night. In Homer the opposition, in the previously explained sense, is not so much between light and night, light and darkness but between day and night, day and darkness. This has a precise, singular meaning, because it is clear that while there is an identity between night and darkness or shadow, it seems, on the other hand, that there isn’t a total correspondence between light and day. In order to gain a clearer understanding of this non-correspondence, note that always in Homer, the relationship between the Sun (Elios) , he who makes things visible, and Phoebus (Foibos), ‘‘he who shines’’ in his youth, is never one of identity – as in the later tradition, starting with Aeschilus – but one of distinction. What does this mean? Phoebus is the splendour of the Sun, its eternal youth, that illuminating defines the day. The relationship between light and day is similar to that between Phoebus and Elios. Seeing that the Sun is always complementary to Hades, consequently day and night are the aspects that define the eternal circularity of being. Because Elios is bound to Phoebus, and they are the shining of the sun, consequently Phoebus represents a sort of capacity and quality of his white and bright splendour. Therefore it seems that light is both the cause as well as the condition of day and night, of visible things (endela) and the invisible ones (adela), thus of truth, of memory and of oblivion. Day and night constitute the conditions of a cosmologic circle that is dominated by the light: which is the splendour that the sun radiates (day) and that Hades hides (night). This alternation defines the temporality of being, its precariousness, its shady or ephemeral dimension. Shady and ephemeral both share the meaning of being precarious, with regard to both the night as well as the day. In the first case ‘‘shady’’ is the existence of a night, in the second one, ‘‘ephemeral’’ is the existence of a day. Light is always that circular movement that brings thought and being to rise; shadow and night are the enigmatic moment, like with the sun and the day. Night and shadow, sun and day are complementary expressions of the circularity of being.

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Here light manifests its central role; but it is a role that always defines itself not in opposition with the shadow, but in the circularity of the day and the night, of the visible and the invisible, of the productive and the destructive, of the living and not living. The shadow is another and necessary manifestation of light, its invisibility, as the day is its visibility. However the day couldn’t be this without the night, and vice versa. What does this mean? It means that it is necessary to confirm the circularity, not the contradiction, of the light–shadow relationship, even though they are different from each other, moving away from the original Greek thought. Shadow and light thus become, from an aesthetical point of view, two paradigms of a new and possible hermeneutic circle. However this is not enough. As in the western tradition of painting, light has been the paradigm on which the image has been visibly constructed, now it is legitimate to try, in a complementary way, to construct another image of the shadow. The problem is to give an existential value, that is no longer marginal to the shadow, the night and their light, as a moment of everything gathering together, in a double sense: both as the background of the image as well as a salient and decisive trait of the iconic representation. Let us take a look at a short and aphoristic story by F. Nietzsche from T hus Spake Zarathustra entitled T he Shadow, in which a Persian reformer holds a dialogue with his own shadow, that vainly tries to reach him. This fleeing from the shadow on the part of Zarathustra is a fleeing from a darkening dimension of the shadow, as something that is opposed to the light. He is against Platonism, against the conception of a transcendent, inaccessible light and an immanent shadow, that obscure intelligence and the senses, as in the example of the myth of the cave. Zarathustra wants ‘‘clearness’’; if the shadow must be, it must be the luminescent projection of a light of the body that highlights its ‘‘earthliness’’. The shadow is the light of the earth, that brings to rise the chthonian, vital dimension of being. Here every contrast of light and shadow is revoked. Zarathustra shuns such a straight dimension, of constant superimposing; he is the teacher of the circle: light and shadow find their coessential belonging at every point, celebrating existence as the visibility of a game that is both tragic and vital at the same time. From the plane of existence, let us now go back to the one of art. Guided by an alchemic and mysterious approach, the colour presents itself to us as that earthly element that conserves within its materiality, shadiness or opacity, the golden light. We must draw light from the earth,

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that is to say, from the colour; this is not light but the covering, the physical shell that contains the vital principle of being within the ‘‘golden bough’’ (Frazer), capable of intervening by means of magic, on the elements of nature, of influencing the shadow like the soul. But what is colour? An aesthetic reflection cannot ignore a similar question. Physics does not set itself the problem of what is colour, but of how to perceive it. Usually it leads to a determining of an original colour, which is white. However, what makes the colour this way? The answer is the obscuring of the light. Colours are polysemous, polyvalent aspects of light in its different and shady grades. Colours are the shadow of the light. We could refer to Goethe who in T he T heory of Colours, in speaking of light in § 81 observes: ‘‘The intense light appears completely white’’, thus it is something without colour, while in § 82, he goes on to say: ‘‘If however, light is weaker you immediately have a manifestation of colour because it acts as an image fading away’’. Therefore, according to Goethe, colour is nothing more than a weakening of light, its partial obliteration or opacification. What is shadow? Leonardo da Vinci in the T reatise of Painting in the part IV, § 647 writes: ‘‘Shadow is reduction or deprivation of light’’. Therefore shadow is colour. Leonardo then goes on to detect in the lesser illumination of a body from an external light source or lamp, its greatest intensity of shadow: ‘‘The shadow’’, he notes ‘‘is of a greater quantity over a shady body, which will be illuminated by a lesser quantity of light’’. Basically, both Leonardo as well as Goethe, move within a vision of energetic correlation between light and shadow, whereas colour is an ambiguous, alchemical synthesis. Even in the ordinary language, apparently far from the aesthetic one, the circularity of light and shadow has been conserved in expressions such as ‘‘to bring to light’’ or ‘‘to shade’’ or ‘‘place in the shadow’’. In both cases there is a symmetrical relationship, since that light highlights something while placing something else in the shadow, and vice versa. Schopenhauer, in his work Sight and Colours, deduced the proper consequences: those of the ‘‘affinity of the colour with the shadow, of the colour as skieron, in that it is ‘‘similar to shadow or to grey and due to this the colour is always lighter than black and darker than white’’.10 After the conception of colour as skieron, ‘‘shady’’, we can perceive that this adjective doesn’t relate only to the manifestation of colour, but also its being. Skieron answers the initial question: what is colour? The answer is therefore the following: shadow.

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But what do we intend by colour being shadow? We mean that it ‘‘places in shadow’’, so that it ‘‘determines’’, ‘‘delimits’’, ‘‘defines’’ something, therefore ‘‘places it in light’’, or, in other words makes it visible, evident, as a phenomenon. Every phenomenon is chromatically defined. This means that we don’t see the light, but its shadow, that is the colour as skieron. Everything that we see and perceive is a ‘‘prismatic’’ definition of light, that has white and its negation at its extremes. Light is therefore, something that is beyond white, of which it is the condition; and white is consequently the condition and cause of the other colours. Here there is a hierarchical order that has its metaphysical presupposition in light: light, white, colour. All this regarding the Platonic example of Book VI of the Republic in which the Athenian philosopher develops a parallelism between the idea of the good, that foments and renders the metaphysical world visible, and the Sun, which foments and renders the physical world visible; translated in an aesthetic sphere this means that good is the light in ‘‘itself ’’, white is the Sun; and as good puts the Sun into being, which in turn puts things into being, so light puts white into being, that consequently puts the other colours into being. In this way, light is what makes colours possible, a metaphysical principle that, Platonically, renders the physical experience of vision, which is always chromatic, possible. The colour thus becomes a sort of medium that light activates between sight and the visible object. But why do we have to presuppose this metaphysical field, which the same physical science has operatively ended up confirming, at the same moment in which it has continued to distinguish between light and colour? Why, on the other hand, at least moving from the aesthetic field, can’t we suggest another beginning of the chromatic experience, guided by Goethe and Schopenhauer? Let us try to start with the colour while remaining in the colour in order to arrive at detecting its possibilities. It has been said that, in our perceptive and aesthetic experience, it is possible to understand light or the lack of it, by means of colour and its expressive gradualness. Then why can’t we assume that it is colour that illuminates things or shades them, in the same proportion to which it highlights or conceals them? Didn’t Goethe define colour as ‘‘shady’’? Therefore what we call light and shadow, in actual fact, are not ‘‘essential beings’’, but functional aspects of colour, aspects with which colour puts things into being.

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Only at this point does it make sense to ask the question ‘‘what is colour?’’ because only now are we able to answer. Wittgenstein urges us to answer this question, when in the Remarks on Colour he mentions that we often use propositions that are on the borderline between logical and empirical, so that their sense swings from one side to the other of this borderline; and they are now used as expressions of a rule, now used as expressions of an experience.11 The constant straying of light (rule) from the colour (experience) is easily traceable in what he says. To avoid easy straying we prefer to start with the experience of colour and to find its functional coordinates (light and shadow). So here is the answer: colour is the vital visibility of a phenomenal reality that is given and defined by means of the shadow. In this way colour seems to be, for us, the first and last reality of things, original intranscendency. Wittgenstein goes on to say – and we conclude – that if we should ask ourselves what the words ‘‘red’’, ‘‘blue’’, ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘white’’ mean, we could, without doubt, immediately point out some things bearing these colours – but explaining the meanings of these words is beyond our capability!12 University of Bari NOTES 1 Saint Augustine, De Genesis contra manichaeos, I,4,7. 2 Ibid. 3 H. Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Tu¨bingen 1986, p. 487. 4 A. Moret, Au temps des pharaons, Paris 1925, chap. V; J. Pirenne, Storia della civilta` dell’antico Egitto, Sansoni, Florence 1967, p. 111. 5 Ivi, pp. 112–113. 6 K. Kerenyi, L a pena di Prometeo, in Scritti italiani, Guida, Naples 1993, p. 170. 7 Hesiod, T heogony, v. 730–731. 8 Plato, Republic, VII, 516a-b. 9 Aristotle, Poetics, 1454b, 10. 10 A. Schopenhauer, Ueber das Sehen und die Farben, chap. 2, § 7. 11 L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, I, § 32. 12 Ivi, I, § 68.

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A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF LITERARY CREATIVITY: RICOEUR AND JOYCE

In this article I wish to present a theory of literary creativity that begins with an idea put forward by Paul Ricoeur in T ime and Narrative, Vol. I. ‘‘The productive imagination,’’ according to Ricoeur, ‘‘is not only rulegoverned, it constitutes the generative matrix of rules’’ (68). Ricoeur shows how an author, in writing a text that is ‘‘sedimented’’ by previously uttered material, perhaps necessarily so, can, none-the-less be engaged in ‘‘innovation’’: innovation by transformation. ‘‘Rule-governed deformation,’’ Ricoeur claims, constitutes an ‘‘axis’’ around which changes in previous material transform these content elements so much that the result consists of an original text (70). I am presenting Ricoeur’s concept of ‘‘rule-governed deformation’’ as a defense against a cascade of theoretical outcomes that place ‘‘creativity’’ into question. Late twentieth-century post-structuralist literary theory challenges the very existence of creativity.1 Theorists’ insights that literary texts consist of a woven fabric of previous literary texts suggest to some of them that ‘‘creativity’’ is a null category. Michel Foucault, to present a single example, thinks that ‘‘to raise or lower’’ a literary work’s ‘‘stock of originality’’ is a ‘‘harmless enough amusement for historians who refuse to grow up’’ (144). For Foucault the evidence for re-use of older texts in every new text is so overwhelming that only an irrational child-like desire to believe in literary creativity can keep a person from accepting that it is an outmoded concept. What could be more useless, Foucault asks, than to ‘‘reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness?’’ The ‘‘great accumulation of the already said,’’ in literary texts means, for Foucault, that ‘‘the originality/banality opposition’’ is ‘‘not relevant’’ (144). Foucault merely states the logical implication of the many statements of post-structuralist theorists to the effect that, in literature, ‘‘only language speaks,’’ that the work does not originate from an author who might be deemed more (or less) original. Among theorists holding this view in addition to Foucault are Roland Barthes (Pleasure 34–50; ‘‘Introduction’’ 111–12; Death 146; S/Z 10), Jacques Lacan (Ecrits 125; Seminars 89), and Jacques Derrida (W riting 187–91). Interestingly post295 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 295–311. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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structuralist theorists, such as these men, presented new arguments for an old position. The idea that literary texts contain nothing truly new is, itself, an old position. Walter Jackson Bate quotes a poet as wishing he ‘‘had phrases that are not known,’’ and ‘‘utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used’’ (3–4). When did this poet live, this man who almost despaired of finding language that was ‘‘free from repetition,’’ and who feared he was condemned always to use a phrase ‘‘which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken’’? He lived around 2000 BCE; he is an Egyptian scribe named Khakheperresenb! Thomas McFarland also shows how this idea is an old one. He traces a ‘‘paradox.’’ The paradox consists of maintaining a claim for originality in the face of consciousness that literary texts consist of a matrix of repetitions from earlier texts. McFarland begins with Plato and ends with Harold Bloom; in between he traces a line through the eighteenth-century theorist Richard Young, Goethe, the English Romantics, the French Symbolists, T. S. Eliot, and Northrop Frye.2 Ralph Waldo Emerson provides McFarland with his most striking instance; McFarland quotes him twice: first Emerson said, ‘‘insist on yourself, never imitate’’ (451), and second ‘‘there never was an original writer’’ (461). McFarland’s historical survey reveals, he says, that critics need to assert that some texts contain ‘‘originality’’ and simultaneously to deny the existence of originality. Thus, he posits an ‘‘inescapable cultural dilemma’’: ‘‘the originality paradox’’ (475–476). If allowed to stand as a paradox, originality and its denial would be an instance of a fundamental conflict: experience contradicting reason. Our belief in the originality of some texts rests on our experience in reading certain literary texts. I am not implying that readers see a text as original if they are inexperienced readers who come across a feature in a text for the first time. Instead, I refer to the experience of readers who have read much and have encountered the ‘‘already said’’ repeatedly. Even these experienced readers sometimes feel that a text they are reading is unique, and they develop an apperceptive understanding that this uniqueness arises from the creativity of the author. In contrast, the perception that all literary works consist of previously expressed statements rests on operations of reason. These operations are so clear to a thinker like Foucault that he feels only children should be exempted from following where the logic leads: if the logic requires a thinker to abandon a favorite concept, he or she should abandon it, even if it is a favorite one like creativity.

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An unexplained, fundamental conflict between experience and reason should be explored, and if possible, resolved. Paul Ricoeur’s thought is imbued with Phenomenology; so he is one natural source from whom to seek a solution to such a paradox. Phenomenology often helps the thinker continue to reason, like a navigator in a sea of uncertainty. Historically, it was similar unexplained aporias, or inconsistent, plausible statements, making paradoxes, that created part of the crisis in Western thought which Edmund Husserl sought to resolve by re-founding thought on the basis of experience and thus reuniting the two; Phenomenology emerged from that activity. Paul Ricoeur’s description of his analyses suggests that he works in this tradition. Ricoeur says his work, ‘‘concerns the relationship between a phenomenology that does not stop engendering aporia and what I called earlier the poetic ‘solution’ to these aporias’’ (71, Ricoeur’s italics). To concretize these reflections, I would like to propose the following exercise based on what I call a literary quiz:

A LITERARY QUIZ

Identify the novel described by the following clues. Many will have a good guess long before the end of the quiz, but they are asked to play along until the end. 1. One of the novel’s major critics describes the novel as ‘‘undoubtedly the most influential’’ novel of its century, ‘‘and to many minds the greatest’’ (Baldick 7). 2. Another critic said that the author ‘‘had undertaken meticulous research to ensure that all verifiable details were exact, even insignificant ones – though ‘insignificant’ is perhaps not the appropriate word,’’ since the author would ‘‘slip in details that were only apparently trivial’’ (Parme´e viii). 3. The same critic wrote of this author’s ‘‘extensive use of indirect, reported speech,’’ a ‘‘device that is easily adaptable to make dreams, memories, or hallucinations appear not imagined but real’’ (Parme´e ix). 4. One main male character has a dream of the main female character in Turkish dress. This is influenced by the fact that the female character looks Southern European, perhaps Spanish. 5. A minor character is a super-nationalist who always refers to himself as ‘‘The Citizen’’ and insists that everyone else do so, as well. The

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Citizen has no known means of support but spends his days in drinking establishments, talking polities of a super-nationalist variety. The climax of one scene occurs when a character flings a container that had contained food at another character. The novel is noted for descriptions of food and eating, more than is common in most novels. Horse racing and betting on the races is an issue in the novel. One main character wants to be a writer, although he has written very little at the time of the novel. Another major character is an advertising agent. Parody plays a large role in the novel’s discourse. Reports in the novel are sometimes parodies of newspaper pieces that are themselves parodic. One classic scene in the novel describes a long ride to the cemetery for a funeral. A minor character is a newspaper reporter who writes up the scene at the cemetery. A musically inclined female character is interested in the transmigration of souls. An important scene occurs when the two main male characters go to a brothel although neither engages in sex with any of the prostitutes. Debt and debt collecting is a recurring theme through much of the novel. An important scene occurs in a maternity hospital. The newborn son of the main character died. The death of the son in infancy put a strain on the relationship of the mother and father, having consequences important in the novel. Partially as a result of the above, a main male character feels that the springs of sexual desire have dried up in himself.

Many people will have answered this quiz as obviously describing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). I composed the questions wholly from A Sentimental Education (1869) by Gustave Flaubert. The fact that Ulysses would be an equally correct answer provides a striking instance in support of the logic behind poststructuralist theory’s claim that every literary text is made up of a tissue of the already said.3 However, the virtually universal experience of people who read Ulysses, even widely read readers, is of a work of striking originality. Thus, the quiz makes for an excellent test case. In T ime and Narrative, Volume I, Paul Ricoeur makes his case that ‘‘rule-governed deformation’’ allows innovation by transformation of the

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previously said. Ricoeur holds that when the literary artist creates ‘‘the imitation (or representation) of action’’ as Aristotle postulated in the Poetics, the writer changes the action in life outside literature into something new (45). ‘‘If we continue to translate mimesis by ‘imitation,’ ’’ says Ricoeur, ‘‘we have to understand something completely contrary to a copy of some preexisting reality and speak instead of a creative imitation’’ (45). Furthermore, even the material of life that the writer imitates is not raw experience; it is not merely random data outside the person. To have understood experience even as events in a sequence, the person has already performed a series of mental operations upon the raw data. The person has applied temporal concepts from within the person. Temporal concepts, in turn, necessarily involve the person in the symbolic realm. The plot of a literary work ‘‘is grounded in a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character’’ (54). In fact, ‘‘human action’’ can be narrated only because the narrator has already transformed it by an imaginative, creative process. Human experience can be narrated, ‘‘because it is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms’’ (57). If in simply understanding experience, people must perform creative acts, and if ‘‘imitating’’ such understandings of the world in fiction involves a second set of creative acts, then it is easy to see how transforming the ‘‘already said’’ of old texts into the new text might also involve creative innovation. The author ‘‘configures’’ the material, taking action, and ‘‘the dynamic character of the configuring operation’’ leads Ricoeur ‘‘to prefer the term emplotment to that of plot’’ (65). We ‘‘ought not to hesitate in comparing the production of the configurational act to the work of the productive imagination,’’ says Ricoeur (68). The sedimented elements from earlier works ‘‘only constitute the grammar that governs the composition of new works’’ (69, my italics). Just as ‘‘the grammar of a language’’ designates what constitutes ‘‘well-formed sentences’’ but permits an ‘‘unforeseeable’’ number of new, original sentences, so too the ‘‘already said’’ that so many theorists and artists have noted is, thus, analogous to the words of a language. As artists manipulate old content using the grammar of innovation: ‘‘a work of art – a poem, play, novel’’ becomes ‘‘an original production, a new existence in the linguistic [langagier] kingdom,’’ says Ricoeur (69). A grammar is a set of rules describing linguistic actions. If innovation is a grammar, as Ricoeur says, we should expect it to consist of a set of rules, and indeed, Ricouer states that innovation ‘‘remains a form of behavior governed by rules.’’ He even adds that the ‘‘labor of imagination

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is not born from nothing’’ (69). If innovation consists of ‘‘rule-governed deformation’’ as Ricoeur posits, then we should be able to determine some of the rules. My colleague, Jerre Collins and I attempted to do this in our article on Edward Albee’s W ho’s Afraid of V irginia Woolf ? (another text that, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, strikes readers as definitely original). Our article appeared in the journal American Drama. ‘‘From our ordinary reading experience,’’ we claimed, ‘‘we know what some of these rules are, on the level of individual texts’’ (62). We identified ‘‘compression of action in time.’’ We give the example of two, otherwise very similar illicit sexual affairs, taking six months in an earlier work, and yet ‘‘Albee depicts the beginning, possible consummation, and mutual disgust in a single evening’’ (63). A second type of rule-governed deformation, we claimed, is ‘‘compression of characters’’ as when an author combines the identifying features and emplotment functions of two or more characters in an earlier work into a single character in a later work (62–63). For a ‘‘third kind of deformation’’ that creates something new from the ‘‘already said,’’ we identified ‘‘changes in context’’ (63). Take the following example: two conversations between a woman and her lover in two works using almost identical words become profoundly different because in the earlier text the woman and her lover are alone and in the later work the woman’s husband is present. I now add a fourth rule, selective sampling. This rule emerges when a later work contains an element which is prominent in an earlier work, with suggestive similarities, but the later work does so in a much-reduced fashion. A fifth rule might be the splitting of characters. This would be the reverse of compression of characters, when two characters in a later work combine the identifying features and emplotment functions of a single character in an earlier work. There may be other rules, nothing in Ricoeur’s formulation limits rule-governed deformation to only five rules. If, for a start, we seek to apply these rules, the idea that Joyce applies the compression of action in time jumps out obviously at us. Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education narrates a generation while Ulysses, famously, covers a single day. Joyce does not sacrifice anything by this deformation. Narrated memories Joyce gives his characters have allowed Joyce scholars to trace the entire former lives of the characters in great detail. Even this memory narrative strategy occurs briefly but importantly in Flaubert’s work, which serves, as well, to illustrate the rule of changes in context. Both novels have an important scene in a brothel. At the very end of Flaubert’s novel, A Sentimental Education, his main character

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remembers in the translation by Douglas Parme´e, a ‘‘den of vice’’ which ‘‘projected an amazing aura throughout the whole district. People would refer to it indirectly as ‘that place you know’, ‘a certain street’, ‘below the bridges’ ... and, needless to say, it was the secret obsession of every adolescent’’ (463). For Fre´de´ric: ... the heat, fear of the unknown, a vague feeling of guilt, and even the thrill of seeing, at one glance, so many women at his disposal, upset him so much that he went very pale and stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak. The women were all laughing, amused by his embarrassment; thinking they were making fun of him, he turned tail and fled; and since he was holding the money, Deslauriers was obliged to follow him. They were seen leaving the house; the scandal this aroused still lingered on three years later. (463–464)

One character held the money for both of the Ulysses characters as well. This event, which would occur very early in a chronology, is narrated last in the novel. It enables readers to retell the story to themselves in a way that provides a context for the Orientalist elements in the novel. What Flaubert calls ‘‘the Turkish woman’’ ran the brothel in A Sentimental Education (463). Many ‘‘people thought she was a Muslim, an actual Turk, thus adding to the poetic charm of her establishment,’’ says Flaubert (463). This information provides a retrospective explanation for why Fre´de´ric would dream of Marie as a Turkish harem inmate when she became the object of his sexual desire. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom dreams of his wife Molly in a Turkish-style harem, and although Bella Kuhn, the madam of Joyce’s brothel, isn’t Turkish, Joyce based Leopold Bloom’s phantasmagoric experience in the brothel directly on images from Flaubert’s T he T emptation of St. Anthony, which has distinctive elements of Orientalism, including a camel. That this camel fits well in Flaubert’s desert setting of T he T emptation of St. Anthony but is totally bizarre in Joyce’s urban setting also dramatizes the deforming function of the changes-in-context rule. When we apply this rule to the individual dream of each character, we find a new insight. In A Sentimental Education, Flaubert writes that Fre´de´ric ‘‘dreamed of her in yellow pantaloons, reclining on cushions in a harem’’ (75). The context suggests but does not require an interpretation that the quoted line refers to day dreams rather than the sleeping dreams which Joyce’s character, Leopold Bloom, has of his wife Molly. The two types of dreams can overlap when a character falls into a waking reverie and recalls a sleeping dream, as appears may be what Flaubert is depicting.

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One characteristic of supposedly oriental women that feeds the fantasy of their being sexually vulnerable is their slightly darker skin. When Fre´de´ric had first seen Madame Arnoux, before he knew her name, Fre´de´ric ‘‘supposed she might be from Andalusia’’ (7), a southern portion of Spain, not far from Gibraltar where Molly Bloom was born to an Irish soldier in the British army and a woman with a Spanish name. Madame Arnoux is not from these places, as Fre´de´ric eventually discovers, but she shares her ‘‘southern’’ looks with Molly Bloom. The reader takes for granted that when a man dreams of a woman, whom he sexually desires, as a harem slave, he implies himself as the Sultan in charge of the harem. And the retrospective brothel scene confirms this in A Sentimental Education. Only in retrospect, after the brothel scene of Ulysses do readers have the information needed to deduce that in Leopold Bloom’s dream of his wife Molly in a harem, some other man is the Sultan! Thus, by applying the rule of context alteration, Joyce has profoundly changed the very similar material of two retrospectively understood dreams. A similar application of rule-governed deformation suggests how two other matching scenes affect readers so differently that they are original. The man who goes by the name of ‘‘The Citizen’’ in A Sentimental Education is named Regimbart. Joyce concentrates the details of The Citizen in one episode while Flaubert’s character of that name occurs in several places in his novel. This means that one rule being applied to deform the event is compression of action in time. Without this, the similarities would be more striking. Gustave Flaubert describes how The Citizen spent his day going from one drinking establishment to the next. ‘‘However, it was not his fondness for drink that attracted Citizen Regimbart to these haunts but his ingrained habit of talking politics in such places’’ (43). David Hyman reported this similarity in his essay on the ‘‘Cyclops’’ chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. But his identification did not lead readers of Ulysses to abandon their experience of the novel as being profoundly original, which, perhaps supports Ricoeur’s claim that rule-governed deformation allows a literary work to be a new creation, even while reusing old content. The rule of changes of context also operates in this pair of scenes, linking it to another paired set. At the climax of Joyce’s ‘‘Cyclops’’ episode Joyce’s Citizen throws an empty tin of biscuits at Bloom. In A Sentimental Education, a character named Cicy insults a woman, so Fre´de´ric ‘‘flung his plate at his face’’ (242). The narrative in Ulysses combines the foodcontainer throwing incident with the narrative about The Citizen, while the episodes are separate in A Sentimental Education. The combination

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illustrates the operation of the rule which my colleague and I call changes in context. In Ulysses, Joyce’s main character is the target of the throw, while the main character in A Sentimental Education does the throwing, a change of context which strongly alters the impact of the two scenes enough so that the later-written one strikes readers as original, and not a copy of the earlier one. The difference between an elaborate Paris dinner party and an informal meeting in a Dublin pub sharpens the change of context, which operates against the background of food and meal descriptions in the two novels. Detailed descriptions of meals are a notable feature of Ulysses’ realistic dimension. For this similarity, let us turn to a summary of the issue in A Sentimental Education by a critic; Douglas Parme´e, in the same ‘‘Introduction,’’ cited above: ‘‘Meals of many kinds form one principal thread,’’ he says. ‘‘Some are nasty, student-style meals in the Latin Quarter or worse’’ (xx). These meals are perhaps a slice below the lower-middleclass meals in Ulysses, but another point ties them closer: ‘‘Hussonnet gets round the problem by cadging [begging] meals, like any sensible reporter before the expense account had become a recognized institution’’ (xx). The tie to the issue of maneuvering to be ‘‘treated’’ to drinks, which is more prominent in Ulysses, echoes here. And these meals remind a reader of several described in Ulysses: Stephen’s breakfast and Leopold’s lunch. For supper, Leopold eats a little better in a hotel dining room, but even this does not match some of the sumptuous feasts described in A Sentimental Education. And this is an important change of context, for it is at what Douglas Parme´e describes as an ‘‘extravagant, large-scale blowout’’ that Fre´de´ric throws his dish. Parme´e sees Flaubert’s description of such meals as being ‘‘central to the novel.’’ They consist of ‘‘the established gastronomic ritual of lavish middle-class luncheon and dinner parties,’’ which are ‘‘so useful for making friends and influencing people, showing off your wealth,’’ or for ‘‘clinching a deal, achieving prestige, indulging your greed in a generally acceptable fashion’’ (xx). For Fre´de´ric to throw a dish at another guest is much more shocking than for a denizen of a Dublin pub to throw an empty tin of biscuits, a context transformation that allows Joyce’s scene to be experienced as original even if a purest might insist on the similarity. Betting on horse racing also links the novels while changes of context separates them. This, too, connects to the episode of The Citizen in Ulysses. Characters at the pub in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses have heard, falsely, that Bloom had bet on the long-shot winner. When he leaves for a few moments, they assume he is going to collect his winnings.

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Because he does not treat them to free drinks in celebration of his win, the losers verbally turn on him, providing an atmosphere that encouraged the attack of The Citizen on Bloom. Although attending horse racing is randomly mentioned in A Sentimental Education as merely one of the numerous entertainments in which the novel’s characters occasionally indulge, one major episode occurs when Fre´de´ric attends the race for the ‘‘Prix de la Ville.’’ Temporarily despairing of consummating his love with Marie Arnoux, Fre´de´ric accompanies Rosanette, M. Arnoux’s sometimes mistress. Flaubert describes the race in detail: horses, jockeys, and spectators. When Madame Arnoux sees Fre´de´ric with Rosanette, Fre´de´ric notices that Marie turns pale. The sight renews Fre´de´ric’s hope that Marie does love him, but it turns her away from him because she now believes her husband’s lie that Rosanette is Fre´de´ric’s mistress, not the husband’s. Ulysses does not contain a scene at the racetrack, which is part of the context change, but comments about the day’s major race recur frequently throughout Joyce’s novel, and most of the characters place bets through bookies. Blazes Boylan interrupted his tryst with Molly Bloom to buy a newspaper, to see how his bet has fared; his action ties the horseracing motif to the adultery motif in this novel just as Flaubert does in A Sentimental Education. An overlap between adultery and horse-racing must be rare in literature – rare enough to make two such linkages suggest support for an argument that this element of Ulysses is not original but based on Flaubert. The context alterations, however, change the horseracing elements enough that they do strike the reader of Ulysses as original, even after learning of their similarity to those of Flaubert. A series of similarities cluster around the issue of writing, income of the main characters, and the job of the second main character in both novels. Stephen Dedalus and Fre´de´ric Moreau both aspire to be authors, although neither has written very much at the start of either novel, nor does either write much during the respective novels’ duration. This might be a basic similarity between the two novels. Both men have recently returned home from their first stay in Paris. Each of these may be considered incidental on its own, but when one adds that the second main male character in both novels have the same job, coincidence becomes less likely. Bloom sells advertising for a newspaper and Deslauriers becomes ‘‘an advertising agent’’ (460). Furthermore, both Fre´de´ric and Stephen come from middle-class families but suffer decreased expectations as their families slip into financial difficulties.

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These events are not deformed by the rules so far mentioned, but a change does differentiate the two novels on one of these issues. About a fourth of the way through his novel, Fre´de´ric is rescued from poverty when his uncle dies and leaves him a fortune. This change may be an indirect effect of Joyce’s application of the compression of action in time rule. Stephen is a repetition of the financially strapped aspiring artist Fre´de´ric, not of the later Fre´de´ric who has a large annual income, allowing him to ‘‘get to know, at long last, that vague, indefinable will-o’-the wisp, ‘society’ ’’ (141). The first thing Fre´de´ric does with his inherited fortune is pay debts ‘‘amounting to forty thousand francs’’ (141). Debts also play a role in Ulysses where Leopold Bloom intermittently remembers a debt owed him by another character. Debt and debt-collection play a much more important role in A Sentimental Education. Perhaps Joyce’s use of the debt motif is a pure coincidence, but, if someone wanted to, he or she could present the debt issues as a similarity to support a thesis of non originality of later works because of re-use of elements from earlier works. If so then I would suggest a fourth rule in the sequence of rule-governed deformation, and that would be selective sampling. Consider the evidence. After Fre´de´ric’s first stint in Paris, he had returned to his rural home for what he assumes to be a visit. His mother informs him ‘‘she’d borrowed money from Monsieur Roque ... Then, out of the blue, he’d demanded payment’’ (99). We later learn that Roque ‘‘had acquired his wealth through investments on Monsieur Dambreuse’s behalf ’’ (264). After Fre´de´ric’s mother ‘‘had paid off all her debts,’’ the income Fre´de´ric can expect is reduced from 15,000 francs to 3,000: ‘‘ ‘it’s not possible!’ exclaimed Fre´de´ric’’ (99). As a result Fre´de´ric is ashamed to return to Paris because he fears his friends will believe he had informed them falsely about his hopes. He accepts a boring job in a local law office and explores the possibility of marrying Monsieur Roque’s daughter, Louise. Recovering his mother’s money may not be Fre´de´ric’s motive, but that is the implication taken by all the other characters. Thus, debts bring Louise and Fre´de´ric closer together; and although the debt issue of Ulysses has nothing to do with Bloom’s interest in Gerty MacDowell, whom he apparently just randomly notices, Louise, when first described, is a charming girl, reminding us of Joyce’s Gerty MacDowell. Of course, countless novels feature charming young girls, so – in itself – this is an insignificant comparison. However, a few more details from A Sentimental Education dovetail with those in Ulysses. Both Louise and Gerty have romantic reading preferences. It is not possible

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to determine Louise’s exact age, and also not possible to determine Gerty’s. Flaubert describes Louise’s facial expression as being ‘‘both bold and dreamy’’ which fits well with Joyce’s depiction of Gerty. Fre´de´ric flirted with Louise, and at one point she tells him, ‘‘I’m pretending we’re married’’ (104–105). This reminds a reader of Gerty’s daydream about being married to the dark stranger whom the reader knows is Bloom. What makes them different is another application of the changes of context rule. Fre´de´ric knew Louise, and Bloom was simply watching a girl he did not know in Gerty MacDowell. The debt motif also interweaves with Fre´de´ric’s efforts to get closer to Marie Arnoux. She permitted a closer emotional connection between them when ‘‘one day she confessed to being worried: Arnoux had made her sign an IOU payable to Monsieur Dambreuse’’ (159). Later, Arnoux announces that he has to leave Paris because of his debts and hints that Fre´de´ric might lend him money because of how upset ‘‘my poor wife’’ is over the problem, perhaps hinting that Fre´de´ric should lend Arnoux 15,000 francs because of Fre´de´ric’s interest in Arnoux’s wife (198). Fre´de´ric does so and later tells Marie, ‘‘I did it for your sake’’ (203). Fre´de´ric also gets the Dambreuse family to give him Arnoux’s four IOUs, which they do because they like Fre´de´ric, want to give him a lucrative job, and back him as a political candidate. They also give Fre´de´ric a potentially lucrative stock tip, which he cannot take advantage of, having lent all his cash to Arnoux, and Arnoux avoids paying the money back (237). Fre´de´ric’s friend Deslauriers makes a pass at Marie while ostensibly trying to collect what her husband owes to Fre´de´ric. Fre´de´ric’s sudden return to Paris as a result of these events breaks off his plan to marry Louise. Upon hearing that Marie had almost fainted when she heard of Fre´de´ric’s marriage plans with Louise, Fre´de´ric’s hopes of making love to Marie are renewed (283). It looks as if his hopes will be fulfilled when they kiss, but the hopes are again crushed when Marie and Fre´de´ric look up and see Rosanette watching them. She had come to get money from Arnoux to pay a debt, and on the way home she tells Fre´de´ric that she is pregnant with his child. The final meeting between Fre´de´ric and Marie, years later, when she is a white-haired widow, even weaves with the debt motif: her excuse for seeking out Fre´de´ric and visiting him is that she wishes to repay the original 15,000 francs he had lent her husband (456). Thus if Joyce was influenced by Flaubert’s text, at all, Joyce only selectively samples from a much wider use of the debt theme in A Sentimental Education.

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In Flaubert’s text, the debt issue revealed itself even further as an emplotment force when Rosanette indirectly instituted the suit that destroys Arnoux, and when Madame Dambreuse publicly humiliated Marie by buying Marie’s favorite items at the public auction, Fre´de´ric breaks off with her, losing his chance to marry a fabulously rich widow (454). When her husband had died, Fre´de´ric made all the arrangements for the funeral and attended it. Flaubert describes it in detail including a lengthy description of the carriage ride to the cemetery. In a description that closely matches the carriage ride to the cemetery in the Hades episode of Ulysses, Flaubert begins by describing the hearse: ‘‘adorned with ostrich feathers and drawn by black horses with beribboned manes, plumes on their heads and decked out in silver-embroidered trappings hanging down to their hooves’’ (414). ‘‘Their driver wore riding boots and a cocked hat with a long piece of black crepe dangling down behind’’ (414). Here we again see how the application of the rule of changes in context makes the later material new. In Flaubert’s text the detail cited above emphasizes the hypocrisy of the situation, since Fre´de´ric was far from mourning; he had been having an affair with the wife of a sick, rich man, hoping to marry her wealth when she became a widow. This while simultaneously being in love from afar with Marie and fathering a child with Rosanette who is even then giving birth to their son. While no such hypocrisy applies in the case of the funeral in Ulysses, each element of Flaubert’s narration of ostentatious grief adds to the irony of the situation in which no one is really grief stricken. As the procession winds its way toward the cemetery, ‘‘passers-by kept stopping to look at all this; women climbed on to chairs with their babies in their arms; men enjoying a glass of beer came over to the cafe´ windows with a billiard cue in their hands’’ (414–415). ‘‘It was a long journey,’’ says Flaubert’s narrator, ‘‘and just as at banquets, where guests start off by being reserved and then relax, the mourners did not take long to become less inhibited.’’ They discussed the ‘‘superb’’ political speeches they had heard recently, as they passed ‘‘shops with nothing to see except colored glass chains and little black discs covered in gold characters and patterns, so that they looked like china shops and caves full of stalactites’’ (415). Of course two rides to a cemetery could occur in different books without arousing theoretical interest, with suspiciously similar details being explained by the fact that many funerals are similar. However, in these cases, another element suggests that these two funeral processions are linked by a repetition principle but saved from what Foucault calls

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‘‘banality’’ by what Ricoeur calls rule-governed deformation. At the elaborately described cemetery, Fre´de´ric’s journalist friend, Hussonnet, ‘‘who had to report the funeral in the newspapers, went so far as to parody all the speeches’’ (416). The presence of a newspaperman known to the main character, who reports the funeral, has its echo in Ulysses. Also we have an example of Flaubert writing speeches that are parodies of real political speeches, and then presenting us the parody of these parodies; and parodies of parodic speeches also occur in Ulysses. Thus, in all likelihood, these are not isolated unrelated episodes in two novels; rather, these are repeated elements made original by rule-governed deformation. Dressed in mourning, as was Bloom in Ulysses, Fre´de´ric goes to the maternity hospital shortly after the funeral; the episode in A Sentimental Education is as follows: At the corner of the Rue Marbeuf he saw a notice in big letters announcing ‘Nursing Home and Maternity Hospital under the management of Madame Alessandri, qualified midwife from the School of Midwifery, author of various publications, etc.’ Then, halfway down the street, on a very small door, was a further notice, with no reference to maternity, just ‘Madame Alessandri’s Nursing Home’, and listing her qualifications. Fre´de´ric gave a loud knock on the door. A saucy-looking maid showed him into the reception-room furnished with a mahogany table, garnet-red plush armchairs and a clock under a glass dome. Madame Alessandri appeared almost at once. She was a tall, slim, well-bred woman of forty, with dark hair and fine eyes. She informed Fre´de´ric that the mother had had a successful confinement and showed him up to her room. (419)

Fre´de´ric is the father of Rosanette’s baby. He is, thus, different from Bloom or Stephen who are present in a maternity hospital in Ulysses, but are not fathers of the babies being delivered during their stay. The context change that affects the major rule-governed deformation is as follows: as Fre´de´ric enters, he is distracted by thoughts of Madame Dambreuse, whom he had seduced during the advanced stages of Rosanette’s pregnancy and whom he expects to marry, now that her rich husband has died. The conversation between Fre´de´ric and Rosanette takes place over a background of piano music, ironic considering Madame Dambreuse’s talent on that instrument. Flaubert narrates the death of the baby son of Fre´de´ric and Rosanette while Joyce presents a picture of Bloom doing everything he can to prevent himself from thinking about this saddest moment of his life. In her case Rosanette became frantic. Her way of avoiding facing death is more active. She insists on having the infant’s body embalmed so she can keep it in her apartment longer before burial. She insists that Fre´de´ric pay the commission for a painter to create

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an oil portrait of the dead child. Flaubert objectively narrates all this heartbreaking detail in a detached tone. The unemotional language of the narration contrasts eerily with the episode’s inherent pathos. Rosanette desperately wants to believe that the baby’s soul is still alive, which raises the issue of what happens to the soul after death. Joyce injects the issue of the soul into the opening scene of the Bloom section of his text by having Bloom’s wife, a singer show interest in metempsychosis, or ‘‘transmigration of souls.’’ This resonates elsewhere in A Sentimental Education than just in the death of Rosanette’s and Fre´de´ric’s baby. Madame Dambreuse ‘‘believed in the transmigration of souls,’’ and in the same sentence we are told ‘‘she played the piano with steely accuracy’’ (423). Molly remembers firing a maid ostensibly for stealing oysters but actually because she thought the girl had aroused the interest of Molly’s husband Leopold Bloom. Likewise, Flaubert’s character ‘‘was high-handed with her domestic staff ’’ (424). Are we really seeing closely similar content deformed by the rules we are positing or just random details, some similar some different, that no theory need be invoked to understand? Any one of these could be coincidental, but suppose we ask a question: ‘‘In what novel do we find an unfaithful wife who has musical talent, is stern with her servants, and fascinated by reincarnation?’’ Relying on the expectations of randomness, would we expect to find two novels that fit perfectly as a correct answer? If we answer that randomness does not explain the connections and differences, then we are looking for a rule that applies. I would suggest compression of characters. In A Sentimental Education, Madame Dambreuse has the three elements also characteristic of Molly Bloom listed immediately above, but Rosanette is the character whose infant son died and whose relationship with the baby’s father deteriorates as a result of the death. Thus five characteristics of Molly Bloom combine as the result of the compression of the two characters into one. Another transformation results from the operation of the fifth posited rule, splitting of characters. This might provide a context for understanding a puzzle: that while both authors narrate their brothel scenes near the end of their novels, Flaubert’s actually occurred as almost the earliest event in his novel’s chronology. Two friends, reunited in middle age, after years of separation, ‘‘told each other the story at great length.’’ Then they agree ‘‘that was our best time’’ (464). Flaubert’s decision to leave this un-narrated until the very end and to present it as the best time of the characters introduces strangeness that, while different than the strangeness that Joyce generates, presents a similar puzzle.

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Perhaps this strangeness prepares us for Flaubert’s statement that nineteen years later, when Fre´de´ric is in his forties, ‘‘desire had lost its edge’’ for, and ‘‘the very springs of feeling had dried up’’ (455). Thus we have the operation of another rule in Ricoeur’s concept of rule-governed deformation, splitting of characters. The younger Fre´de´ric is like Stephen Dedalus while the older one is like Leopold Bloom. Although this analysis has not encompassed all of the similarities noted on the literary quiz, perhaps the above will serve as a representative example of how Ricoeur’s concept of rule-governed deformation answers the challenge to creativity. Paul Ricoeur, himself, implies that his theory does not account completely for the sense of originality experienced by the reader. Ricoeur suggests how to trace the completed process: ‘‘Finally, it is the reader who completes’’ the process (77). Relying on two books, T he L iterary Work of Art by Roman Ingarden and T he Act of Reading by Wolfgang Iser, Ricoeur says that ‘‘written work is a sketch for reading.’’ Reading ‘‘consists of holes, lacunae, zones of indetermination, which, as in Joyce’s Ulysses, challenge the reader’s capacity to configure what the author seems to take malign delight in defiguring’’ (77). I selected Ulysses for this analysis because people’s reaction that they are reading something original is virtually unanimous with this text; this makes Ulysses an unmistakable example for an exploration of the supposed ‘‘originality paradox.’’ Paul Ricoeur confirms me in this, when he presents Ulysses as one of the ‘‘extreme cases’’ where the reader is ‘‘almost abandoned by the work’’; and the reader, thus, ‘‘carries the burden of emplotment’’ (77). This suggests that one way that rule-governed deformation produces the experience of originality is by prompting the reader to fill the holes in the text in new ways. Ricoeur says that the ‘‘act of reading’’ is an ‘‘operator,’’ and reading is ‘‘the final indicator of the refiguring of the world of action under the sign of the plot’’ (77). The idea of rule-governed deformation is one small element in Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume work of T ime and Narrative. Perhaps, Paul Ricoeur’s main objective in this work is not to defend literary creativity, but I believe that his concept of rule-governed deformation, applied to James Joyce’s Ulysses, allows such a defense. L oras College NOTES 1 This article continues a discussion begun in ‘‘Albee’s W ho’s Af raid of V irginia Woolf ?: The Issue of Originality’’ which I wrote with Professor Jerre Collins of the University of

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Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA, and I am deeply indebted to my co-author of that work for his contribution to both the ideas and details I use in this paper. 2 Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus (1947) engages the issue of the struggle to create original music, and a reader can easily apply Mann’s ideas to literature. 3 David Hyman notes the similarity between Joyce’s character The Citizen and Flaubert’s The Citizen. However, among the large number of commentators who note Flaubert’s importance to Joyce, I have found none of the other similarities mentioned in the critical literature on Joyce.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Collins Jerre and Raymond J. Wilson III. ‘‘Albee’s W ho’s Afraid of V irginia Woolf ?: The Issue of Originality,’’ American Drama (Spring 1993): 50–75. Baldick, Robert. ‘‘Introduction’’ in Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (1869). Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin, 1964, 7–13. Barthes, Roland. ‘‘The Death of the Author.’’ Image–Music–T ext. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 142–48. Barthes, Roland. ‘‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.’’ Image–Music–T ext. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 79–124. Barthes, Roland. T he Pleasure of the T ext. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Bate, Walter Jackson. T he Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, MA: BelknapHarvard, 1970. Derrida, Jacques. W riting and DiVerence. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Flaubert, Gustave. A Sentimental Education. Translated by Douglas Parme´e. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Foucault, Michel. T he Archeology of Knowledge and T he Discourse on L anguage. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York, Pantheon, 1972. Hyman, David. ‘‘Cyclops’’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Edited by Clive Hart and David Hyman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. McFarland, Thomas. ‘‘The Originality Paradox.’’ New L iterary History 5 (Spring 1974): 447–476. Parme´e, Douglas. ‘‘Introduction’’, in Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (1869). Translated by Douglas Parme´e. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, vii–xxvii. Ricoeur, Paul. T ime and Narrative. Vol. I. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

MICHEL DION

BASIC CONDITIONINGS OF THE INNER AND CORPOREAL LIFE Representations from T wo Major Novelists of the 19th and 20th Century L iterature (Dostoyevsky, Proust)

INTRODUCTION

Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) and Proust (1871–1922) constitute two major novelists who have emphasized, in their respective works, the inner and corporeal life and its basic conditionings. However, very few researches reflect the dialectics between the inner and the corporeal life, as it is manifested within Dostoyevsky’s and Proust’s novels. Marcel Proust (‘‘In Remembrance of Things Past’’; ‘‘Against Sainte-Beuve’’) is concerned with the notion of inner life and personal change, and particularly with the idea of the ‘‘Other’’ as it is present in the self. He described many conditionings of the corporeal life, as they are expressed throughout adult life, maturity and old age. More specifically, Proust was deeply aware of the role played by sickness, pain and death in human existence. There are realities we cannot explain to those who do not bear them, within their selves. On the other hand, F. Dostoyevsky (‘‘Brothers Karamazov’’; ‘‘Crime and Punishment’’; ‘‘The Idiot’’; ‘‘The Possessed’’) deepened the inner life itself in exploring different models of relationships with God (including unbelief ). Unlike Proust, he was much more interested in childhood and youth, even in the way he dealt with suffering and death. A. THE INNER LIFE AND CHANGE

According to Proust, our spirit cannot be the slave of any form. Spirit governs the world. Body is imprisoning the spirit, although we never know what is hidden in our soul. Having a body is the greatest threat for spirit. The thinking human life is a miraculous process perfecting animal and physical life. Nature has instituted the division of bodies but has neglected to make the interpenetration of souls possible.1 1. Notions of Change and Inner L ife Everything is changing in the world because of an inner principle we, until then, were not aware of. Everything that seems to be permanent is 313 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 313–330. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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always changing, particularly where a specific change was perceived as impossible. In our inner life, everything is connected with the other elements and is superposing itself to prior experiences. Our own personality (particularly our affects and passions) is changing neither more slowly or more quickly than societies. Our heart is changing very slowly, so that we are actually able to detect various successive states, but never the change itself that is actualizing through many steps. Our changing life is substituting realities to fictions. Our changing life implies to awaken our forgotten ‘‘selves’’ (past emotional/cognitive/relational states) and to reinforce such remembering, even when they provoke more suffering. Others are changing through their relationships with us as well as in their own inner life. Change also implies that things are repeating themselves, although it is done through important variations.2 Sometimes, we are contradicting our inner inclinations or dispositions. But, there is a basic trend of self-transcendence, that is, an inner disposition leading to overcome the limits of our soul. We are longer our ‘‘self ’’ when we are only focusing our whole life on others’ perceptions, so that what they have said or done is more important than our own personal life. There is a basic limitation to inner change: there is an inner ‘‘garden’’ that remains unavoidable during our whole life. Nobody wants to make this ‘‘inner garden’’ (or soul) available to everybody.3 2. T he Other within the Self Proust’s theory of relationships with others is based on the real ability to perceive the self in its complex network. D’une part, la re´alite´ de l’autre est inconnaissable (...) D’autre part, il sugge`re que cette re´alite´ est insignifiante ou meˆme inexistante: autrui n’e´tant rien que le re´ve´lateur d’un ordre ge´ne´ral. Mais qu’il s’efface dans l’ombre de l’inconnaissable (...) ou dans la clarte´ des grandes lois, de toute fac¸on, le personnage, l’eˆtre individuel, disparaıˆt. (...) Le mouvement vers le re´el qui commande l’œuvre de´route de la recherche d’autrui, vers quoi peut-il donc se tourner, sinon vers la possession de soi-meˆme?4

According to Proust, the ‘‘other in the self ’’ is that psychical component that is responsible to think, so that we do not have to assume such a burden. We are never only one self. Sometimes, we are too anxious to remain in the sole presence of our self. We then need to discuss with our own self, as if it would be a stranger. Although we believe to be a unique self (self-perceived self ), there is another self in us, a true self that is symmetric with our self-perceived self but that is qualitatively different

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(with reference points and symbols that seem quite strange to us). Under the self-perceived self there are many veiled, hidden selves. A given being is a superposition of many selves, desires and beings’ remembering. Many selves constitute integral part of our being. Our self is made of a changing superposition of successive states of mind. The old days are put on the surface of older times; and the older times are buried under the surface of the future. Every old day is kept within ourselves. At every moment, we feel that old days are coming at the surface of our present. There is a ‘‘substitute self ’’ that destiny keeps for those situations in which our self is too harmed. The substitute self is then representing the whole self. The substitution occasionally happens, most of the time unconsciously. We are aware of that change of self only when it implies a great pain,. We have then become someone else, someone for whom the pain of the predecessor is nothing but others’ suffering. We are not afflicted by the fact we have become a new self (implying a total death of the self we were until then). In a given day, we can successively be different (sometimes contradictory) selves: the ambitious self, the disinterested self, the mischievous self, the kind self. The disappearing self can be modified momentarily (when its object is the temperament) or in a permanent way (when its object is passions).5 Le point de depart de cette vaste ‹fable philosophique› consiste a` refuser absolument la re´ification de soi-meˆme par autrui. L’ego re´clame le droit d’eˆtre reconnu comme un moi ve´ritable. Or, accepter de se laisser saisir dans le cadre des qualite´s que vous accorde autrui, c’est entrer dans un syste`me de relations objectivantes qui interdit a priori tout acce`s authentique a` l’autre conscience: je suis, tu es, nous sommes une addition de qualite´s (morales, sociales, ethniques, etc.) acquises une fois pour toutes. La premie`re e´tape de la compre´hension d’autrui se pre´sente donc comme un rapport originel (car on ne part pas du moi pur, mais du regard, du de´sir ou du jugement d’autrui) et douloureux (puisqu’il s’agit d’e´chapper a` autrui). Ce paradoxe va de´terminer tout l’itine´raire philosophique du rapport d’autrui chez Dostoyevsky.6

In a same person, there are many selves. Some are inherited from the mother, others from the father. The order of superposition of such selves is continuously reversed through our daily life, so that we are unable to distinguish all parts of our being and their respective influence. We are various selves, according to persons who are looking at us and considering our own being. There is a set of juxtaposed selves that are dying one after the other. Those ‘‘moral cells’’ that constitute a given being are more sustainable than the being itself. We are continuously copying the traits of our real being, and never those of the person we would like to be. The more we becomes our self, the more the familial traits are emphasized.

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Beings are developing themselves in us (inner development) as well as out of us (outsider development), so that one kind of development (inner or outsider) has an influence on the other. Sometimes, we are reducing others to components of their beings that are closer to our self. We are thus reducing the mystery of others that seem different to us, through the use of imagination.7 3. Unbelief and Faith in God Believers are convinced that soul eternally lives. But there is no immortality without God. Believers are convinced of God’s existence through their experience of love. As much as our love for others is continuously growing, we become more convinced of God’s existence and the immortality of soul. Through a total self-abnegation (like in holiness), we strongly believe in God, so that our soul cannot be shaken by doubts. God is necessary; He must exist. God is necessary because He is the only being we can eternally love. If God does not exist, then human being is God. If God exists, then He owns all wills, so that without His Will, we are impotent beings. If God does not exist, we own all wills. The only refuge of human being in the midst of suffering is the faith in God (and the hope in eternal life). We need to believe that there is somewhere an absolute happiness and an absolute peace for everybody. The law of human existence consists in the possibility for human being to face someone who is Absolute, Infinite, the Eternal Thought. Without such a belief, people refuse to live, and die with despair. Our immortality is necessary since God cannot extinguish our love we had for Him Love is beyond being. That’s why if we have loved God, He cannot extinguish us (and our love for Him), putting him in nothingness. If God exists, we are immortal. Faith cannot be imposed to nobody. We believe in God, because we want to believe in Him. But in human existence, everything is defined while in the spiritual realm, there is nothing but undetermined equations. God has simply put in every soul a ‘‘germ of faith’’ that could grows and constitutes our refuge in face of human predicament.8 Without immortality, there is no virtue. Thus, everything is allowed; there is no crime, no sin. There is no God’s Word without an exemplar conduct. Without the Word of God, people will perish, since our soul needs such a divine Word. Every living being (an insect, a bee, for instance) knows its own aims through its instincts; it continuously accomplishes the divine mystery. If God (and immortality) does not exist, everything is allowed. Human beings can release themselves from the rules of tradi-

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tional morality, from which they were slaves. Such a moral nihilism teaches that nothing will no longer be prohibited. Nothing could require that people love each other. If love has been shown on Earth, it is due to the belief in immortality. If we destroy that faith in immortality, love will no longer be able to actualize itself. Without immortality, there is no virtue. There will no longer be immoral behaviors and thoughts. Everything will be allowed. If God does not exist – if it is an idea created by humanity – then human being is the king of the universes. How could he be virtuous without God? Some thought we can love humanity without God. But if God does not exist, virtue is useless.9 Without the human invention of God, there would never be civilizations. As said Voltaire (1694–1778) (‘‘E´pıˆtre a` l’auteur des trois impostures’’), if God would not exist, we should invent it. God is nothing but an hypothesis, but it is required to world’s order. What is striking is not that God really exists, but rather that this (holy and wise) idea of the necessity of God’s existence is born in the mind of a malicious (human) being. If God exists and has created the Universe, He has made it according to Euclide’s geometry (3th century) and has given to us the notion of three spatial dimensions. But the question of the existence of God is beyond the abilities of human mind. That’s why we should admit God’s existence, His wisdom and (unknowable) Will and believe in the eternal harmony and Universal order, said Dostoyevsky. We should believe in God all beings tend to be united with. The Universe is in God, and is itself God. Although they sometimes do not admit it, people believe: (1) in God (although they could deny His Creation), (2) in the fact that suffering will disappear; (3) in the fact that at the end of the drama, where eternal harmony will be realized, a revelation will occur, so that everything will be forgiven and justified.10 In the history of peoples and nations, reason and science have played a secondary role. Peoples and nations are constituted and have evolved through a sovereign power whose origin remains unknown and cannot be explained. Such a power is the continuous affirmation of being and the negation of death. Such a power is the spirit of life (according to Scripture), the aesthetic principle, the moral principle, the quest for God. The aim of every people has always been the quest for God, as the Unique and the only true God. God is the synthetic personality of the people. Every nation has always had its own God. But there was never a common God to all peoples and nations. When peoples and nations share a same God, it means that such peoples and nations are running to their collective death, the disappearance of their faith. The more a people or nation is

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strong, the more its God differs from other Gods. No people or nation, in past historical periods, was amoral, that is without any notion of good and evil. Every people or nation owns its own concepts of good and evil. When peoples or nations share the same notions of good and evil, then such peoples or nations are destructing themselves, and the distinction between good is evil is progressively disappearing. Every people or nation needs to own its own God and negates all other Gods. That was the basic belief of all great nations that have played a major role in the history. If a great people or nation no longer believes that it is the only one that can save other peoples or nations, it has lost its greatness and has become a pure ethnographic matter.11 B. THE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONINGS IN CORPOREAL AND INNER LIFE

Other’s face seems to never change when we look at it, precisely because such changes are so lent that we cannot perceive them. Our face is made of gestures that got a permanent presence (through habit). When we look at other’s face, we adopt a global perspective first; then, in a second phase of the observation, we could analyze some of its parts. The aspects of a given face could change and have a different meaning if they are assembled in a different way. According to Proust, human being is that ‘‘being without fixed age’’. We have the faculty to become again, in few seconds, much younger, so that we have ready to hand many periods of our life that we can make reborn, for a minute or an hour. We do not see our own age and corporeal form. We only see that of others.12 According to Dostoyevsky, the fate of individuals can be grasped through their corporeal dynamics that integrates their spiritual life. Inner change cannot be explained by an ideological transformation or a practical dead end. Dostoyevsky tries to overcome the classical dualism of body and spirit.13 1. Childhood Children try to hide that they have felt pleasure, because they fear that their parents will no longer take care of them. On the other hand, children try to hide they had a profound sorrow, since they want to avoid this unavoidable fact: their parents will take care of them too much. When adults attempt not to reveal some truths to their children, the result is that children are developing a feeling of persecution and resentment. Children felt that their parents are lying to them. They even have an

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impression to know that veiled truth. Proust said that adults are less courageous than children, because their life is less cruel. But children have many predispositions for evil.14 Dostoyevsky considered children with a lot of compassion and respect, although he reflected, in his novels, that childhood is full of terrible events. Pour quelques enfants choye´s, heureux, vivaces dans l’œuvre de Dostoyevsky, combien, en fait, d’enfants abandonne´s, battus, viole´s, agonisants par maladie, tue´s ou accule´s au suicide. Leurs silhouettes freˆles se glissent a` travers toutes les pages, voisinant avec de petits fre`res et sœurs morts, de petits cercueils.15

In order to get the full trust of children, said Dostoyevsky, we must be pragmatic and treat them as equal ‘‘partners’’. Children are the future of humankind. They reflect the image of Christ and thus belong to the Kingdom of God, said Dostoyevsky. That’s why God commands to respect and love them. The birth of a new being is a great mystery. it means a new spirit, a new thought, a new love. In our world, there is nothing greater than that. Dostoyevsky believed that we could say everything to children. Adults do not deeply know children (although they are their daughters and sons). We should never hide anything to them, since they actually know what we try to veil. Children can notice that their fathers consider them as being unable to understand and to exert their discernment. On the contrary, children can understand anything. In very conflicting situations, children can give a very important advice to adults. Through the influence of children, our soul becomes more tender and kind.16 Until they are seven years old, children are qualitatively different from adults. They seem to represent a different being, to have a different nature than mature human beings. Children look at some objects with a respectful fear that increases their pleasure. When children play at ‘‘war (or thief ) games’’ at school, they are satisfying an artistic need that is growing in their souls. Sometimes, their artistic creation is much more successful than theatre ... representations. Young people naturally play as actors, while we go to the theater and look at ‘‘professional actors’’.17 2. Youth According to Proust, adolescence is the only period of life in which we actually learn something important. In the ‘‘first youth’’, we expect that only the power of our thought will make our ideals actualizing in our

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life. Youth is characterized by the fact that many kinds of pain can be quickly healed, due to the vitality of young people. Youth is basically characterized by an imprudent behavior and judgment.18 Youth is made of a spirit of independence, the newness of ideas and sometimes a presumptuous attitude. With young people, we learn new things. In observing youth, we learn and discern many important things. Youth is fascinated by intelligence, joyful subtleness (of the spirit) – which is a beauty of nature and a consolation of human life – and abstract arguments of reason. Some impressions are eternally kept within the consciousness of young people so that they constitute a decisive factor for their future life. Youth often feels a hurt self-love and a generous enthusiasm.19 According to Dostoyevsky, the basic power of youth lies in the fact that young people have the future of humankind in their hands. La jeunesse apparaıˆt chez Dostoyevsky comme une force soit d’amplification, soit de re´action radicale par rapport aux valeurs de la ge´ne´ration pre´ce´dente. (...) La jeunesse apparaı´t surtout comme une force impe´tueuse et de´vastatrice, mue par une violence incontroˆlable. (...) La volonte´ de puissance caracte´rise e´galement cette jeunesse impe´tueuse, avant toute chose, c’est sa capacite´ a` agir, a` controˆler les autres. (...)20

We must protect youth against itself. We cannot spend our own life on the heights of imagination. We must protect youth against the abyss in which the intolerance of elders attract them. We must keep an attitude of benevolence and sympathy towards youth. Youth is always full of power and enthusiastic. The only thing that could change from a generation to another is the aim, the ideal identified by the youth. Youth often experiment excessive passions and foolish clans. That’s why we often consider their faults as inevitable.21 3. Adult life and Maturity In the ‘‘second part of our life’’ (which is not specified), we usually develop a different personality than that we had earlier. It could get a feeling of greatness as well as a voluntarily reduced form and contents. It is often the opposite of the ‘‘first’’ personality. According to Proust, there is period of life in which we believe that satisfying our body will stimulate the power of our spirit, a period where the fatigue of our mind (that makes us more materialistic) and our decreasing activity (that are connected to influences which are passively received) make us admitting that there are perhaps some privileged bodies and occupations which can naturally

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realize our ideals. Proust believed that young virtuous people are servants of the passions they have become aware of. Around fifty years old, said Proust, women are deepening a new kind of beauty (and youth). Such modifications cannot be realized by the too beautiful and the too ugly women. The most beautiful women have definitive lines that cannot be changed so that they are transforming themselves in statues. The most ugly women apparently are not progressively becoming older; they rather always remain the same. Some men and women appear to us as if they would have kept the same age. However, when we are closer to them, the reality is quite different. According to Proust, women are continuously struggling against old age and are searching for a beauty that is quickly going far from them. Women tend to keep in touch with the individuality of their charm, although the new lines of their face has changed the individuality they were dreaming about or that they had in the past.22 When we are thirty years old, we keep a noble self-expression, although we are deceiving ourselves. The second half of our life is determined by habits acquired during the first half of our existence. Around fifty years old, the ‘‘true’’ life begins, said Dostoyevsky. In the wealthy social classes, men who are fifty years old are – sometimes unconsciously -considering themselves as superior beings.23 4. Sickness and Pain Our physical suffering is not dependent from our thought. Our mind can focus on a felt pain and become aware that such a pain has increased or decreased. Suffering is, above all, an organic need to become aware of a new state of body/spirit that is troubling our inner peace. We express our promises towards goodness or knowledge, while we are absolutely obeying to pain. The most terrible reality give us both suffering and the joy to discover unexpected things, since it gives a new and clearer form to what we unconsciously are thinking about. Our life can release us from a pain that seemed unavoidable. Such a release is actually realized in different conditions. Sometimes, such conditions are the opposite than the reality it can heal. Within our soul, there are things we are deeply attached to, even unconsciously. According to Proust, there are two possibilities: (a) either if we live without them, it is because everyday we project in the future that moment when we will possess them, because of a fear to suffer; (b) or if we live with them, we believe we are responsible to keep them as they are. But if a given being we seem indifferent to is leaving us, we are no longer able to live.24

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We could love others. The act that our love cannot be perceived by the other is always suffering. We are then suffering in our thoughts that are modified through continuous changes. However, the pain we would have to loose them when we are alone and are giving to them the form we want, such a pain is qualitatively different of that following from a moral incident that is provoked not by people but rather by the way we have learned we will never see them again. There is something within events themselves that could amplify and even distort the nature of the pain that others could impose to us. We should be able to feel every pain while controlling our self so that we can look at such a suffering, even if it has been provoked by a malicious mind.25 Pain is the extended line of an imposed moral shock. It tends to change its form. We usually wish to get rid of it in getting more information about it. We usually want to impose on pain many kinds of metamorphosis. Such an attitude is much less courageous than to keep the pain as it is. Human beings like to invent legends and tales in order to help them to support existential pain. Pain puts us in an intimate relationships with the most insignificant things. Then, those things seem to get charm and mystery. Pain could radically modify reality as such. Pain does not need memory, since it will impose its effects on our body. We should distinguish between physical evils that are provoked by a physical agent and those that are caused by the intelligence (particularly, memory). Our thought has a power to renew things, but is also characterized by the impossibility to safeguard our self, an impossibility that could even be grounded in our physical body.26 In our earthly mind, we know that suffering exists, that there are no guilty people, that everything is interdependent. We need compensation (in our finite existence) for that; otherwise, it will give birth to selfdestructive attitude. We cannot understand how children should suffer in order to participate (through their suffering) in a somewhat ‘‘eternal harmony’’. Children are not materials to prepare the eternal harmony. All human beings (except children) participate in sin and damnation. All human beings are collectively guilty of their fathers’ faults. But such a truth cannot be applied to children. The suffering of children cannot be used to perfect the sum of pains required to reach truth. Evil makes events occurring in human life and created irrational realities, in a given order. The result of such events is to make people suffering. On the other hand, they are living a real (and not imaginary) life, since suffering is life. Without suffering, life will offer no pleasure as such.27

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There is a level of suffering that could no longer be tolerated. When they are reaching that level of pain, people get rid of their pride and admit they have been conquered by suffering. When we are suffering, we should keep a high level of serenity. Nowadays, moral serenity is lacking. People do not understand each other. People do not want to understand others’ perspective. Our world is full of terror. Suffering is required to have a large conscience and a deep heart. In order to be an authentic being, we must have felt a deep sorrow. We must accept and assume our suffering. Some physical pains can distract our mind from moral suffering. The main suffering, the most intense one, could be in the expectation of our death, especially when the moment of our death can be precisely determined, so that we know our soul will leave our body, in an hour, in ten minutes, in thirty seconds, or the next second. Real suffering can make someone more serious and courageous, even for a short period of time. A true pain can give intelligence to idiots, again for a short period of time.28 Some symptoms are common to various kinds of sickness. According to Proust, the origin (and the source of propagation or expansion) of some kinds of sickness can be identified or closely connected to specific physical spaces. Sickness is producing some physical changes in our face. Our organs are atrophying or become stronger according to the fact that we more or less need their powerful functioning. People having the same sickness are closer than others. Sick people exaggerates politeness, as it is the case with kings. We are ready to reduce the martyrdom of sick people when we benefit from the effects of such an action.29 Some anxious (nervous) people who are faking a given sickness will eventually become really sick, and that sickness will acquire a permanent duration. Anxious (nervous) people are sensitive and egoistic beings. They cannot accept that other are exhibiting their own sickness, since they want to see others focusing their attention to their own sickness. Among anxious (nervous) people, there is part of fatigue that depends on the attention they put to their psychical condition and that can only exert its influence through memory. There is a progressive loss of energy within our nervous system when it becomes older. It is also true for our permanent self, as well as for our successive selves that are part of our permanent self.30 We are suddenly tired or exhausted when we fear to be like that. In order to recover our energy, we must forget such a feeling to be exhausted. Even exhausted people can find in their own words some powers they are unfortunately unable to transmit to people they are talking with –

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those ‘‘listeners’’ becoming more and more exhausted as far as others are feeling awakened and powerful. The feeling of being tired or exhausted is the organic accomplishment of a prejudice or a first impression. Neurasthenic people will be more exhausted if we make them aware that they are tired. Neurasthenic people could borrow different personalities: some are anxious others (neurotic) seem to be calm and relax. However, both have the same anxiety in common. Neurasthenic people would like to be healed, but they want to keep their maniac attitudes.31 Some patients are searching to be healed through some means that contribute to expand the effects of the sickness. In fact, they loved their sickness and would cease to love it if they would recognize the destructive nature of those means. Sometimes, we can heal some people in making them touching a living person where they were seeing a dead person, so that the dead person has to leave the real world because it has no longer room to exist for such people. But, we often suggest to others that some medical theories would benefit to their health and well-being, while we could benefit from them too.32 There are some permanent defaults of the personality that cannot be healed. We should not try to be healed from kinds of minor sickness that protects us against the worst ones. There are some permanent pathological states that seem to immunize against other kinds of sickness. There are some ‘‘usual’’ pathological states we are not fearing of. However, an unavoidable incident could give them an extreme gravity. Phobia can have as much forms than the uncertain evil which is its subject matter. Chronic states of sickness use pretexts to reborn. Those meaningless lives of maniac people who restraint their pleasures and have masochistic practices are rarely changing and are thus quite predictable. Some kinds of foolishness do not influence the nature of thought. Except their moments of crisis, foolish individuals are able to keep good sense, good reasoning.33 As to physical pain, it is determined (and imposed) by the sickness itself. Sickness can make us be closer to death than to life, so that we are able to identify what we could loose from life (some kinds of ‘‘unknown countries’’). However, when the risk to die is no longer there, we tend to go ahead with routine, daily dull life experiences, as if those ‘‘unknown countries’’ would have never existed. In certain kinds of sickness, patients could confuse some secondary effects with the sickness itself. When those effects cease, patients are astonished to feel that they are closer to be healed than what they thought.34

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Some believe that foolish people have committed a logical mistake, misused their discernment so that they have developed a mistaken worldview. In that case, we would only refute the reasoning process (and arguments) of those people in order to heal them. Indeed, this is not the whole reality. Their sickness has also physical and biological components. Apathy could look like a state of deadly indifference characterizing people who are dying. Some people cannot know how we are suffering. Individuals rarely agree to recognize others’ suffering. But innocent people (especially children) should not suffer to expiate others’ fault.35 5. Old Age and Death Old people who are preparing themselves to death are renouncing to many things in their daily life. It is a similar attitude of renouncement we could find out between friends and lovers. Renouncing to material goods implies the conviction that communication will no longer be possible in this world. Proust seems to presuppose that there would be another kind of communication in the after-life condition. For some old women, the fatigue of old age makes difficult to pass from the remembering of things past to the present. Old age makes us unable to go ahead with projects we could realize when we were younger. However, we are still able to desire. It is only in the ‘‘very old age’’ that a renouncement to desires actually appears. But it is then due to the fact that those people had to abandon any type of action. They are only surviving. Some people face old age (or death) with indifference, because they have much less imagination (and not because they are more courageous). When we rarely live ‘‘within our self ’’ and are not surprised by the accumulation of years (since, in our daily life, we usually, make the addition of days, weeks and months), we are not astonished to find out that we never cease to live in Time. Old age is a reality about which we always keep an abstract emotion. We participate in our children’s wedding without understanding (because of our fear) what it actually means. For some old people, the usage of material faculties is interpreted (by their children) as being impregnated by an extraordinary moral beauty. Old people do not necessarily express goodness, justice, and kindness.36 Through the disappearance of our youth it is difficult to believe that those who were young are old. We are not able to grasp that those who are now old have been very young in the past, and that the very young now will become old in the future. This is the same matter coming from the same body. Time often leads to a premature old age. The phenomenon

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of old age takes few social habits into account. People from various social classes seem to become very old people in the same manner. Old people have much less clairvoyance. Their fatigue makes their vitality radically decreasing. Sometimes, the physical transformation through time makes very difficult to recognize someone. While in her youth, a women could express a deep melancholy through her face, she uses her face to make others laughing. Our prejudice is that people will always remain the same. That’s why we are astonished to find that they are older than what we believed. If our prejudice would be that all people are old, we would actually find them younger when we would meet them. Although we know that years are accumulating, one after the other, and that old age is succeeding to adult life, the manner in which we perceive the moving universe (that is modified through Time) is making it immobile. We always consider young the people we have known when they were young. We also project the virtues of old age to those we have known as old people.37 Elders can be enslaved by passion and have a blind reason, so that their hope could be irrational. In such a situation, elders show have a strong self-love. Such elders sin and easily find out an excuse for their wrong behavior. In old age, remembering often comes from a neglected, forgotten past. In that case, they come within our consciousness with a lot of details.38 Others’ death seems to be a definitive incident so that we are unable to think about our own death. That’s why we systematically avoid any reflection about our own death. It is not because others are dead that our affection for us is decreasing. It is rather because we are dying to ourselves. Death is not useless. Death actually influences us. People believe that death is not a source of fear, since they think about it when they are in a good health. They are introducing a negative idea in a general state of good health that could be modified by a near death. The fear of death does not govern the world; some people are ready to risk death for many purposes. The death of our self is neither impossible nor extraordinary. It is consuming everyday, even against our own will. The idea that we will die is more cruel than dying. But it is less cruel than the idea that another is dead. Death is the reality where there is neither will nor knowledge. In our mind, a dead body is not actually dead. It has an ‘‘aura of life’’ that makes it possible to be present in our thoughts as if it would be living. When we are reasoning about death, we cannot represent something else than life. When we are reasoning about what will happen after our death, we are projecting our still living being. The reality of dead persons actually survives for a short period of time. Death

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acts as an absence. Death is breaking our love of life and will ‘‘heal’’ us from any desire of immortality. Death is subjected to some laws. Accidental death is perhaps known (in advance) by gods and is revealed by an unconscious/conscious sadness.39 We cannot love without suffering; we cannot suffer without learning truths. That’s why we look at death as a self-releasing process. Death cannot reduce the sufferings of jealousy. Those who have met truth before their death have an advantage on others. Any human death is simplifying others’ existence. Death that is within our self (as the long process of dying begun since our birth) actually veils our life. Life is the terrible act to be on the road leading to our death. When people are actually dead, there is a king of physical kindness and detachment from reality. As soon as we are dead, it is as if we would have never existed. Children often provoke our own impression that we will continue to exist after our death. Our being-to-survive (that is, our child) can often show a passionate tenderness towards our own being-having-to-die.40 As said Kristeva (1994), Proust has been the precursor of the ‘‘beingtowards-death’’ and has characterized many forms that such a mode of being can be manifested. But it is only through the mediation of imagination that such expressions are made possible. (...) la mise en e´vidence par Proust de la structure imaginaire – pour autant que celle-ci met en volume le sens, sens du temps et de la mort, et l’e´largissement jusqu’a` la passion du sens dans le sensible – re´clame du lecteur contemporain un nouveau rapport a` l’Eˆtre. (...) l’espace imaginaire demeure celui, le seul, ou` se ressource la singularite´ insaisissable, toujours fuyante en avant et depuis, l’avant a` rebours d’elle-meˆme (...) l’imaginaire polymorphe propose une alternative (...) Il s’agit d’une troisie`me voie entre l’impatience de l’histoire dont nous refusons autant les promesses que les de´sastres, et la passion des corps re´duits aux seuls langages utilitaires, e´conomisant les me´taphores et les ambiguı¨te´s.41

When we are aware of our death, there could be a kind of mystical fear that is connected to the feeling of its presence in our life. We fear death because we love life. Believers strongly affirm that life exists and that death does not exist, even if every living being in this world will die. Everyday, many beings must die, in order to make possible for the whole world to subsist.42 According to Dostoyevsky, our world is living within delusions and is deceiving itself. Death consciousness gives a sense to the nature of life itself.43 CONCLUSION

According to Proust, everybody is unique and is made of various characteristics, whether it is on his (her) face and body. We do not see our body

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in the same way as others look at it. When we are no longer with someone, we only have access to remembering and our memory has chosen (and exaggerated) some aspects of other’s body and face. There is a deep difference between what is got through remembering and the reality itself. Every being is destroyed when we no longer see it, so that when get in touch with him (her) again, there is a kind of new creation, different of all prior appearances. Remembering and imagination could focus on a different aspect of a given being, at different steps of the observer’s life. We could localize in other’s body all potentialities of his (her) life, his (her) remembering. Within our body, said Proust, there is an instinct of what could help or save us (as there is an instinct of our moral duties within our heart). According to Proust, everything exists according to our own self. Everything is nothing but a set of appearances. We usually believe that things are as they seem to be. But we only have access to appearances. The most invisible aspects of a given individual are not the most essential.44 University of Sherbrooke NOTES 1 Marcel Proust, L a Prisonnie`re, pp. 192, 372; Albertine disparue, p. 28; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 336, 427. 2 Proust, Du coˆte´ de chez Swann, p. 96; L a Prisonnie`re, pp. 61, 70, 241, 314, 352; Albertine disparue, p. 73; L e temps retrouve´, p. 406. 3 Proust, Du coˆte´ de chez Swann, p. 97; Du coˆte´ de Guermantes, II, p. 554; Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, p. 107; L a Prisonnie`re, pp. 140, 249. 4 Gae´tan Picon, L ecture de Proust, Paris, Coll. «Folio/Essais», no. 266, Gallimard, 1995, pp. 89–91. ` l‘ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, II, p. 304; 5 Proust, Du coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, p. 234; A Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, pp. 196, 223; L a Prisonnie`re, p. 85; Albertine disparue, pp. 14, 126, 176, 222. 6 Michel Eltchaninoff, Dostoyevsky. Roman et philosophie, Paris, Coll. «Philosophies», PUF, 1998, 86–87. 7 Proust, Du coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, p. 193; Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, p. 18; Albertine disparue, pp. 81–82, 268–269; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 68, 316. 8 Fedor Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 92–93, 100, 202, 793, 795, 803–804; L es posse´de´s, pp. 604, 606, 648–649. 9 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 118, 135, 352–353, 401, 740, 744, 757, 780, 788, 808–809, 860. 10 Idem., pp. 203, 330–331, 697, 702. 11 Dostoyevsky, L es posse´de´s, pp. 252–253. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, II, pp. 286, 305, 345; Albertine disparue, p. 194; 12 Proust, A L e temps retrouve´, pp. 293, 299.

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13 Eltchaninoff, Dostoyevsky. Roman et philosophie (1998), pp. 114–115. 14 Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 338, 346, 354; L a confession d’une jeune fille, p. 8. 15 Marie-The´re´se Sutterman, Dostoyevsky et Flaubert. E´critures de l’e´pilepsie, Paris, PUF, 1993, p. 154. 16 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, p. 257; L es posse´de´s, p. 582; L ’idiot, pp. 90, 95; Crime et chaˆitment, p. 362. 17 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 334, 660, 678. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, II, pp. 107, 241; L a confession d’une jeune fille, 18 Proust, A pp. 16, 28, 19 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, p. 700; Crime et chaˆtiment, pp. 163, 375–376; L ’idiot, p. 726; L es posse´de´s, p. 390. 20 Pierre Lamble´, L a me´taphysique de l’histoire de Dostoyevsky. La philosophie de Dostoyevsky, tome 2, Essai de Litte´rature et Philosophie Compare´e, Paris, Coll. «Ouverture philosophique», L’Harmattan, 2001, pp. 39–40. 21 Dostoyevsky, L es posse´de´s, pp. 301–302, 478, 688, 692. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, I, p. 88; II, p. 241; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 64, 22 Proust, A 318–320. 23 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 78, 326; L es posse´de´s, p. 265; L ’idiot, p. 21. 24 Proust, Du coˆte´ de chez Swann, p. 288; L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, p. 331; Sodome et Gomorrhe, I, p. 221; II, p. 299; L a Prisonnie`re, p. 4; Albertine disparue, p. 42. 25 Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 211; Albertine disparue, p. 29; L e temps retrouve´, p. 259. 26 Proust, Albertine disparue, pp. 13, 47, 76, 100, 108, 224. 27 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 341–343, 799–800. 28 Dostoyevsly, L es fre`res Karamazov, p. 932; L es posse´de´s, pp. 205, 695; L ’idiot, p. 30; Crime et chaˆtiment, pp. 292, 362, 460, 498. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, I, pp. 162, 192; L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, II, p. 584; 29 A Sodome et Gomorrhe, I, p. 314; Albertine disparue, p. 21; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 214, 379. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, I, p. 320; L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, p. 14; L e 30 Proust, A temps retrouve´, pp. 13–14. 31 Proust, L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, pp. 50, 311; Sodome et Gomorrhe, I, p. 178; L a Prisonnie`re, p. 202; Albertine disparue, p. 184. 32 Proust, L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, p. 224; Albertine disparue, p. 185; L a confession d’une jeune fille, p. 44. 33 Proust, L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, I, pp. 86, 295; II, p. 188; L a Prisonnie`re, pp. 15, 37, 146; Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 182. 34 Proust, Albertine disparue, pp. 65, 115, 127. 35 Dostoyevsky, L es fre`res Karamazov, pp. 333–334; Crime et chaˆtiment, pp. 464–465, 479. 36 Proust, Du coˆte´ de chez Swann, p. 154; Albertine disparue, pp. 211, 215; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 299–307. 37 Proust, L e temps retrouve´, pp. 311–315, 320–321, 340–341, 408. 38 Dostoyevsky, L ’idiot, pp. 67, 321; L es posse´de´s, pp. 305, 692. 39 Sodome et Gomorrhe, I, p. 252; II, p. 55; Albertine disparue, pp. 8, 30, 66–67, 90, 93, 101–102, 176, 183, 223, 225; L e temps retrouve´, p. 203. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, I, pp. 193, 242–243; Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, 40 Proust, A p. 55; L e temps retrouve´, pp. 214, 275, 358; L a confession d’une jeune fille, p. 51. 41 Julia Kristeva, L e temps sensible. Proust et l’expe´rience litte´raire, Paris, NRF Essais, Gallimard, 1994, pp. 391–392.

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42 Dostoyevsky, Crime et chaˆtiment, p. 481; L ’idiot, p. 540; L es posse´de´s, pp. 119–120, 239, 263. 43 Pierre Lamble´, L es fondements du syste`me philosophique de Dostoyevsky, La philosophie de Dostoyevsky, tome 1, Essai de Litte´rature et Philosophie Compare´e, Paris, Coll. «Ouverture philosophique», L’Harmattan, 2001, pp. 131–143. ` l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, II, pp. 202, 313–315; L e coˆte´ de Guermantes, 44 Proust, A I, p. 40; Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, p. 223; L a Prisonnie`re, pp. 6, 175, 331–332.

CHIEDOZIE OKORO

PHENOMENOLOGY FOR WORLD RECONSTRUCTION

The theme for this year’s phenomenological conference centers on the logos. A theme that immediately calls to mind the ancients to whom logos always meant that immaterial substance (thought, reason, or wisdom) which precedes all material essences (James, 1959, 139–140). L ogos reminds us of the primevality and primordiality of thought, which as a foundation of existence amplifies the point that what really sustains existence as existence, is the human prowess of transcendence that rises from nothingness, projects into nothingness, and returns into nothingness. Sartre says ‘‘emptiness lies coiled up like a worm in the heart of being’’ (1969, 21). Yet human thought must rise beyond this apparent emptiness, demonstrate its prowess of transcendence and proceed to ascribe meaning and order into the chaos of the universe. As beings of transcendence, we are also beings of logos. The point is therefore re-inforced that logos is the highway to Being. This highway to Being is no other than hermeneutic phenomenology. It is clear from the above that the usage of logos that we have in mind, is never the same as that of traditional philosophers. Plato uses logos to mean eidos and the transcendental process by which the eidos are apprehended he calls the dialectics of reason. Rene´ Descartes takes cogito to mean logos and cogito institutes transcendence by way of methodic meditation. For Immanuel Kant, the mention of logos brings up the discourse on finite pure reason, which, by way of transcendental dialectics, autonomously institutes transcendence and legislates spectacles for comprehending and ordering reality. On the part of Edmund Husserl, logos would refer to the transcendental ego or the ego of egos, which by the processes of inductive generalization and imaginative variation (the epoche) ascends the Olympian height of phenomenological standpoint where upon visioning becomes beatific. Excellent as these interpretations of logos seem, they all in unison bear a common blemish. They speak of the ‘‘majesty of thought’’ the ‘‘autocracy of reason’’, and the ‘‘might of wisdom’’, and are incisive of the mind towards absolutism and impositionalism. In place of such logocentric expressions, we shall speak of the ‘‘piety of thought’’, the ‘‘constructions of reason’’, and the ‘‘meekness of wisdom’’. Our operating methodology is Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, which advocates the theory of openness and offers an inspiring insight 331 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCII, 331–355. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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into the tenet of epoche. One can say that for Heidegger, epoche is the transcendental process by which interpretation results, which should inculcate in us the attitude of openness. Yet, this process of transcendental interpretation is as well technical. It operates the trilogy of analysis, synthesis and application. Hermeneutics thus becomes the eidetic process by which openness is instituted. Openness itself is a state of mind that invites and puts us into the mood of silence, so that we could be predisposed to Being’s disclosedness. Needless to say, the Heideggerian notion of epoche and openness calls to mind the theory of involvement in African ontology. A being predisposed towards Being’s disclosedness is a being entangled, a being involved. For when we are open to Being, we are thus immersed in Being’s process of unconcealedness. Hence, to be involved is to be open and to be open is to be involved. The attempt to contrast the theory of openness with the notion of immersion or involvement definitely raises serious questions. Questions that border on: how we could get involved, but not subsumed into the manifold forms of Being’s disclosedness? How do we get opened up, in readiness for Being’s moments of unconcealedness, and still remain focused, not to forfeit that which has been gathered through deep meditation? These questions are no doubt, central to this essay. They are questions that will be addressed phenomenologically, in the sense that, they constitute a big puzzle to the phenomenological orientation itself. These questions afford us the opportunity to re-examine the phenomenological orientation with a view to seeing how adequately equipped it is in tackling the challenge of world reconstruction. Consequently, what ensues in this essay is the phenomenologization of phenomenology, intended to fortify phenomenology for the task of world transformation. This way, logos is critically reviewed, so that the shining light of Being could reveal to us more graceful ways of improving the human condition. THE INTERPLAY OF LOGOS AND PHENOMENON IN THE ENTERPRISE OF WORLD RECONSTRUCTION

World reconstruction is a self-imposed obligation made manifest by the interplay between logos and phenomenon. By the expression ‘‘self-imposed obligation’’, we mean that world reconstruction is an arduous task targeted towards the improvement of the human condition without any external interference. Whenever the great debate on world reconstruction ensues, human wisdom is challenged to device finer ways of ameliorating human existential problems for the emancipation of men from the drag-

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nets and the suffocating pains of nihilism. Thus, insofar as world reconstruction is a recurring theme, so would the interplay between logos and phenomenon remain a continuum, which makes the enterprise of world reconstruction becomes a perpetual struggle for us to remain resolute, shower care, show understanding and maintain eternal vigilance in our march towards self-regeneration and self-emancipation. Needless to say, world reconstruction is an authentic quest by man to recreate, reinvent, rediscover and improve the quality of human existence. It is a holistic and enlightenment project that should touch down on the peoples and cultures of the world, intended to distill, purify, and post us all beyond the palpable trappings of nihilism. Invariably, the enterprise of world reconstruction is a continuum that entails the transformation, reconstitution, reconfiguration and reordering of entities into finer states of affairs. This, on the instance, reminds us of the affinity between mind (form) and matter enunciated in Aristotle’s theory of hylemorphism, intended to resolve the great debate over which principle governs the world, permanence or change. The theory of hylemorphism simply states that dynamism is the principle that ensures balance in the universe, made possible by the creative symbiosis between logos and phenomenon. Some 4000 BC down the way we read from the Memphite theology/ philosophy that logos is the primordial principle of cosmic development accomplished through ‘‘utterance, planning and governance’’ (Onyewuenyi, 1994, 141). In the Memphite philosophy, logos is equated with another principle ptah referred to as the principle of intelligibility, illumination and reason. In essence, in Memphite philosophy, logos could mean any or all of the following: ‘‘thought’’, ‘‘creative power’’, ‘‘creative utterance’’, ‘‘order’’, and ‘‘form’’. L ogos is also addressed as the ‘‘artificer’’ and ‘‘potter’’ (James, 140). However, as the principle of intelligibility, the creative functions of logos is only prior to that of atum or fire (i.e. the Demiurge), which combines force with logos to bring about construction and reconstruction. Again, we read in the philosophies of Heraclitus and the Stoics that world reconfiguration and transformation would be impossible without the intermingling of logos and fire. In both the philosophies of Heraclitus and the Stoics, logos is interpreted to mean, ‘‘the cosmic principle of intelligibility, the principle of thought and of consciousness in which is contained the forms of all things to come’’ (Omoregbe, 1999, 11 and 72–73). Entangled in a perpetual dance of harmony with fire, logos ensures that the world is in an eternal state of becoming. It is clear in the above explanation, that logos is accorded primacy, primordiality and primevality over and above phenomenon. In the mind

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of the ancients, it was thought that that which is rational and intangible is superior to that which is sensual and tangible. In the same vein, the ancients concluded that since thought precedes action, it means that the immaterial has pre-eminence over and above the material. This gave rise to the ‘‘two realm cosmology’’ very much evident in the Parmenidean metaphysics. The vogue of any ‘‘two realm cosmology,’’ such as that of Parmenides and Plato, is to place preference upon reason above sense perception. Reason is equated with intelligibility, intangibility, indivisibility, indestructibility and originality. The perceptible world, on the other hand, is conceived as being tangible, divisible, material, destructible and illusory. The contrast between these substances with opposite attributes gave rise to the demarcation between ‘‘reality and appearance’’. In other words, whereas logos depicts ‘‘real reality’’ phenomenon is used to refer to ‘‘mere appearance. This classical way of demarcating logos from phenomenon, which characterized Western philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel can best be understood when a survey of the history of phenomenon is made. Phenomenon is the singular form of phenomena. In its most ordinary sense, phenomenon denotes ‘‘reality’’. That is to say, ‘‘the there is’’ insofar as this ‘‘isness’’ connotes thing, event, entity, or occurrence. Thus, in the traditional rendition, phenomenon is understood to mean – the totality of what exists, that lies in wait for investigation, to be brought to light, or made visible to the naked eyes. We find in this description, the bifurcation of phenomenon into a ‘‘hidden original’’ or a ‘‘hidden essence’’ and a ‘‘visible’’ ‘‘appearing’’ entity. Accordingly, Anthony Quinton(1975) identifies two main ways in which phenomenon is conceived. The first is ‘‘the scientific way of differentiating public, material object (i.e. the objective world) from mental constructions or theoretical entities (i.e. human subjectivity)’’ (p. 2). In the second sense, phenomenon ‘‘as what is actually observed or what actually appears to a perceiver, is set against observable, non-appearing thing which is somehow inferred, supposed or conjectured’’ (p. 2). Early Greek thinkers conceived phenomenon in a cosmological double. That which is visible to the naked eyes is termed material and that which is hidden from the naked eyes is termed immaterial. Thus, whereas Thales the materialist identifies water as ‘‘real’’ reality’’, Plato the idealist identifies the eidos as the ‘‘most supreme reality’’. The Greeks are not alone in this line of thinking. Traditional Africans also conceived phenomenon in a cosmological double of ‘‘spirit force’’ and a ‘‘material essence’’. Kenneth C. Anyanwu makes this point clear when he states as follows:

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When the African looks at a tree within the assumptions of his culture, he sees and imagines a life-force interacting with another life-force. He sees the colour of the object (tree), feels its beauty, imagines the life-force in it, intuitively grasps the interrelationships between the hierarchy of life-forces. If he did not do this, he would not have concluded that spirit exists in the world. He does not see spirit with his eyes nor is it a rationally and theoretically postulated concept like atoms and electrons (Anyanwu, 1981, 95).

It is instructive from the above that it is common among traditional peoples (Greeks or Africans) to bifurcate reality into a duality. However, contrary to the Greeks, Africans do not conceive the duality of spirit (i.e. ideas or reason) and matter as monistic or exclusive. For Africans, spirit and matter operate the law of inclusivity, of symbiosis, and of interpenetrability. Thus, the world as plenum of forces is in process, in a continuum. Everything is symbolically and symbiotically embedded in everything. We shall return to the contrast between the Western and African conceptions of phenomenon, for now, we continue with our survey of the history of phenomenon within the confine of Western philosophy. Within the materialist tradition of Western philosophy, phenomena are seen as the physical objects and the physical (cosmic) forces or laws that govern the universe. The enterprise of seeking for an ethereal double behind the physical universe is a craze of idealist philosophers. For all idealist philosophers, including transcendental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, ‘‘real reality’’ is logos or reason. Phenomena are used to depict mere appearances or illusions. In Parmenidean cosmology for instance, logos is the way to Being and this way to Being denotes truth, while phenomenon depicts the way of the senses which denotes illusion. In Platonism, logos is the same thing as the eidos, that is, the pure perfect forms in the world of forms. Phenomena as the physical universe are ephemeral copies, imperfect reflections of the eidos. This pattern of thinking permeated the idealist school of thought from antiquity to modern times. Idealist philosophers such as Plotinus, St. Augustine, George Berkeley, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel and a host of others, either conceive phenomena as mere appearances or simply as illusions. Hegelianism conceives of logos as Absolute Reason, which as the determiner and organizer of all phenomenal occurrences ‘‘expresses itself in the form of rules and principles by means of which we think and interpret phenomena; more than that, it is also the essence of things’’ (Bah, 1997, 71–72). So for Hegel, phenomenon does not announce itself as itself, it is rather the physical manifestation or appearance of the Absolute. In actual fact, Hegelianism is a reaction against the Kantian notion of the imperceptibility of noumena by the human mind. One would have expected

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that since Immanuel Kant, the transcendental philosopher, had as a principal objective, the harmonization of the views of materialist and idealist philosophers about phenomena, he would have provided us with a truer account of phenomena. However, in Kant, phenomena are still conceived as mere appearances. According to Kant, human understanding can ‘‘employ its various principles and its various concepts solely in an empirical never in a transcendental manner’’ (1970, 259). Given that a priori concepts relate to intuition, to the data of a possible experience, Kant posits that the understanding is like an island Enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits – it is the land of truth – enchanting name ! surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion (p. 258).

Thus, human understanding, by its constitution, can only apprehend appearances never the ‘‘things-in-themselves’’. Summing up the view of Kant on phenomena, Anthony Quinton states that for Kant Appearances, so far as they are thought of as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomena, therefore, a phenomenon is an articulated system of appearance unified by the categories in the form of an object, appearances are ingredients of phenomena, the properties, perhaps, that enter into the construction of a concrete individual (1975, 3).

Kant’s bifurcation of reality into noumena and phenomena attracted severe criticisms from his successors, prominent among whom is Karl Marx. Putting on their materialist lenses, Marx and Marxists profess that the entire universe is physical. For instance, Frederick Engels totally rejects Kant’s theory of noumena, dismissing it as ‘‘philosophical crotches of agnosticism’’ (Kuznetsov, 1987, 34). Lenin describes the theory of noumena as an attempt to ‘‘distort the true meaning of phenomena’’ (Kuznetsov, p. 74). According to V. I. Lenin, Phenomena are the things-in-themselves. There is no realm of the unknown or unknowable, Phenomena simply consist of the known and the yet to be known (p. 74).

Thus, the history of phenomena as presented in Western philosophy from Plato to Karl Marx can be summed up as follows: (i)

That things have a double nature which are not normally accessible to our ordinary perceptual apparatus (Platonist),

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(ii)

That our perceptions of things are different from what things are in themselves (Kantian), (iii) That things are mere ejaculations of a self-actualizing Reason (Hegelian), (iv) That there is a distinction between reality and appearance (Unah, 1998, 316), and (v) That phenomena are physical objects and the dynamic laws and forces governing economic/social activities (Marxian).

Essentially, from Plato to Marx, phenomenon is presented variously as material, immaterial, illusion or appearance. These traditional conceptions of phenomenon are imprecise, in the sense that they regiment logos, thereby preventing logos from fully utilizing its potentialities. In essence, since logos peculates its graceful light on phenomenon, in order to gather the essence of phenomenon as phenomenon, it is only proper that logos should first and foremost come into terms with itself as itself. It is when logos comes to realize itself as logos that the task of world reconstruction will become sincerely and honestly manifest. COMING INTO TERMS WITH LOGOS AS LOGOS

Acquaintance with logos as logos must begin by putting the records about metaphysics and Being straight. Metaphysics defined as ontology studies Being as Being. As a science of Being, metaphysics (ontology) has variously been defined as the science of beyondness or transcendence, or the beyondness of Being. In the words of Kant, insofar as metaphysics is the transcendental science of Being, it means that its origin must always derive from the a priori faculties of human consciousness. As it concerns the source of metaphysical cognition, its very concept implies that they cannot be empirical. Its principles (i.e. propositions and concepts) must never be derived from experience. It must not be physical but metaphysical, that is, knowledge lying beyond experience. It can therefore have for its basis neither external experience, which is the source of physics proper, nor internal, which is the basis of empirical psychology. It is therefore a priori cognition, coming from pure understanding and pure reason (1983, 107).

Kant is right when he states that the delineation of the ontological structure of pure reason should culminate in the rehabilitation and humanization of metaphysics, which in turn, should yield a profound theory of Being. In essence, metaphysical quest brings into focus the interrogation of Being by human being. Needless to say, the only way Being can be interrogated is that human consciousness (as logos) interacts with phenomenon. That the interrogation of Being reinforces the interplay between logos and phenomenon should not at all surprise us, because,

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both logos and phenomenon are manifestations of Being. Consequently, the metaphysical interrogation of Being should not only illuminate our path to Being but should in actual fact bring us into personal encounter with logos as logos. Unfortunately, traditional Western philosophy shrouded the questioning concerning metaphysics and Being in unnecessary mystique. The term ‘‘beyondness’’ or ‘‘transcendence’’ was misconstrued to mean the contemplation of natural and supernatural essences that lie outside the human entity. Being was simply conceived as that which is indefinable, indeterminable, indescribable, indivisible, and yet universal. It was left to Kant and Husserl to correct this anomaly in their different philosophical systems. Kant’s metaphysical project is said to be revolutionary, in the sense that, it attempts to reconstruct metaphysics by relocating transcendence in the human mental capacity. Kant regards metaphysics as the human transcendent ability to rise beyond experience into the transcendental realm of pure mental constructions where upon, imagination and contemplation become beatific, for concept formation, necessary for the reorganization and reconstruction of human chaotic experience. Husserl’s phenomenological orientation on the other hand, can be regarded as a rigorous science of the human ego. It describes the transcendental process by which the purified human ego dispassionately comprehends phenomena as pure essences. For Husserl, phenomena refer to the cogitata, that is to say, objects or things as they nakedly display themselves. However, prejudiced contemplation of objects could distort the true essences of objects. Invariably, phenomenology as a rigorous egological science, should purge the mind of prejudice so that the shining light of Being could merge with the illuminating light of logos to reveal essences as essences. Granted that the philosophies of Kant and Husserl succeeded in properly refocusing and addressing the puzzle concerning the interplay between logos and phenomenon, nevertheless, both systems of thought failed to adequately account for how this interplay comes about. In the first place, neither Kant nor Husserl makes Being a cardinal topic of concern. For instance, the whole gamut of Kant’s critical ontology is simply anthropological. His basic aim is to answer the question ‘‘what is man’’. It is quite possible the thinking that anthropology by its nature is encompassing and all embracing encouraged Kant to anchor his project of ontology on anthropology. As Kant himself writes in the Critique of Pure Reason,

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All the interest of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? And (3) What may I hope for? (1970, 635).

Then in the Introduction to L ogic, Kant further informs us that while the question ‘‘what can I know?’’ Belongs to metaphysics, ‘‘what ought I to do?’’ To ethics, and ‘‘what may I hope for?’’ To religion, the key question: what is man? Belongs to anthropology’’ (1885, 15, quoted by Eze, 1997, 113). Kant emphatically states that the first three questions refer to the last because the first three disciplines can collectively be classified under anthropology. Besides, in the concluding pages of the Critique of Practical Reason, he speaks of the two most inspirational problems, which confronted him – the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The first deals with Newtonian physics, while the second deals with ethics, which for Kant, is the science of moral freedom. Given that the chief question on which Kant’s ontological project is anchored reads: what must I be in order to be a man? It means that the whole exercise of the critique of finite pure reason is to answer in the affirmative: man is first and foremost a metaphysical being. It is now clear why Kant’s ontology falls short of an adequate and comprehensive account of the interplay between logos and phenomenon. In the fashion of traditional metaphysicians, Kant took the questioning concerning Being for granted. As for Husserl, he already sets the limits of his work from the beginning when he describes his phenomenological orientation as the ‘‘transcendental theory of knowledge’’ (1960, 81). According to Herbert Spiegelderg, ‘‘the central mystery was to Husserl not Being as such, but the fact that there is such a thing in this world as a being that is aware of its own being and of other beings’’ (1976, 87). Therefore, if we go by the submission of Ernst Cassirer that the ultimate plan of Kant is to posit a ground theory of knowledge, intended to resolve the age long wars in epistemology and to act as a foundation of science, it would seem then, at least on the surface, that both Kant and Husserl had similar agenda. To be succinct, Kantian and Husserlian philosophies no doubt open up novel ways of interpreting logos and phenomenon, they nonetheless, fail to sufficiently address the question of Being. So far, we have identified two approaches to metaphysics (Ontology). The first approach is Aristotelian which defines ontology as the study of beings as beings or the structure of being in general. The second approach is Kantian, which presents ontology as the study of the conditions (i.e. the categories of understanding) that make the study of Being possible. These two approaches can be regarded as only preliminary to a proper

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and adequate account of Being. This proper and adequate account of Being is posited by Martin Heidegger who makes the analysis of Being his main preoccupation. Heidegger regards ontology as ‘‘the inquiry into the being of beings’’ (King, 1964, 1) or the ground of Beings. The ground of beings is no other than Being itself. In ‘‘The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics’’, Heidegger refers to Being as ‘‘the light that gives sight to metaphysic or the light from which metaphysics derives its sight’’ (see Hartman, 1967, 433). Accordingly, Heidegger writes: The truth of Being may thus be called the ground in which metaphysics, as the root of the tree of philosophy, is kept and from which it is nourished (Hartman, 433).

Heidegger goes further to state that ‘‘the thinking attempted in Being and T ime sets out on the way to prepare an overcoming of metaphysics’’ (p. 434). This overcoming of metaphysics is not intended to rehabilitate or abolish metaphysics, but to overhaul the entire edifice and inject into it the ingredients necessary for world transformation. But this ‘‘overcoming of metaphysics’’ does not abolish metaphysics. As long as man remains the animal rationale he is also the animal metaphysicum. As long as man understands himself as the rational animal, metaphysics belongs, as Kant said, to the nature of man. But if our thinking should succeed in its efforts to go back into the ground of metaphysics, it might well help to bring about a change in human nature, accompanied by a transformation of metaphysics (p. 434).

By the expression ‘‘overcoming of metaphysics’’ or ‘‘transformation of metaphysics’’, Heidegger has in mind ‘‘fundamental Ontology’’. Fundamental ontology inquires into Being as the primordial ground of beings and relays the interplay of logos and phenomenon more lucidly. In other words, by defining Being and showing that logos and phenomenon are processes in Being, fundamental ontology lays the foundation for world reconstruction. But what exactly is Being and how are logos and phenomenon related to Being? The German term for Being is ‘‘Sein which is the infinitive to be, while Seins frage means: to question what it means to be’’ (Gelven, 1970, 13). Now to be in itself depicts the isness or primordiality of Being, while the questioning concerning the isness or to beness of Being brings into focus the issue of the being – who is out there (i.e., Dasein) and has the ability to inquire about Being and beings. In essence, Being is the ground, the soil, the foundation, the light that illuminates or brings into light whatever is (i.e., beings). Magda King explains that ‘‘the German des Seiende, which translates as beings, things, the existent, entity or entities is the equivalent

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of the Greek to on, which can mean both being and beings (ta onta); that is to say, where the Greek ta onta means: that which is or the things that are’’ (1964, 14–15). Now, granted that Being is the ground of all entities and the light that makes possible the coming into light of entities, given also that both logos and phenomenon are processes in Being, it follows that it is Being that endows man (the logos of phenomenon) with the transcendent ability for meaning making (construction) and for investigating and bringing phenomenon into light. As the logos of phenomenon, man inquires into the nature of things and also fashions principles for world reconstruction. And since Bing grants the coming into light of phenomena, classical philosophers used phenomena to mean ‘‘the totality of what lies open for inspection or what can be brought to light’’ (Unah, 1996, 205). Needless to say, this act of ‘‘bringing to light’’ is made possible by the shining light of Being and the luminous nature of logos. James Watson reiterates this point by stating that: ‘‘The Greek phenomenon also expressed as phainomenon derives from the verb phainesthal which translates as ‘to show itself ’ ’’ (1971, 31). Thus, in the original sense of the word, phenomenon means ‘that which shows itself ’’ (p. 31). Watson concludes that: ‘‘It is important to bear in mind that the Greek term for phenomenon is a substantivization of a verb whose stem pha signifies ‘the light’, ‘that which is bright’. The substantive ‘phenomenon’, therefore, cannot signify something which becomes visible by means of something else, it must signify that which shows itself in itself ’’ (p. 31). This explains the reason why Heidegger cautions that ‘‘the bewildering multiplicity of phenomena designated by the words phenomenon, semblance, appearance and mere appearance, cannot be disentangled unless the concept of phenomenon is understood from the beginning as that which shows itself ’’ (1962a, 54). To get to the ground of the term ‘‘phenomenon’’, Heidegger travels back to Aristotle and the early period of the Greeks. His discovery is amazing. For the early Greeks a-letheia as the word used in depicting phenomena is used to mean ‘‘the unconcealedness of what-is-present, its being revealed, its showing itself ’’ (Unah 1998, 310). According to Michael Murray, ‘‘unconcealedness suggests that truth happens in a context with concealment, with hiddenness; this hiddenness of Being is something fertile and positive, as expressed in the aphorism of Heraclitus that physis loves to hide’’ (1981, 514). In seeking out the root meaning of phenomenon, Heidegger radicalizes the meaning of phenomenon. He began by explaining the difference between the manifold and the manifest essences of a being. As unconcealedness, a being shows itself in the positive sense

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as manifest and as manifest, a being ‘‘shows itself as itself, it reveals itself in the light of day, but whether as semblance or as manifest, phenomenon remains essentially manifold, that is, we grant that ‘what is’ reveals itself only in profiles or aspects, in bits and pieces’’ (1962a, 51). Next, Heidegger enters into the delineation of the primordial signification of logos and phenomenon in order to show the link between the two. First, he demarcates ‘‘logos as discourse’’ from ‘‘logos as logic’’. Whereas ‘‘logos as discourse’’ depicts: ‘‘L ogos as understanding, intelligibility, that which reveals or brings a thing into light; ‘logos as Logic’ portrays logos as ratio, logical deliberation or ratiocination. Thus ‘logos as discourse’ designates what Heidegger refers to as ‘hermeneutic situation’ ’’ (1962a, 275). Accordingly, he explains that: ‘‘The function of ‘logos as discourse’ is to make clear that which is talked about’’ (p. 59). On this matter, James Watson explains that: ‘‘Where logos simply translates as discourse, its deeper meaning could be derived from the verb legein, which is the Greek expression for ‘to hold discourse’, that is, where the verb legein means the same as deloun, which translated as ‘to make manifest’ ’’ (Watson, 33). This task of making manifest or explicit, or throwing light on that which shows itself as itself (phenomenon) has been described as hermeneutic situation. Hermeneutic situation describes the circular structure of Daseinanalytic and hermeneutic phenomenology. According to James Watson whereas Daseinanalytic emphasizes the point that every ‘‘ontological knowledge presupposes a pre-ontological understanding and that all interpretations presuppose previous understanding of that which is interpreted;’’ hermeneutic phenomenology for its part means ‘‘the circularity of hermeneutic discourse and designates the totality of its presuppositions under the rubric the existential forestructure of Dasein’’ (1971, 37). In essence, hermeneutic phenomenology has the task of discussing the temporal process by which human beings proceed about the enterprise of world reconstruction, which in the first place, derives from our ontological prowess to question about beings. Hence, Dasein is the being that is self-revealing and allows beings to be revealed in profiles. Dasein is that essent which lies hidden egregiously, which relapses and gets covered up again, which shows itself ‘‘in disguise’’ (Heidegger, 1962a, 59). Insofar, as it is Dasein that inquires about Being and beings, insofar as it is Dasein that renders explicit and enables the coming into light of beings, we say that Dasein is the logos of phenomenon, the entity of entities and the essent of essents. Put differently, ‘‘the ultimate irreducible fact for Heidegger is that man exists in a world which

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transcends him and in which he finds himself, he is there in it, he is ‘beingthere’, dasein’’ (Schacht, 1972, 59). We can now see how a proper and adequate account of Being has allowed logos to come into light as logos, which should result in the transformation of our phenomenal world. It is now clear why Heidegger insists that the questioning concerning Being is one that is to be treated phenomenologically (1962a, 49). He also states that the term phenomenology is primarily a methodological conception (p. 50). He insists that to gather the true meaning of the term phenomenology, the word logos must not be construed in its ordinary sense as logos-come-logic. L ogos in this sense denotes a science, study, or theory of something. He warns that such a rendition of logos would amount to a denigration of phenomenology as being ‘‘anthropological’’ (see pp. 58–59). And because the phenomenological usage of logos probes into the ground of beings, we say, Heidegger’s phenomenological quest is ontological. For ‘‘only as phenomenology is ontology possible’’ (p. 60). PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE TASK OF WORLD RECONSTRUCTION

To apply phenomenology to the task of world reconstruction is tantamount to making an outline of ‘‘Applied Ontology,’’ in which makes phenomenology an ‘‘action oriented theory’’ for world transformation. Needless to say, the challenge of world transformation is one that questions the preparedness of phenomenological ontology to meet up with such a task. Therefore, phenomenology has no choice but to proceed by way of casting critical doubt upon itself. As a transcendental science of the ego, phenomenology is consciousness way of subjecting itself to critical scrutiny. In the Kantian parlance, we say that thought as consciousness institutes a tribunal and puts itself to judgment. Thus, to say that phenomenology should turn its critical search-light upon itself, is to say that consciousness is entangled in the pure process of ‘‘eidetic (transcendental) reduction’’ by which concepts are forged for world reconfiguration. At a first glance, it would appear that such endeavor is completely futile or at best self-defeatist. The apparent futility of such a venture stems from the fact that any attempt to critique the phenomenologico-ontological method is bound to be double-barreled, which tantamount to the phenomenologization of phenomenology. Put differently, the critique of the phenomenologico-ontological method sounds tautologous because, to pass phenomenology through its own crucible will amount to a ‘‘deconstruction of deconstruction’’, ‘‘an interpretation of interpretation’’, ‘‘an

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investigation of investigation’’, and ‘‘the transcendentatization of transcendentalism’’. Nevertheless, such a double-barreled approach only reaffirms the method of critical criticism, making deconstruction and interpretation assume a two-pronged attack. Certain factors we are faced with make the issue before us a most difficult one. If we grant that ‘‘twentieth (or is it twenty-first) century phenomenology articulates itself in terms of both an implicit and explicit interpretation of Greek philosophy, that phenomenology is not only a Greek-based word, it signifies a Greek way of thinking’’ (Murray, 501); if we also grant that phenomenology does not in any way destroy the European Spartan spirit embedded in traditionalism and modernism, we will then come to realize the dilemma of how phenomenology can be made relevant to the cultures and traditions whose orientations differ from Greek and Europe. This poser is fundamental because, it forms the very ground of our discourse. If phenomenology is to be made relevant to the challenge of world reconstruction, it means that all cultures and traditions must first and foremost touch base with Being, internalize the orientation of hermeneutic phenomenology, before they can qualify to form quorum for a biased free debate on how the world could be reconstructed. It is exactly this dilemma that informs our critique of phenomenology. Fortunately, the criticisms offered against phenomenology by Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Niyi Osundare afford us the opportunity to make assessment of how ready phenomenology is for the task of world transformation. Variously in T he Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and a host of other works of his, Michel Foucault descends heavily on the phenomenological quests for ‘‘origins, formal a prioris, and founding acts’’ (Shiner, 1982, 312). For instance, in T he Archeology of Knowledge (1972) Foucault declares his intention ‘‘to free history from the grip of phenomenology’’ (p. 203). His critique of phenomenology is focused on three cardinal issues: ‘‘the subject, the lifeword, and the intentional-historical quest for origins, which correspond to his attacks on the epistemological, empirical and genealogical arguments against phenomenology’’ (Shiner, 313–317). These three pronged attacks on phenomenology can be itemized as follows: (a) that man (the individual) cannot double as the subject and object of knowledge or what Foucault himself describes as ‘‘a strange empirico-transcendental doublet’’ (1973, 318); (b) that there is no such a thing as discourse arising from some ‘‘primeval night of silence’’ (1972, 112), which refers to the primordial sourcing of language and meaning captured in the phenomenological

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beacon for us to go back to the things themselves; and (c) ‘‘that discourse emanates from social intercourse, implying that the epistemological subject is produced by historical changes in the configuration of power knowledge, making power and knowledge inseparable attributes’’ (Shiner, 312 and 316). In the fashion of postmodern analytic philosophy, Richard Rorty calls for the demolition of all forms of absolutist and logocentric orientations that seem to hamper and infringe upon the autonomy of disciplines and cultures. He makes allusions to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts and Karl Popper’s theory of conjectures and refutations, which he (Rorty) dubs ‘‘scientific revolutions’’ (Veatch, 1985, 309). By the expression scientific revolutions, Rorty hopes that deconstruction as the new paradigm of philosophy, should allow for ‘‘intellectual self-autonomy’’, which refers to our conceptual schemes, our categories, our theories and hypotheses, be they in science or philosophy’’ (Veatch, 311), for sharpening our perspectives. Rorty goes ahead to allude to the Sartream sense of total freedom for the purpose of qualifying what he means by ‘‘perspectival conceptual scheme’’, which he says makes room for ‘‘intellectual permissiveness’’ (p. 312). This intellectual total permissiveness or freedom constitutes the ‘‘parameter (or parameters) of our modern culture – or any culture for that matter – that the denizens of that culture cannot but find themselves caught up in whole web of ideals, basic beliefs, prevailing world views, all of which together tend to channel and govern the lives and activities of those within that culture’’ (p. 312). For Rorty, the multi-faceted nature of reality dictates that we should allow the diversity and plurality of disciplines and cultures to be. Niyi Osundare’s complaint against poststructuralism and phenomenological ontology is targeted against what he describes as ‘‘the deconstruction of dichotomy’’ (1993, 2). Osundare is of the view that both phenomenological ontologists and poststructuralists are insincere, not steadfast and inconsistent in their attempts to rid philosophy of the traits of absolutism characteristic of traditionalism and modernism. He dubs this discrepancy or double standard posture as the ‘‘undeconstructed silences’’ (p. 9). The point Osundare makes is that phenomenological ontology germinates in the same European soil that gave birth to absolutist theories that have jeopardized the freedom of non-Europeans and bifurcated the world into the realms of the ‘‘elect or chosen’’ and the ‘‘reject or wretched.’’ It is obvious that Osundare is very much skeptical of the phenomenological agenda to rescue humankind from nihilism and recast the world anew. This skepticism stems from the fact that the erst-

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while colonizer should not be the one to suggest the terms of freedom otherwise such emancipation bid will not only fail, it is bound to generate catastrophic consequences in due course. Besides, within the context of existentialism, it would amount to an act of forfeiture and a contradiction in terms for freedom to be given, not worn. Accordingly, Osundare posits, All theories leak. Old assumptions give way to new ones. Pre-existing platitudes get spruced up in new raiment, and what used to be called ‘six’ receives a brave new baptism of half dozen. Old prejudices, myths, fallacies, and misconceptions have not been deconstructed, on the contrary, they have been reconstructed into fresh frameworks couched in new fanged lingo. The interrogative power of contemporary theories has been severely selective (pp. 9–11).

By showing the way to Being phenomenology merely suggests a new approach for rebuilding the world afresh, it does not destroy rigid foundations of the classical and modernist traditions. Therefore, the hardness in Osundare voice is meant to forewarn against the apparent die hard nature of man and the limitation of human thought to always relapse into absolutism and hold tight to that which is advantageous to self. The ‘‘self ’’ being talked about here is no other than the erst-while colonizer under whose tutelage, the developing world, still groan. Invariably, The complaint of Osundare is meant to warn and fortify the world against the dangers of intellectual, spiritual and cultural imperialism. Be that as it may, the criticism leveled against phenomenology by Foucault, and Rorty’s aim to rid philosophy of all forms of absolutism could pass muster for Husserl’s phenomenological orientation, not Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In the first place, Husselian phenomenology aims at consolidating Greek traditionalism and European modernism. This apart, Husserl is oblivious of the: ‘‘Ontological difference between Being and beings, which is concealed by the tendency to reduce or ground Being in a being – say a theological substance as in the case of Descartes, and in the case of Hegel and Husserl himself, in absolute subjectivity. Unfortunately, this obliviousness to Being threatens the very foundation of philosophy and forms the real root of nihilism in all Western ontologies, theologies, cosmologies, psychologies and logics’’ (Heidegger, 1969, 66 and 1977, 82–83). It is for this reason that Heidegger recommends that philosophy must be freed from the spell of the Greeks. Accordingly, Heidegger totally rejects all concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology that seem to replicate absolutism. Thus for Heidegger, there are no such things as ‘‘standpoints’’ in phenomenology, nor has phenomenology anything to do with bracketing or suspension. Such rendition of

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phenomenology amounts to obscurantism. Therefore, opposed to Husserl, Heidegger uses epoche to mean the ‘‘luminous keeping of itself of the truth of Being, which refers to being’s withdrawal in the process of unconcealment of beings, the lethe of a-letheia’’ (Murray, 518). Jean Paul Sartre reiterates this point in the T ranscendence of the Ego (1990). He wonders ‘‘whether consciousness can be found after a reduction to be presided over by a ‘transcendental ego’, that is to say, an ‘I’ or subject essentially involved no less than objects in the very possibility of an act of consciousness whatsoever’’ (p. 17). For Sartre, to speak of a transcendental ego is to recall the question of a cosmic intelligence (a policeman) who oversees the activities of men. The existential implication of this Sartrean position is that man should be able to interpret his circumstance freely, devoid of any prior commitment. Again, in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis, Richard Bernstein seeks to do a ‘‘detranscendentalization’’ (Drummond, 1988, 291) of all transcendental philosophies whose problem is basically that of foundationalism. For Bernstein; ‘‘Husserlian phenomenology is incapable of leading philosophy to its new destination because, it suffers from ‘Cartesian anxiety’, a trait, characteristic of modernism, and stems from the fear that the failure to establish absolute, timeless foundations for distinguishing genuine from non-genuine cognitions leads inexorable to relativism, skepticism, intellectual and cultural chaos’’. He concludes that ‘‘a phenomenological orientation which follows the Husserlian model, is in disarray’’ (1983, 12). It is clear from the above that Husserlian phenomenology is unable to free itself from anthropologism. This anomaly stems from the fact that Husserl’s philosophy still belongs to that tradition which treats logos as ratio or as logic. No doubt, Husserlian phenomenology resolves the old aged riddle concerning phenomena, and bridges the dichotomy between the subject and object of an experience (i.e. within the confines of Western philosophy), it however, ended up in the absolutization of the human ego, thereby creating the impression that logos possesses intimidating, majestic and dictatorial credentials. Such a notion of logos merely re-enacts the impositional and logocentric nature of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology. Kant posits that human reason is logically pure and strict and that by the process of ‘‘transcendental (time) deduction,’’ the mind institutes a tribunal over which it sits in judgment. But as rigorous and profound as this critique appears, in Kant, finite pure reason failed to accomplish its own very legislations autonomously established by the tribunal. At the point of the ‘‘Transcendental Object-X’’ (by which we mean the transcendental imagination), he encountered a great

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abyss (i.e. nothingness) lying deep in the heart of man. Seized by vertigo, he recoiled, lapsing from ontology to anthropology, he declared that the transcendental imagination is the ‘unknown root’ and a complete emptiness’’ (1970, 268–295). Analyzing this great bathos in Kant’s philosophy, Heidegger says that Kant’s ontological project yields the following conclusion: ‘‘The establishment of metaphysics is an interrogation of man, i.e. it is anthropology’’ (1962b, 213). Besides, we may as well argue that the anomaly in Kant’s ontology is deliberate, that is to say, if we consider the fact that Kant lived in the period when Europe’s domination of the world was rife. Thus, given that his whole philosophical project was meant to awaken Europeans from dogmatic slumber and to fortify Europe’s rapid growth and ascendancy, it would have been foolhardy for him to delve into the exploration of the transcendental imagination. Therefore, for the sake of consistency (and perhaps convenience), Kant decided to remain rooted in the tradition that treats logos simply as logic or as ratio. It is for this reason that he declares that ‘‘reason has colour’’ (Eze, 1997, 103–140) and by this he meant that reason is racially heirarchicized and determined. We can now see that Kant’s critical ontology, genuine as it appears, is highly inadequate for the enterprise of world reconstruction. This point has been sufficiently made by postmodernists and postcolonial African philosophers alike. And if Husserl’s phenomenology is meant to be a consolidation of this Kantian cum modernist spirit, it means that like modern philosophy, Husserlian phenomenology is ‘‘vitiated by its binary thinking, its logocentricism, that has ensnared its victims in hopeless metaphysical traps requiring a radical and a thorough going deconstruction of philosophy’’ (see Irele, 1993, 54). We are left with the lampooning of poststructuralism and phenomenology by Niyi Osundare who is of the view that phenomenological ontology is selective and silent over some salient issues that seem to be in favour of Europe and that for this reason the deconstructive agenda of phenomenology is double standard. This is short of saying that phenomenological ontology lacks the essential credentials for world reconstruction. But it is exactly this task of world reconstruction that constitutes the target of Heideggerian phenomenological orientation. Heideggerian phenomenology espouses the view that nihilism is made possible by our refusal to get acquainted with Being in its perfect essence as Being. If we all touch base with Being, we will come to the realization that Being in its manifoldness invites us to the path of ‘‘openness’’, where upon our visioning of beings become luminous for the sifting of essences.

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Granted that hermeneutic phenomenology is that luminous path to Being which results in openness and the universal sifting of essences, the question is; how is this luminosity as openness possible? Openness captures a mood (state of mind) in which human thought commits itself to silence, withdraws into its subjective self, meditatively, reflectively, explores and discovers essences afresh. Openness creates ‘‘awareness of mind’’ or ‘‘the presence of mind’’ by which thought defines its scope or range and operates the law of simultaneity; human thought directs and records its own activities as it intuits, reasons and imagines all at the same time. Openness depicts the freedom of human thought to autonomously render objects luminous and also draw up a plan for world transformation. In all and within the context of African ontology, openness as a condition for revelation depicts our immersion into Being. An open state of affair is one of sober reflections in which one is spontaneously involved, entangled in free discourse. Free discourse entails that the participants should levitate towards that state of mental tranquility or equanimity of mind that allows for the serenity of thought. But since immersion or involvement implies being ‘‘deeply sympathetic and living in symbiosis’’ (Brockway, 1963, 34), one wonders if the theory of openness in this context, would not result in forfeiture or loss of self ? Herein lies the basis of Osundare’s complaint against phenomenological ontology and its theory of openness. It is precisely the attitude of openness that put Africa and the Developing World at a disadvantage on the economic and political scales. The rich-North (headed by the G8) encourage the poor-South to remain open to the ideological and economic schemes put on ground by the United Nations and other world bodies, at the same time, members of the rich-North are not themselves open. It then seems that the openness theory is double standard such that one begins to think that the phenomenological orientation is unwittingly been used to entrench the monolithic and absolutist project dubbed globalization. To be frank, the hermeneutic assessment of contemporary international relations reflects naked obliviousness to Being on the part of nations and cultures of the world. Nevertheless, the disdain against Being does not detract from the fact that the Being question invites us to the path of ‘‘genuine openness’’ of mind, which should ensure the emergence of new horizons for rebuilding the world afresh. Hence, going by the theory of immersion, Being is the realm where all forces interfuse, all ways merge, and all cultures conjoin, such that civilization becomes a communal repository into which all cultures make contributions and from which each can borrow without sinister conditions. At the realm of Being, no

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entity is superior or inferior rather, entities simply play their parts, no matter how little. However, danger looms large when we operate in the realm of Being without consideration for anthropological variations. Such a case of negligence (as one thinks it is) could result in the loss of self, which stems from the fact that at the level of Being, one deals with essences as essences, not with particularities. A genuine journey into the realm of Being entails the overcoming of discrimination against other entities. At this level, understanding becomes empathizing in the same way as thinking becomes thanking. It is in this sense that the Igbo (of South-East Nigeria) would say – Let all birds plume the sky is wide enough for all; let all birds perch whichever says the other should not perch, let its wings be broken; the world is big enough for all. Thus, in a world where empathic, symbiotic understanding (of issues) is the norm, absolutism is replaced with pluralism, tolerance with symbiotic co-existence. In essence, one who operates in the realm of Being as Being, is accommodating and tolerant of all views and ways, but in doing so, can easily derail into naivety, syncretism and forfeiture. Kenneth Anyanwu captures this more succinctly when he states that: The goal of African cultural values and civilization is to unify all opposites. Thus the source of African strength is at the same time that of her weakness. Europe rejected Islam and Asia rejected Christianity, yet, these two religious doctrines find adherents in Africa (1981, 373).

There lies the grave danger in operating blindly in the realm of Being. Such attitude of blanket openness that is oblivious of the stark realities of human existence is bound to be disastrous. On the other hand, the West and Asia are partially open. These two never allow themselves to be alienated. They never borrow any idea from outside their cultures without subjecting it to the crucible for re-adaptation. Therefore, the issue at hand is how hermeneutic phenomenology can assist in inculcating a genuine attitude of openness that would cure the poor-South of naivety and the rich-North of impositionalism so that communal existence can be enabled? Epoche is the term used in describing the capability of the human ego to process beings’ essences. Invariably, epoche should radicalize our assessments of Being and cure us of all mental infirmities that encourage the obliviousness to Being. Thus, epoche ensures that while we delve deep into the exploration of Being, we remain focused (but not attached) to the main object of investigation. This way, epoche becomes the bridge between the two realms of ontology and anthropology. The point being

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made here, is that at the level of anthropology man sees himself as special among all other creatures. It is this attitude of self- exaltation that results into discrimination among the species. At the level of ontology, the seeing of species disappears and in place of this emerges the seeing of essences as essences. Thus, if from the perspective of ontology man idealizes about Being, phenomenology is that way that enables man to approach Being in openness, while through hermeneutics man interprets Being in manifold ways. The manifold seeing of Being enlightens us to the fact that no one has absolute prerogative to Being and that every seeing of Being is genuine. Besides, Being is the realm of universality into which all make contribution and draw ideas for world transformation. But transformation would be rendered spurious if ideas gathered from the universal realm of ontology are not anthropogically localized. Epoche ensures that while we ontologically levitate into the realm of Being to garner up ideas for world transformation, we simultaneously, remain anthropologically focused for the localization of the universal ideas so garnered. This way, eideitic analysis becomes a process of synthesis by which we let ontology guide human anthropological activities. The point to note here is that complete operation at the level of ontology oblivious of anthropological peculiarities could result into naivety, in the same way as concentration on anthropological peculiarities oblivious of ontological essences could result into absolutism. This is the point which Kant misses and which Heidegger sets out to correct. It is perhaps, for this reason that Herbert Spiegelberg (1976) says that Husserl uses the phrase: ‘‘free from presuppositions’’ (p. 83) to mean ‘‘the elimination of merely presuppositions that have not been thoroughly examined, or at least in principle, been presented for such elimination, clarification or verification, not freedom from all presuppositions’’ (p. 83). Now, eidetic systemization of the theory of openness along the paradigms of hermeneutic phenomenology and the notion of immersion in African ontology yields three levels of meaning of the term ‘‘openness:’’ (i) There is openness as it relates to our universe and the objects therein (ii) There is openness at the inter-personal or inter-subjective level (iii) There is openness at the inter-cultural or communal level.

Openness in the first sense admonishes man to be a friend of his universe, to shepherd his environment with love and care, so that in the process of technologizing, man does not ‘‘enframe’’ (Heidegger, 1977, 20) both nature and himself into ‘‘standing-reserve’’ (p. 19). It is in this sense that Heidegger opines that technology as ‘‘enframing’’ raises the question

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about the ontological ability of man to humanize science, and Husserl advocates that phenomenology should guide or direct science. Openness in the second sense grounds inter-subjectivity as the foundation of human interaction in the society. Inter-subjectivity in this second sense of openness becomes the criterion for instituting pluralism, tolerance and cohesion in the society. Openness in the third sense refers to human interaction at the global or international level. This is the stage where the postmodernist concept of inter-subjectivity as ‘‘social discourse’’ comes in most handy. At this level of relationship among peoples and cultures disagreement is most rife such that disensus becomes the basis for consensus. Just as man could loose out if he is gullible in his relationship with nature, just as gullible individuals could loose out to the crafty members of the society, gullible states can be subsumed to serve the will of predator nations. It is this third sense of openness that forms the kernel of our discourse. Human international relationship is turbulent because everywhere man turns to he wants to enframe the world and the entities therein. The loss for profit has overwhelmed the quest for care and empathy. Empathy and care are like Siamese twins that emanate from deep concern, from communal existence, from symbiotic relationship. Empathic existence in itself is made possible when we empathize with Being. To empathize with Being is to understand the manifold nature of Being. We then come to the realization that Being is heirarchicized in its manifestations. It is in this sense that Heidegger says that Being manifests itself in profiles. First, it unconceals, withdraws, and then displays its manifold nature, now as appearance, as semblance, and as manifest. Only one who empathizes with Being, understands its hierarchical nature and imbibes the open attitude of letting things be. It is in this sense that Innocent C. Onyewuenyi says that within the confine of African epistemology, knowledge of the world is determined by ‘‘how deeply one understands the nature of forces, true wisdom lies in the understanding of forces, their hierarchy, their cohesion and their interaction’’ (1978, 250). What all this boils down to is that inter-subjective discourse is insufficient for accomplishing communality and cohesion at the global level. For the world to be truly reconstructed on a genuine human ontology, discourse has to become interpenetrating. For discourse to be interpenetrating, humankind is left with no alternative but to strive to get acquainted with the manifold or hierarchical nature of Being. It is now clear why Heidegger invites Germans to the path of spirituality as the way out of nihilism. Heidegger pointedly remarks that German is

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the most spiritual language in which Being can be intellectualized. He challenges Germans as the giant pincers sandwiched between the two mass carbacan races: Russian and America, to free humankind from barbarism and nihilism. Germany has since turned a new leaf of welfarism and empathic relationship. Germany not only promotes her culture, she also assists other nations in the propagation of their own cultures. The rest of mankind should take a cue from this and begin to ascend the highway of spirituality, touch base with Being, from which should emerge a new world order that is truly communalistic and humanistic. CONCLUDING REMARKS

The present discourse ignites further questions that cannot be tackled right away, but shall form the core of a future essay to be entitled: ‘‘Phenomenology of Life-force’’. Be that as it may, the high point of this essay concerns the fact that world reconstruction would remain impossible if logos is not freed from the trappings of nihilism and absolutism. Daunting as this task may appear, it is one that every contemporary scholar must make serious commitment to. The gravity of this statement lies in the fact that world-affairs are directed by logos and if logos is not freed from the trappings of nihilism, the world would continue to groan under the tutelage of draconian principles. In the words of Holderlin, the true worth of logos is to radiate wisdom and conscientiously resolve problems no matter their magnitude. But where danger is, grows the saving power also (Heidegger, 1977, 35).

The word to note is ‘‘power’’. Power is at the centre of all tussles, squabbles and plays that have generated bitterness and rancour in the world. Therefore, rather than speak of the ‘‘saving power’’ of logos, it is better to speak of its ‘‘saving or amazing grace’’ to forge unity in the midst of chaos? In the first place, to speak of logos as a power is to compound the danger at hand. We can now see why Heidegger opines that the luminosity of the ‘‘saving power’’ of logos is made possible by questioning. ‘‘Questioning is the piety of thought’’ (p. 35) because, questioning shows the way to Being and builds a plan for world reconstruction. To be precise, the task of phenomenology is to make the shining light of logos shine brighter by substituting ‘‘saving grace’’ for ‘‘saving power’’ University of L agos L agos, Nigeria.

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Anyanwu, K. C. African Philosophy: An Introduction to the Main Philosophical T rends in Contemporary Africa. Rome: Catholic Book Agency, 1981. Bah, T. D. P. Philosophy and Metaphysics: A Critical Introduction. Lagos: Obaroh and Ogbinaka Publishers Ltd., 1997. Bernstein, R. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983. Brockway, F. African Socialism. London: The Bodley, 1963. Drummond, J. J. ‘‘Modernism and Postmodernism: Berstein or Husserl,’’ in Review of Metaphysics, XLII (1988), pp. 275–300. Eze, E. C. Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1997. Foucault, M. T he Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. __. T he Order of T hings: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Gelven, M. A. Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and T ime (vol. II). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967. Heidegger, M. Being and T ime. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962a. __. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. J. S. Churchill (trans.). Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1962b. __. ‘‘The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics’’, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. W. Kaufman (trans. & ed.). New York: Meridian Books, 1956. __. Identity and DiVerence. J. Stambough (trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1969. __. T he Question Concerning T echnology and other Essays. W. Lovitt (trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dorian Cains (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Irele, D. Introduction to Contemporary Social and Political T hinkers. Ibadan: New Horn & Critical Forum, 1993. James, G. M. G. Stolen L egacy. Newport News: United Brothers Communication Systems, 1959. Kant, I. Introduction to L ogic. T. K. Abbot (trans.). London: Longman and Green, 1885, quoted by E. C. Eze, Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1997. __. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. N. K. Smith (trans.). London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1970. __. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Come Forward as Science. P. Carus (trans.), extensively revised by J. W. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing Company, 1983. King, M. Heidegger’s Philosophy: A Guide to His Basic T hought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964. Kuznetsov, V. N. Engels’ L udwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987. Murray, M. ‘‘Husserl and Heidegger: Constructing and Deconstructing Greek Philosophy’’, in Review of Metaphysics, XLI, (1988), pp. 501–518.

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Omoregbe, J. I. A Simplified History of Western Philosophy: Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Lagos: Josa Educational Research and Publisher Ltd., 1999. Onyewuenyi, I. C. ‘‘Towards an African Philosophy’’, in Readings in African Humanities: African Cultural Development. Kalu, O. U. (ed.). Nsukka: University of Nigeria Press, 1978. __. T he African Origin of Greek Philosophy: An Exercise in Afrocentricism. Nsukka: University of Nigeria Press, 1994. Osundare, N. ‘‘African Literature and the Crisis of Poststructuralist Theorizing’’, in Dialogue in African Philosophy Monograph Series 2. J. O. Sodipo (ed.). Ibadan: Options and Information Services, 1993. Quinton, A. ‘‘The Concept of a Phenomenon,’’ in Pivevic (ed.), Phenomenological and Philosophic Understanding. Bristol: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1969. __. T ranscendence of the Ego. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (trans.). New York: Hill & Wang, 1990. Schacht, R. ‘‘Husserlian and Heideggerian Phenomenology’’, in Philosophical Studies, 23 (1972), pp. 293–314. Shiner, L. ‘‘Foucault, Phenomenology and the Question of Origins’’, in Philosophy T oday, XXXI (1983), pp. 312–321. Spiegelberg, H. T he Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 1, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. Unah, J. I. Metaphysics, Phenomenology and African Philosophy. Ibadan: Hope Publications, 1996. __. ‘‘Heidegger’s Phenomenological Orientation,’’ in Analecta Husserliana, A-T Tymieniecka (ed.), LIV (1998). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 303–330. Veatch, H. ‘‘Deconstruction in Philosophy: Has Rorty Made it the Denouement of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy’’, in Review of Metaphysics, XXXIX (1985), pp. 303–320. Watson, J. R. ‘‘Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology’’, in Philosophy T oday, 15 (1971), pp. 30–43.

INDEX OF NAMES

Aalto, A.: 135 Adams, A.: 4 Adorno, T.: 80, 85, 87, 89, 93 Aeschines: 52 Albee, E.: 300 Alberti, L.B.: 27 Allori, A.: 24 Ammannati, B.: 22 Annunziata, A.: 16 Antonaccio, M.: 230–1 Anyanwu, K. C.: 334–5, 350 Arendt, H.: 173 Aristotle: 43, 51, 94, 173, 176, 215, 275–6, 278, 287, 299, 333 Atwood, M.: 235, 240–1, 243–4, 246 Augustine: 34–5, 38–40, 42–5, 279, 335 Bachelard: 259 Backhaus, G.: 201–2 Bah: 335 Bakhtin, M.: 114, 122 Baldick: 297 Bambach, C.: 3–4, 9 Bardot, B.: 63 Barthes, R.: 295 Bate, W. J.: 296 Battiferri: 23 Beethoven, L.: 60 Bello, A. A.: 20 Bembo, P.: 26 Benjamin, W.: 45, 93 Berenson, B.: 4 Bergson, H.: 201, 206 Berkeley, G.: 335 Bernstein, R.: 237, 347 Beuys, J.: 142 Bi, W.: 109 Bloom, H.: 296 Bo¨hme, G.: 136, 138 Bok, S.: 242 Booth, W.: 248

Bordieu, P.: 134 Boulez, P.: 60 Bouwsma, O. K.: 164 Brahms: 62 Brentano, F.: 57–8 Brockway: 349 Bronzino: 20, 22, 24 Brooke, R.: 269 Caravaggio: 76 Carter, E.: 60 Casey, E.: 202, 206, 208–9, 214 Cassirer, E. 339 Castiglione, B.: 20–1 Celibidache, S.: 62–3 Cellini: 22 Cezanne: 203, 207 Charles V: 19 Chopin: 60 Clifton, T.: 59–60 Coen, E.: 17 Cohen, J.: 50 Collins, J.: 300 Conrad, J.: 176 Conradi, P.: 223 Crunelle, M.: 136 da Messina, A.: 14 Da Vinci, L.: 3–10, 17, 27, 291 Dante: 73 Danto, A.: 103, 204, 214 Davies, C.: 83 De Chirico: 17, 25 de Cusa, N.: 42–3 de Ockham, G.: 29, 40–1 della Francesca, P.: 16 della Mirandola, P.: 19 Derrida, J.: 69–70, 108, 174, 295 Descartes, R.: 211, 331, 335 Dewey, J.: 203, 213 Dickens, C.: 248

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Dilthey: 45 Dipple, E.: 222–3, 230–1 Dostoyevsky: 161, 176, 235, 313, 315, 317, 319–21, 327 Droysen, J. G.: 114 Drummond: 347 Duchamp, M.: 132–3 Dufrenne, M.: 94, 138, 209 Du¨rer, A.: 27 Durkheim: 205–6, 213 Eagleton, T.: 236 El Primo: 20 Eliasson, O.: 84 Eliot, T. S.: 63, 73, 157, 176–7, 296 Emerson, R. W.: 296 Engels, F.: 336 Eno, B.: 61 Euclid: 317 Euripides: 284 Eze: 339, 348 Faulkner, W.: 157, 162, 168, 176 Felibien, A.: 19 Ferrara, L.: 60 Fischer, P.: 206–7, 209, 214 Flaubert, G.: 298, 300–10 Fledman: 204 Ford: 260, 274 Foucault, M.: 295–6, 344, 346 Frazer: 291 Freud, S.: 160, 163, 174 Frost, R.: 200, 206–7, 209–19 Fry, B.: 83 Frye, N.: 296 Gadamer, H-G.: 98, 114–15, 134, 179–83, 185, 187–92, 221, 279 Gao, J.: 103, 108–9 Geiger, M.: 144 Gell, A.: 4 Gelven: 340 Genette: 205 Gerber: 44 Gioconda: 17, 22 Giotto: 16, 21 Gisze, G.: 27 Goethe: 61, 291–2, 296

Goodman, N.: 59 Gordon, B.: 157 Gordon, D.: 224 Gosetti-Ferencei: 202, 206, 208–9 Graham, G.: 69 Greenberg, C.: 204 Grossatesta, R.: 281 Hadrian: 7 Halbwachs, M.: 114 Hals, F.: 19 Hamann: 40, 44–5 Haney, K.: 7 Hartmann, E. V.: 44–6 Harvey, J.: 208 Hegel, G.W.F.: 19, 44, 59, 93, 182, 221, 334–5, 346 Heidegger, M.: 15, 31–2, 37, 45, 53–4, 71, 75, 80, 93, 97–8, 101, 136–9, 158, 177, 184–5, 187, 191, 199, 201, 207, 212–13, 224, 237, 331–2, 339–43, 346–8, 351–3 Heraclitus: 333, 341 Herder: 31, 37, 40, 44–5 Herodotus: 52 Hesiod: 275, 277–8, 281–4, 288 Hindemith, P.: 59 Hoffman, H.: 205 Hoffmannstahl, H.: 60 Holbein, H.: 26 Ho¨lderlin: 53, 199, 353 Homer: 52, 284, 288–9 Hopper, E.: 211 Horkheimer: 85 Humboldt, W. V.: 40 Husserl, E.: 29, 31, 33, 36, 49, 58, 60, 97, 114, 116–25, 171, 174, 176, 184, 187, 201, 205, 214, 221, 297, 331, 338–9, 346–8, 351–3 Hyman, D.: 302 Ingarden, R.: 45, 94, 97, 115, 123–8, 221, 226, 259, 310 Iotto, L.: 23 Irele: 348 Irigaray, L.: 203 Iser, W.: 96–7, 310 Ives, C.: 60

INDEX OF NAMES Jakobson: 49 James: 331, 333 Janke´le´vich, V.: 59 Jauss, H. R.: 53 Jordaens, J.: 19 Joyce, J.: 176, 295, 298–310 Kaige, C.: 149–50 Kant, I.: 53, 59, 110, 115, 201, 203, 209, 212, 215, 218, 221, 241, 331, 335–6, 338–9, 347–8, 351 Karenyi: 283 Kemp, M.: 6 Kennedy, J. F.: 165 Kersten, F.: 57 Kimmel, L.: 3, 6 King, M.: 340 King, P.: 59 Klee, P.: 204, 207 Kolnai, A. 259–70, 273 Kristeva, J.: 203, 212, 327 Kuhn, T. 345 Kuznetsov: 336 Lacan, J.: 79–80, 89, 295 Langer, S.: 59 Laozi: 109 Leibniz, G. W.: 57, 335 Lenin, V. I.: 336 Levinas, E.: 36, 39, 138, 179–94, 235, 237–8, 256 Levy, B-H.: 237 Ligabue, A.: 13–14 Liszt, F.: 60 Lochhead, J.: 60 Lonergan, B.: 239, 249–50, 255 Loseriu, E.: 33 Lotman, Y.: 114 Lotto: 23–4 Lyotard, J. F.: 80 Mahler, G.: 60 Man Ray: 132 Mann, T.: 95 Mantegna: 16 Manzoni, P.: 142 Marani, P.: 7 Margolles, T.: 142

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Marston, J.: 260, 269–71 Martelli, U.: 25–6 Marx, K.: 176, 336–7 Mazzacurati, M.: 14 McFarland, T.: 296 Merleau-Ponty, M.: 30, 80, 88, 103–4, 106–9, 134, 138, 201, 209, 259 Messiaen, O.: 60 Middelton: 260, 274 Moore, G. E.: 103–9 Morandi: 207 Morrow, L.: 236 Mozart: 4, 60 Murdoch, I.: 221–32, 238–9 Murray, M.: 341, 344, 347 Nabokov, V.: 168, 176 Neiman, S.: 236–8 Nietzsche, F.: 44, 87, 173, 175, 290 Noddings, N.: 241, 251 Nora, P.: 114 Norgard, P.: 61 Nussbaum, M.: 175 Omoregbe: 333 Onyewuenyi, I. C.: 352 Orlan: 142 Ortega y Gasset: 29, 40, 45–6 Osundare, N.: 344–6, 348–9 Ovid: 277 Palisca, C.: 59 Palladio, A.: 119–20 Pallasmaa, J.: 135 Panciatichi, L.: 25 Parker, C.: 84 Parme´e: 297, 303 Parmenides: 334 Peirce, C. S.: 32, 40 Peters, T.: 246–7 Petrarch: 23 Pfa¨nder: 21 Pinter, H.: 176 Piper: 201 Plato: 36–40, 46, 50–2, 71, 163, 177, 276–80, 285–8, 296, 334, 336–7 Plotinus: 335 Pollock, J.: 200, 203–4, 206–7, 210, 213–19 Polykleitos: 140

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INDEX OF NAMES

Ponge: 207 Popper, K.: 345 Pratt, C.C.: 59 Proust: 136, 176, 200, 202, 313–14, 318–21, 323, 325, 327–8 Pushkin: 119 Pythagoras: 288

Socrates: 39, 158, 69, 71 Sophocles: 199 Spiegelberg, H.: 339 Spinoza, B.: 335 Spoeri, D.: 142 Steinbeck: 248 Stumpf, C.: 57–9, 63 Swift, J.: 248

Quinton, A.: 334, 336 Raphael: 20–1 Read, H.: 204, 206 Reas, C.: 83 Reich, S.: 60 Remarque: 176 Rey, D.: 29–30 Ricoeur, P.: 94, 97–101, 173–4, 237–8, 255, 259, 295–300, 302, 308, 310 Ridley, A.: 59 Riley, B.: 86 Riley, T.: 60 Rilke, R. M.: 53, 199–200, 202, 207–9, 217 Robbe-Grillet: 207 Rombach, H.: 144 Rorty, R.: 344–6 Rowell, L.: 59 Santayana, G.: 40, 173–4 Sartre, J-P.: 143, 200, 202–3, 206–9, 215, 331, 347 Satie, E.: 61 Scarry, E.: 103, 109 Schacht: 342 Scheler, M.: 259–60 Schleiermacher: 44–5 Schmitz, H.: 136–8, 142 Schneider, N.: 23–4 Schoenberg, A.: 60 Schopenhauer, A.: 57, 59, 291–2 Scruton, R.: 59 Seghi, A.: 5 Sermon, P.: 83–4 Shakespeare, W.: 175, 210–11, 216, 218, 229, 235 Shiner: 344–5 Shusterman, R.: 103 Slovsky: 52 Smith, F. J.: 58

Tao, S.: 104, 109 Tarkovsky, A.: 135 Tasso: 22 Tchaikovsky: 208–9, 211 Tellenbach, H.: 137 Titon, J. T.: 60 Tolstoy, L.: 120 Toumer: 260 Tymieniecka, A-T.: 3, 6–9, 94, 259 Unah: 341 van der Weyden, R.: 22 Van Eick, J.: 19 Van Gogh, V.: 18 Vare`se, E.: 61 Veatch: 345 Velasquez, D.: 20 Vermeer: 76 Verrocchio, A.: 4 Voltaire: 317 von Karajan, H.: 62–3 Wagner: 95 Walker, A.: 235, 240, 246–8, 251, 254, 256 Walther, G.: 21 Watson, J.: 341–2 Webster: 260, 262–3, 265–6, 268–70 Weil, S.: 227, 239, 244, 249 Welsch, W.: 140 Westcott, P.: 166 Wilson, R.: 84 Wittgenstein, L.: 171, 214, 292–3 Yimou, Z.: 151–4 Young, R.: 296 Zhuangzi: 109 Zizek, S.: 88 Zola, E.: 248

APPENDIX T he T hird World Congress of Phenomenology PHENOMENOLOGY WORLD-WIDE Organized by: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning (1 Ivy Pointe Way, Hanover, NH 03755, United States) its centers and affiliated societies, as well as other phenomenology groups and societies. T heme LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS Historical Research; Great Phenomenological Issues; Present Day Developments

Wadham College, University of Oxford, England August 15–21, 2004 The Congress begins at 4:00 p.m., Sunday, August 15, 2004, with an Opening Reception and Registration on site, in the Cloister Garden, near the Cloister, which is located behind the College Hall. Registration on site will continue at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, August 16, in the Auditorium. Plenary sessions will run from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 PM. Lunch will run from 1:00 p.m. until 2:30 p.m.. The afternoon sessions will run from 2:30 p.m. until 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. (with a coffee break in the afternoon). Coffee may be taken in your room or in the King’s Arms (a pub).

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PROGRAM Monday, August 16 8:30 a.m. The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m.

INAUGURAL LECTURE Presided by: Brian McGuinness, Siena, Italy

THE LOGOS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LOGOS Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, United States PLENARY SESSION I Chair: Grahame Lock, Oxford University, Great Britain PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE HERMENEUTIC OF TRADITIONS Mafalda Blanc, Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, Portugal ONTOLOGICAL INTENTIONS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM Anatoly Zotov, Russia SCIENCE IN MIND. EXPLORING THE LANGUAGE OF THE LOGOS Leo Zonneveld, The Netherlands HEIDEGGER’S TAUTOLOGICAL THINKING AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE END OF PHILOSOPHY Tze-wan Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION I: PHENOMENOLOGY OF HISTORY Organized and Presided by: Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States

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PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States PHENOMENOLOGY, HISTORY AND HISTORICITY IN KARL JASPER’S PHILOSOPHY Filiz Peach, City University, Great Britain THE TASK OF A HUSSERLIAN PHENOMENOLOGY OF HISTORY Osborne Wiggins, University of Louisville, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break ‘‘PHENOMENOLOGICAL HISTORY: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION’’ W ith the following participants: Mark E. Blum, University of Louisville, United States Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States Filiz Peach, City University, Great Britain Osborne Wiggins, University of Louisville, United States Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION II: FREEDOM, NECESSITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION Chair: Maija Kule, University of Latvia, Latvia OUTLINE OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF VIOLENCE. PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RESISTANCE Kadria Ismail, Ein-Shams University, Egypt PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE’S OPENING TO THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY – THE VIRTUE’S ISSUE Carmen Cozma, ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’ University, Romania 4:30 – 5:00 p.m. Coffee Break

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PATOCKA AND DERRIDA ON RESPONSIBILITY Eddo Evink, Groningen University, The Netherlands SARTRE’S METHOD, THE DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY Raymond Langley, Manhattanville College, United States ‘‘PERFECT HEALTH’’ AND THE DISEMBODIMENT OF THE SELF. AN APPROACH TO MICHAEL HENRY’S THOUGHT Stella Zita De Azevedo, Universidade do Porto, Portugal Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION III: LIVING TOGETHER IN THE PSYCHIATRIC PERSPECTIVE Presided by: Simon Du Plock, Regents College, Great Britain PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY Simon Du Plock, Regents College, Great Britain LOGOS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: PHENOMENON OF ENCOUNTER AND HOPE IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP Camilo Serrano Bonitto, Latinoamerican Circle of Phenomenology, Colombia THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MENTAL HEALTH AS BEING WITHIN A WORLD OF APPARENT MEANINGLESS BEING Jarlath McKenna, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland FUNCTION AND MEANING OF DESIRE IN DEPTHPSYCHOLOGY Mina Sehdev, Italy 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break ONTOPOIESIS AND UNION IN THE PRAYER OF THE HEART: CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOTHERAPY AND LEARNING Olga Louchakova, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, United States DIE VERWANDLUNG DES SCHIZOPHRENNEN IN-DER-WELTSEINS Eva Syristova, University of Prague, Czech Republic

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Monday, August 16 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION IV: PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Organized and Presided by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States TOWARD A CULTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States A SCHUTZ’S CONCEPTION OF RELEVANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY Natalia Smirnova, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia DEMONSTRATING MOBILITY Anjana Bhattacharjee, Brunel University, Great Britain 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AND THE CHOICE TO CHOOSE Marianne Sawicki, United States THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELF AS NON-LOCAL: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND RESEARCH REPORT Amy Louise Miller, United States USER-FRIENDLY MARKET AS A PROJECT OF MODERN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEM Maria Bielawka, Krakow, Poland GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 8:30 a.m., The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION II: CROSSING BRIDGES Chair: Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy SOME COMMENTS ON ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY Grahame Lock, Oxford University, Great Britain

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‘‘THE TEMPTATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY ARE VERY GREAT HERE’’: ON THE CURIOUS (ABSENCE OF) DIALOGUE BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY Richard Paul Hamilton, Saitama University, Japan LESSONS FROM SARTRE FOR THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Manuel Bremer, Heinrich-Heine-Universita¨t Du¨sseldorf, Germany PROBLEM OF THE ‘‘IDEA’’ IN DERRIDA’S ‘‘THE PROBLEM OF GENESIS’’ Dasuke Kamei, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan NON-INTENTIONALITY OF THE LIVED-BODY Andreas Brenner, University of Basel, Switzerland 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION V: PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION Presided by: Thomas Ryba, Notre Dame University, United States BEFORE THE GENESIS: LEVINAS, MARION AND TYMIENIECKA ON CONSTITUTION, GIVENNESS AND TRANSCENDENCE Thomas Ryba, St. Thomas Aquinas Center at Purdue, United States MATER-NATALITY: AUGUSTINE, ARENDT, AND LEVINAS Ann Astell, Purdue University, United States LEVINAS AND THE NIGHT OF PHENOMENOLOGY Sandor Goodhart, St. Thomas Aquinas Center at Purdue, United States THE POTENTIALITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ISLAM Aziz Esmail, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Great Britain

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4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break AL-SUHRAWARDI’S DOCTRINE AND PHENOMENOLOGY Salahaddin Khalilov, Azerbaijan Universiteti, Azerbaijan RELIGION WITHOUT WHY: EDITH STEIN AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON THE OVERCOMING OF METAPHYSICS Michael F. Andrews, Seattle University, United States HERMENEUTICS OF THE MYSTICAL PHENOMENON IN EDITH STEIN Carmen Balzer, Universidad Cato´lica Argentina, Argentina Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 SESSION VI: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORCHESTRATION OF THE ARTS Presided by: Mao Chen, Skidmore College, United States PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE WORK OF ART: R. INGARDEN, M. DUFFREN, P. RICOEUR Elga Freiberga, University of Latvia, Latvia NATURAL BEAUTY AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING David Brubaker, University of New Haven, United States TOWARDS PHENOMENOLOGY OF NATURAL – ARCHITECTURAL MEMORIAL Ljudmila Molodkina, State University of Land Use Planning, Russia PATINA – ATMOSPHERE – AROMA, TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF FINE DIFFERENCES Madalina Diaconu, Academy of Fine Arts, Austria 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE PERSISTENCE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL TIME: REFLECTIONS OF RECENT CHINESE CINEMA Mao Chen, Skidmore College, United States THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING (LEVINAS) AND THE TRUTH CRYSTALLIZED IN THE WORK OF ART (GADAMER) Aleksandra Pawliszyn, Uniwersytet Gdanski, Poland

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Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION VII: ‘‘THE MOST DIFFICULT POINT’’: ‘‘THE BOND BETWEEN THE FLESH AND THE IDEA’’ IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S LAST THOUGHT Organized and presided by: Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy LET IT BE Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy THE INVISIBLE AND THE FLESH. QUESTIONING CHIASM. Patrick Burke, Seattle University, United States MERLEAU-PONTY ON THE RELATION BETWEEN LOGOS PROPHORIKOS AND LOGOS ENDIATHETOS Wayne Froman, George Mason University, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break UN ECART INFIME (A MINUSCULE HIATUS): THE CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF LIVED-EXPERIENCE (VECU) IN FOUCAULT Leonard Lawlor, University of Memphis, United States THE INVISIBLE AND THE UNPRESENTABLE Luca Vanzago, Universita degli Studi Pavia, Italy GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 ROUNDTABLE ON A-T. TYMIENIECKA’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Presided by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States THE LOGOS OF LIFE AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Agnes B. Curry, Saint Joseph College, United States Lawrence Kimmel, Trinity University, United States

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ONTOPOIESIS AS THE FIRST ONTOLOGY OF BEINGNESS-INBECOMING Peter Abumhenre Egbe, Lateran University of Rome/Nigeria 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break ECOLOGY Zaiga Ikere, Daugavpils Pedagogical University, Latvia HUMAN CONDITION-IN-THE-UNITY-OF-EVERYTHING-ALIVE AS A NEW CONCEPTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland THE MEASURE Carmen Cozma, University ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’, Romania THE NEW CRITIQUE OF REASON Nancy Mardas, Saint Joseph College, United States GENERAL DISCUSSION Tuesday, August 17 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION VIII: DISCLOSURE AND DIFFERENTIATION: THE GENESIS OF BEAUVOIR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL VOICE Presided by: Laura Hengehold, Case Western Reserve University, United States, and Shoichi Matsuba, Kobe City College of Nursing, Japan BEAUVOIRIAN EXISTENTIALISM: AN ETHIC OF INDIVIDUALISM OR INDIVIDUATION? Laura Hengehold, Case Western Reserve University, United States BEAUVOIR’S CONCEPT OF DISCLOSURE: ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES Kristana Arp, Long Island University, United States THE ORIGINS OF BEAUVOIR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD Edward Fullbrook, Case Western Reserve University, United States

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5:00 – 5:30 p.m. Coffee Break GENERAL DISCUSSION Wednesday, August 18 8:30 a.m., The Auditorium, Registration 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION III: LIFE IN NUMEROUS PERSPECTIVES Presided by: Kadria Ismail, Ein-Shams University, Egypt THE LANGUAGE OF OUR LIVING BODY Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE NEW EVOLUTIONISTIC PARADIGMS Roberto Verolini, Italy, and Fabio Petrelli, Universita degli Studi de Camerino, Italy HUMAN BEING IN BEINGNESS: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA’S VISION Zaiga Ikere, Daugavpils Pedagogical University, Latvia WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE EMBODIED, NATURALIZING BODILY SELF-AWARENESS Peter Reynaert, University of Antwerp, Belgium SENSIBLE MODELS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Arthur Piper, University of Nottingham, Great Britain 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SYMPOSIUM Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue Around the Perennial Issue: MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM Organized and Presided by: Nader El-Bizri, University of Cambridge, Great Britain BEING AND NECESSITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL

APPENDIX

INVESTIGATION OF AVICENNA’S METAPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY Nader El-Bizri, University of Cambridge, Great Britain THE ILLUMINATIVE NOTION OF MAN IN PERSIAN THOUGHT: A RESPONSE TO AN ORIGINAL QUEST Mahmoud Khatami, University of Tehran, Iran THE MICROCOSM/MACROCOSM ANALOGY IN IBN SINA AND HUSSERL Marina Banchetti-Robino, Florida Atlantic University, United States MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM IN LOTZE Nikolay Milkov, Universita¨t Bielefeld, Germany 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM IN MAX SCHELER IN RELATION TO ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland AL-GHAZALIAN INTERPRETATION OF AN ARISTOTELIAN TEXT USED BY HEIDEGGER Abu Yaareb Marzouki, International Islamic University of Malaysia, Malaysia MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND OMAR KHAYYAM ON THE QUESTION OF ‘‘THERENESS’’ Mehdi Aminrazavi, Mary Washington College, United States CONCLUDING REMARKS Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Phenomenology Institute, United States Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION IX: CLASSIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN THEIR TRANSFORMATION Presided by: Carmen Cozma, University ‘‘Al.I.Cuza’’, Romania THE FORMAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING: HUSSERL’S THEORY OF MANIFOLDS Nikolay Milkov, Universita¨t Bielefeld, Germany

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ON THE MODE OF EXISTENCE OF THE REAL NUMBERS Piotr Blaszczyk, Pedagogical University, Poland ON THE ONTO-LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF HUSSERL’S PERCEPTUAL NOEMA David Grunberg, Middle East Technical University, Turkey 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break HERMENEUTISCHE VERSUS TRANZENDENTALE PHANOMENOLOGIE Jesus Adrian Escudero, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain PHE´NOMENOLOGIE TRANSCENDENTALE ET CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON THE´OLOGIQUE Arion Kelkel, La Terrase, France Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 ROUNDTABLE: EPOCHE` AND REDUCTION TODAY Organized and Presided by: Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria INTRODUCTION: EPOCHE` AND REDUCTION AFTER HUSSERL Michael Staudigl, Institute for Human Sciences, Austria CONCEPTION OF TIME IN HUSSERL’S SOCIAL WORLDS – MODERN PERSPECTIVE OF ‘‘METAXU’’ Cezary J. Olbromski, University Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej, Poland ON SCHUTZ CONCERNING THE TRANSCENDENTAL REDUCTION Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break BODY OR FLESH (FROM HUSSERL TO MERLEAU-PONTY Luca Vanzago, Italy

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BEYOND THE EPOCHE: INTUITION AND CREATIVE IMAGINATION (ON TYMIENIECKA) Nancy Mardas, Saint Joseph College, United States

GENERAL DISCUSSION Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION X: TIME, ALTERITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS Organized and Presided by: Richard Sugarman, University of Vermont, United States EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND THE DEFORMALIZATION OF TIME Richard Sugarman, University of Vermont, United States THE JUSTIFICATION AND JUSTICE OF PHENOMENOLOGY Richard A. Cohen, University of Vermont, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break EMMANUEL LEVINAS: NON-INTENTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STATUS OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT Roger Duncan, Promisek Center, United States THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME IN PHILOSOPHY OF LEVINAS: TEMPORALITY AND OTHERNESS IN THE HEBRAIC TRADITION Shmuel Wygoda, Israel

GENERAL DISCUSSION

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Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XI: Chair: Francesco Totaro, University Degli Studi di Macerata, Italy and Ignacy Fiut, Krakow, Poland LES FIGURES DE L’INTERSUBJECTIVITE´ CHEZ HUSSERL Maria Manuela Brito Martins, Universidade do Porto, Portugal ESSENTIAL INDIVIDUALITY: ON THE NATURE OF A PERSON Roberta de Monticelli, University of Geneva, Switzerland EGO-MAKING PRINCIPLE IN CLASSICAL INDIAN METAPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY Marzenna Jakubczak, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break THE EMPIRICAL EGO AND THE PROBLEM OF NARCISSISM: PREAMBLES TO A READING OF ‘‘IDEEN I’’ 27–32 Jeffrey Bloechl, College of the Holy Cross, United States PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY OF THE BEING-WITH: THE NOTION OF CO-EXISTENCE IN MAURICE MERLEAUPONTY AND JAN-LUC NANCY Rinalds Zembahs, University of Latvia, Latvia Wednesday, August 18 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XII: TIME, CONSCIOUSNESS AND HISTORICITY Presided by: Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICITY IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Maija Kule, University of Latvia, Latvia TIME AND HISTORY IN P. RICOEUR’S THOUGHT Marı´a Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain

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HUSSERL AND BERGSON ON CONSCIOUSNESS AND TIME Rafael Winkler, University of Warwick, Great Britain THE HISTORICITY OF NATURE Konrad Rokstad, University of Bergen, Norway 5:00 – 5:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND EARLY ROMANTIC CONCEPTS OF NATURE AND THE SELF Oliver W. Holmes, Wesleyan University, United States ANXIETY AND TIME IN THE HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF HEIDEGGER Marta Figueras I Badia, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Thursday, August 19 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION IV: THE LIVING SPACE Presided by: Jorge Garcia-Gomez, Southampton College, United States LIVING SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF HUMAN LIFE W. Kim Rogers, East State Tennessee State University, United States DISCUSSION ON THE NOTIONS OF ‘‘LIFE’’ AND ‘‘EXISTENTIA’’ IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS OF HEIDEGGER AND MERLEAU-PONTY Maria Golebiewska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland VARIATIONS OF THE SENSIBLE, TRUTH OF IDEAS AND IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY MOVING FROM THE LATER MERLEAUPONTY Mauro Carbone, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE OF ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA IN RELATION TO HER ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPTION Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Gdansk, Poland PHENOMENOLOGY AND ECOPHILOSOPHY Ignacy Fiut, Krakow, Poland

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MEN IN FRONT OF ANIMALS Leszek Pyra, Poland 1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium Roundtable (and lectures) GREAT CLASSICAL QUESTIONS REVISITED Presided by: Andreas Brenner, University of Basel, Switzerland STRUCTURE AND THE CRITIQUE OF EVIDENCE Helena De Preester, Ghent University, Belgium, and Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Ghent University, Belgium DESCARTES AND ORTEGA ON THE FATE OF INDUBITABLE KNOWLEDGE Jorge Garcia-Gomez, Southampton College, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE QUESTION IN HUSSERL AND FINK WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ‘‘SIXTH CARTESIAN MEDITATION Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, University of Southampton, Great Britain AN INTERPRETATION OF HUSSERL’S CONCEPT OF CONSTITUTION IN TERMS OF SYMMETRY Filip Kolen, Ghent University, Belgium Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XIII: Presided by: Carmen Balzer, Universidad Cato´lica Argentina, Argentina PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGOS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION Rimma Kurenkova, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia Y. A. Plekhanov, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia Elena Rogacheva, Vladimir Pedagogical Institute, Russia

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HOW ARE WE STUDYING PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY IN MONGOLIA? Danzankhorloo Dashpurev, The Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Political Science, Mongolia PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFELONG LEARNING Klymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Turkey 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break FROM THE STATION TO THE LYCEUM Matti Itkonen, University of Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland THE FRUITS OF THE LABOR: TYMIENIECKA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY Nancy Mardas, St. Joseph College, United States CREATIVITY AS A CHANCE FOR MAN Monika Kowalczyk-Boruch, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, Poland Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XIV: PHENOMENOLOGY AND LITERATURE Presided by: Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States LOGOS, THE AESTHETIC IMAGINATION, AND SPONTANEITY Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The University of Maine, United States AN HISTORICAL LOOK AT GENRE WITHIN PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS Donald F. Castro, Mesa Community College, United States EXPLORING AESTHETIC PERCEPTION OF THE REAL IN IRIS MURDOCH’S ‘‘THE BLACK PRINCE’’ Calley Hornbuckle, University of South Carolina, United States 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF EMOTIONS: AUREL KOLNAI’S ON DISGUST AND JACOBEAN DRAMA Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States A PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY OF LITERARY CREATIVITY: RICOEUR AND JOYCE Raymond J. Wilson III, Loras College, United States Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 Presentation of our ‘‘Encyclopedia of Learning’’: PHENOMENOLOGY WORLD-WIDE Foundations – Expanding dynamics – Life-engagements A Guide for Research and Study Robert D. Sweeney, John Carroll University, United States Jadwiga Smith, Bridgewater State College, United States Kathleen Haney, University of Houston, United States 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break Thursday, August 19 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 2 SESSION XV: Presided by: Robert D. Sweeney, John Carroll University, United States UNDERSTANDING OF CULTURE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Rihards Kulis, University of Latvia, Latvia LIFE WORLD BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL EXPERIENCE: ON ‘‘EUROPEAN CRISIS’’ Andrina Tonkli Komel, Slovenia TIME, SPACE AND BEING IN THE WORLD THROUGH THE LIFE COURSE Judith A. Glonek, Somerton, Australia COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPTION IN THE WORKS OF A-T. TYMIENIECKA WITH SOME ISSUES OF CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN PHENOMENOLOGY Mamuka G. Dolidze, Institute of Philosophy, Tblisi, Georgia

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4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break THE PHILOSOPHICAL SENSE IS THE MATURE SENSE – HUSSERL’S REFLECTION ON THE MEASURE OF PHILOSOPHY Włodzimierz Pawliszyn, University of Gdan´sk, Poland LANGUAGE, TIME AND OTHERNESS Julia Ponzio, University of Bari, Italy VIRTUAL DECADENCE Martin Holt, City University, Great Britain Friday, August 20 9:00 a.m., The Auditorium PLENARY SESSION V: WORLD OF LIFE, CULTURE, COMMUNICATION Presided by: Tze-wan Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong IMAGINARY WORLD AND WORLD OF LIFE. MASS COMMUNICATION AS NEW ‘‘IDEENKLEID’’ AND IMPLICATIONS OF SENSE Francesco Totaro, University Degli Studi di Macerata, Italy THE INTERFACING OF LANGUAGE AND WORLD ¨ niversitese (I˙.K.U ¨ .) & I˙stanbul Teknik Erkut Sezgin, I˙stanbul Ku¨ltu¨r U ¨ niversitesi, Turkey U LES DEPENDANCES INTER-SUBJECTIVES OU LE LANGUAGE ET LA COMMUNICATION JOUENT UN ROLE IMPORTANT Jozef Siva´k, Filozoficky Ustav Sav, Slovakia LIFEWORLD: MEANING OF SIGNS AND COMMUNICATION Ella Buceniece, University of Latvia, Latvia PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS OF INTERMEDIACY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF INTERCULTURAL SENSE Dean Komel, Slovenia ARENDT’S REVISION OF PRAXIS: ON PLURALITY AND NARRATIVE EXPERIENCE William D. Melaney, American University in Cairo, Egypt

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1:00–2:30 p.m. Lunch Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., The Auditorium SESSION XVI: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AS A NEW EXCAVATION INTO THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELD Presided by: Angela Ales Bello, Lateran University, Italy HISTORY AS THE UNVEILING OF THE T EL OS. THE HUSSERLIAN CRITIQUE OF THE WELTANSCHAUUNGEN. Nicoletta Ghigi, University of Perugia, Italy THE ‘‘PERSON’’ AND THE ‘‘OTHER’’ IN MARI´A ZAMBRANO’S PHILOSOPHIC ANTHROPOLOGY Maria Mercede Ligozzi, Ministry of Culture, Italy THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHICS Mobeen Shahid, Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican City VITOLOGY: THE AFRICAN VISION OF THE HUMAN PERSON Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia, Lateran University, Vatican City 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break WHOSE LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE? Victor Gerald Rivas, Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico PLATO’S TEACHING ABOUT ‘‘LIVING CREATURE’’ AND PHENOMENOLOGY Olena Shkubulyani, Ukraine DISPOSITION TO PHENOMENOLOGY IN W. JAMES’S CONCEPTION OF PURE EXPERIENCE Velga Vevere, University of Latvia, Latvia

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Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 3 SESSION XVII: THE MORAL SENSE OF LIFE Presided by: Marı´a Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain MORAL ASPECTS OF LIFE Tadeusz Czarnik, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland THE PRINCIPLE OF GRATEFULNESS: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIVING AS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ONE’S OWN IDENTITY AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF GLOBALIZATION Shannon Driscoll, Pontifical Georgian University, Rome, Italy THE CREATIONISM OF LEONARDO COIMBRA AND THE SAUDADE AS A MORAL GIFT Maria Teresa de Noronha, Universidade Aberta, Portugal 4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break FICTION AND THE GROWTH OF MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS: ATTENTION AND EVIL Rebecca M. Painter, Marymount Manhattan College, United States THE SOCIAL, AFFECTIVE AND TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSIONS OF BEING IN DOSTOIEVSKY’S, PROUST’S AND WOOLF’S NOVELS Michel Dion, Universite´ de Sherbrooke, Canada PHENOMENOLOGY FOR WORLD RECONSTRUCTION Chiedozie Okoro, University of Lagos, Nigeria Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 1 – Room 3 SESSION XVIII: EXPERIENCE AND LOGOS IN FINE ARTS Presided by: Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Siena College, United States

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LEONARDO DA VINCI’S WORKING METHOD, IN LIGHT OF A-T. TYMIENIECKA’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Siena College, United States PRINCIPIOS DE OBJECTIVIDAD POETICA Antonio Dominguez Rey, Universidad Nacional de Educacion Distancia, Spain ESSENTIAL ‘‘POIESIS’’ J.C. Couceiro-Bueno, Univ. de la Coruna, Campus Elvina s/n, Spain PHENOMENOLOGY OF COUNTENANCE. PORTRAITING THE SOUL, REPRESENTING A LIVED EXPERIENCE Piero Trupia, UPS University, Italy 4:30–5:00 p.m. Coffee Break MUSICAL PROGENY: THE CASE OF MUSIC AND PHENOMENOLOGY Ellen J. Burns, State University of New York, Albany, United States ART, ALTERITY AND LOGOS: IN THE SPACES OF SEPARATION Brian Grassom, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain Topic to be Announced Maha Salah Taha, Misr International University, Egypt LOGOS, RATIONAL AND DESIRE IN CONVERGENT ART PRACTICES James Werner, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 2 – Room 2 SESSION XIX: PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE DIALOGUE WITH THE SCIENCES Presided by: Leszek Pyra, Poland ‘‘OBJECTIVE SCIENCE’’ IN HUSSERLIAN LIFE-WORLD PHENOMENOLOGY Aria Omrani, Isfahan, Iran

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PHENOMENOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF NATURAL COORDINATE SYSTEM Nikolay Kozhevnikov, Yakut State University, Russia ALIENATION AND WHOLENESS: SPINOZA, HANS JONAS, AND THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT ON THE ‘‘PUSH AND SHOVE’’ OF MORTAL BEING Wendy C. Hamblet, Aldelphi University, United States M. HEIDEGGER’S PROJECT FOR THE OPTICAL INTERPRETATION OF REFLEXION AND THE LOGOS Alexandr Kouzmin, Yaroslav Wise Novgorod State University, Russia 5:00–5:30 p.m. Coffee Break ‘‘PHENOMENA’’ IN NEWTON’S MATHEMATICAL EXPERIENCE A.L. Samian, National University of Malaysia, Malaysia WHAT COMPUTERS COULD NEVER DO: AN EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE PROGRAM OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Eldon C. Wait, University of Zululand, South Africa INHABITED TIME: COUPERIN’S PASSACAIL L E Jessica Wiskus, Duquesne University, Australia Friday, August 20 2:30 p.m., Staircase 9 – Room 1 SESSION XX: HEIDEGGERIAN PHENOMENOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Organized and Presided by: Mark Wrathall, Brigham Young University, United States HEIDEGGER ON LANGUAGE AND ESSENCES Mark Wrathall, Brigham Young University, United States HEIDEGGER’S PERFECTIONIST PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, OR: BILDUNG IN BEING AND T IME Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, United States

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4:00–4:30 p.m. Coffee Break HEIDEGGEREAN, TAOIST AND THE BOOK OF CHANGES Xianglong Zhang, Peking University, China 7:00 p.m., Friday, August 20: Farewell dinner at Wadham College, tickets to be ordered at registration (18.50 pounds). Organization Committee: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Gary Banham, Ullrich Haase, Matthew Landrus, Grahame Lock (Great Britain); William Smith, Chair. Program Director: Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Hanover, NH, USA. Assisted by: Gary Backhaus, Morgan State University, United States; Tadeusz Czarnik, Jagiellonian University, Poland The Congress begins with the Opening Reception on August 15 at 4:00 p.m. and ends by a Farewell Banquet on the night of August 20.

Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Editor-in-Chief

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume 1 of Analecta Husserliana. 1971 ISBN 90-277-0171-7

2.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he L ater Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism – Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3

3.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The ‘‘A Priori’, Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0

4.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X

5.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8

6.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6

7.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3

8.

Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology. Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0924-6

9.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he T eleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5

10.

Wojtyła, K., T he Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979 ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8

11.

Ales Bello, A. (ed.), T he Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6

12.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Philosophical Reflection of Man in L iterature. Selected Papers from Several Conferences held by the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Includes the essay by A-T. Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1312-X

13.

Kaelin, E. F., T he Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and literature. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1313-8

14.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Individualisation of Nature and the Human Being. (Part I:) Plotting the Territory for Interdisciplinary Communication. 1983 Part II see below under Volume 21. ISBN 90-277-1447-9

Analecta Husserliana 15.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality, Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Phenomenology in a Foundational Dialogue with Human Sciences. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1453-3

16.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1

17.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of L ife in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X

18.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic – Epic – T ragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8

19.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Part 1:) The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-Significance in Literary Interpretation and Theory. 1985 For Part 2 and 3 see below under Volumes 23 and 28. ISBN 90-277-1906-3

20.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of L ife. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics, Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2085-1

21.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8

22.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the L ife- and Social World. Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of the Authentic Life in the ‘‘Moral Sense’. 1987 Sequel to Volumes 15 and 20. ISBN 90-277-2411-3

23.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part 2: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest, Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano ... 1988 ISBN 90-277-2569-1

24.

Tymieniecka, A-T., L ogos and L ife. Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-277-2540-3

25.

Tymieniecka, A-T., L ogos and L ife. Book II: The Three Movements of the Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-277-2557-8

26.

Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6

27.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his L ife-World. Contributions to Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2767-8

28.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3

29.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-Existence. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Life. – Introducing the Spanish Perspective. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0324-5

30.

Rudnick, H. H. (ed.), Ingardeniana II. New Studies in the Philosophy of Roman Ingarden. With a New International Ingarden Bibliography. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0627-9

Analecta Husserliana 31.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T heMoral Sense and Its Foundational Significance: Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3

32.

Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Comparative Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0738-0

33.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others: The Performing Arts, the Fine Arts, and Literature. 1991 Sequel to Volumes 4 and 30 ISBN 0-7923-1014-4

34.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he T urning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Husserl Research – Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5

35.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1146-9

36.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl’s L egacy in Phenomenological Philosophies. New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7

37.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1195-7

38.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Elemental Dialectic of L ight and Darkness. The Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0

39.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, L ife, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8

40.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: L ife, Historicity, Culture. Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2215-0

41.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2312-2

42.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.), Allegory Old and New. In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2348-3

43.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): From the Sacred to the Divine. A New Phenomenological Approach. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2690-3

44.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of L ife. Passions of the Soul in the Imaginatio Creatrix. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2749-7

45.

Zhai, Z.: T he Radical Choice and Moral T heory. Through Communicative Argumentation to Phenomenological Subjectivity. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2891-4

46.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he L ogic of the L iving Present. Experience, Ordering, Onto-Poiesis of Culture. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2930-9

Analecta Husserliana 47.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Heaven, Earth, and In-Between in the Harmony of L ife. Phenomenology in the Continuing Oriental/Occidental Dialogue. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3373-X

48.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife. In the Glory of its Radiating Manifestations. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book I. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3825-1

49.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife. T he Human Quest for an Ideal. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3826-X

50.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife. Phenomenology of L ife as the Starting Point of Philosophy. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4126-0

51.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passion for Place. Part II. Between the Vital Spacing and the Creative Horizons of Fulfilment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4146-5

52.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of L ife and the Human Creative Condition. Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field. Book I. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4445-6

53.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative V irtualities. Harmonisations and Attunement in Cognition, the Fine Arts, Literature. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book II. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4461-8

54.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretation-inExistence. The I and the Other in their Creative Spacing of the Societal Circuits of Life. Phenomenology of Life and the Creative Condition. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4462-6

55.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative V irtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-inCulture. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book IV. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4545-2

56.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Enjoyment. From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, the Fine Arts and Aesthetics. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4677-7

57.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife. DiVerentiation and Harmony ... Vegetal, Animal, Human. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4887-7

58.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Matsuba, S. (eds.): Immersing in the Concrete. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Japanese Perspective. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5093-6

59.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of L ife and the Sciences of L ife. Ontopoiesis of Life and the Human Creative Condition. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5141-X

60.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife – T he Outburst of L ife in the Human Sphere. Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Book II. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5142-8

61.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Breaking the Barriers. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6006-0

62.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Mimesis of Emotion. From Sorrow to Elation; Elegiac Virtuosity in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6007-9

Analecta Husserliana 63.

Kronegger, M. (ed).: T he Orchestration of T he Arts – A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers. The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6008-7

64.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Z. Zalewski (eds.): L ife – T he Human Being Between L ife and Death. A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy, Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5962-3

65.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): T he Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6183-0

66.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Origins of L ife, Volume I: T he Primogenital Matrix of L ife and Its Context. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6246-2; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5

67.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Origins of L ife, Volume II: T he Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-L ife. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6276-4; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5

68.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): PAIDEIA. Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life Inspiring Education of our Times. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6319-1

69.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Poetry of L ife in L iterature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6408-2

70.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, volume 4. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6731-6; HB 0-7923-6730-8

71.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and L iterature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6675-1

72.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and E. Agazzi (eds.): L ife – Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition. Medicine and Philosophy in a Dialogue. 2001 ISBN Hb 0-7923-6983-1; Pb 0-7923-6984-X

73.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – T he Play of L ife on the Stage of the World in Fine Arts, Stage-Play, and L iterature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7032-5

74.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife-Energies, Forces and the Shaping of L ife: V ital, Existential. Book I. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0627-6

75.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he V isible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, L iterature and Reality. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0070-7

76.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – T ruth in its Various Perspectives. Cognition, SelfKnowledge, Creativity, Scientific Research, Sharing-in-Life, Economics ...... 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0071-5

77.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Creative Matrix of the Origins. Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of Life. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0789-2

78.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0858-9

79.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Does the World exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1517-8

Analecta Husserliana Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundations Expanding Dynamics Life-engagements. A Guide for Research and Study. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0066-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Metamorphosis. Creative Imagination in Fine Arts, Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1709-X Tymieniedta, A-T. (ed): Mystery in its Passions. Literary Explorations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1705-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Imaginatio Creatrix. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis/Ontopoiesis of Human Life and Reality. 2004. ISBN 1-4020-2244-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of Lfe. Meeting the Challenges of the ISBN 1-4020-2463-0 Present-Day World. 2005. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3575-6 Not yet published Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3577-2 Tymieniedta, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book One: Phenomenology as the Critique of Reason in Contemporary ISBN 1-4020-3678-7 Criticism and Interpretation 2005. Tymieniedta, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Two: The Hwnan Condition in-the-unity-of-euerything-theye-is-alive. Individuation, Seg Person Sev-determination, Freedom, Necessity. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3706-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three: Logos of History - Logos of Lfe. Historicity, Time Nature Communication Consciousness Alterity Cultwe. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3717-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Fow: The Logos of Scient$c Interrogation. Participating in Nature - L f e - Sharing in L f e . 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3736-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. BookFive: The Creative Logos. Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts Literature and Aesthetics. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3743-0

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